CORNELIUS O’DOWD
UPON MEN AND WOMEN
AND OTHER THINGS IN
GENERAL
By Charles Lever
Originally Published In Blackwood’s Magazine
1864
CONTENTS
A FRIEND OF GIOBERTS: BEING A REMINISCENCE OF
SEVENTEEN YEARS AGO.SOMETHING ABOUT SOLFERINO AND SHIPS.
THE STRANGER AT THE CROCE DI MALTA.
THE ORGAN NUISANCE AND ITS REMEDY.
R. N. F. THE GREAT CHEVALIER D’INDUSTRIE OF
OUR DAY.ITALIAN TRAITS AND CHARACTERISTICS.
OF OUR BROTHERS BEYOND THE BORDER.
TO JOHN ANSTER, ESQ., LL.D.
My dear Anster,
If you knew how often I have thought of you as I was writing this book,—if
you knew how there rose before my mind memories of long ago—of those
glorious evenings with all those fine spirits, to think of whom is a
triumph even with all its sadness,—and if you knew how I long to
meet once more the few soldiers who survive of that “old guard,”—you
would see how naturally I dedicate my volume to him who was the best of
us. Accept it, I beg you, as a token of recollection and regard from your
affectionate friend,
CORNELIUS O’DOWD.
Lago Maggiore, July 20,1864.
NOTICE.
AMIABLE AND ACCOMPLISHED READER,
As I have very little to say for myself that is not said in some of my
opening pages, there is no need that I should delay you on the threshold.
You will learn, if you take the trouble, by what course of events I came
to my present pursuit, converting myself into what a candid, but not
complimentary, friend has called “a diverting Vagabond.”
The fact was, I gave the world every reasonable opportunity of knowing
that they had a remarkable man amongst them, but, with a stupidity all
their own, they wouldn’t see it; so that when the solicitor who once gave
me a brief died—I believe it was a softening of the brain—I
burned my wig and retired from the profession.
Now, let people say what they may, it is by no means easy to invent a new
line of life; and even if you should, there are scores of people ready to
start up and seize on your discovery; and as I write these lines I am by
no means sure that to-morrow will not see some other Cornelius O’Dowd
inviting the public to a feast of wisdom and life-knowledge, with perhaps
a larger stock than my own of “things not generally known.” I will
disparage no man’s wares. There is, I feel assured, a market for us all.
My rivals, or my imitators, whichever you like to call them, may prove
superior to me; they maybe more ingenious, more various, more witty, or
more profound; but take my word for it, bland Header, there is always
something in the original tap, whether the liquor be Harvey sauce or L.L.
whisky, and such is mine. You are, in coming to me, frequenting the old
house; and if I could only descend to it, I could print you more
testimonials to success than Mr Morrison’s of the pills, or the other man
of cod-liver oil, but I scorn to give the names, imparted as they were in
secret gratitude. One only trick of the trade I will condescend to—it
is to assure you that you had need to beware of counterfeits, and that no
O’Dowderies are genuine except signed by me.
My heart is broke with requests for my autograph. Will a sympathising
public accept the above—which, of course, will be immediately
photographed.
CORNELIUS O’DOWD
MYSELF.
Bland Reader,—If you ever look into the Irish papers—and I
hope you are not so exclusive regarding them as is Mr Cobden with the
‘Times’—you will see that, under the title, “Landed Estates Court,
County Mayo,” Judge Dobbs has just sold the town and lands of
Kilmuray-nabachlish, Ballaghy, and Gregnaslattery, the property of
Cornelius O’Dowd, Esq. of Dowd’s Folly, in the same county.
Now the above-recited lands, measuring seven hundred and fourteen acres,
two roods, and eleven perches, statute measure, were mine, and I am the
Cornelius O’Dowd, Esq., referred to in the same paragraph.
Though it is perfectly true that, what between mortgages, settlement
claims, and bonds, neither my father nor myself owned these lands any more
than we did the island of Jamaica, it was a great blow to me to be sold
out; for, somehow or other, one can live a long time in Ireland on
parchment—I mean on the mere documents of an estate that has long
since passed away; but if you come once to an open sale and Judge Dobbs,
there’s an end of you, and you’ll not get credit for a pair of shoes the
day after.
My present reason for addressing you does not require that I should go
into my family history, or mention more of myself than that I was called
to the Bar in ‘42; that I stood an unsuccessful election for Athlone; that
I served as a captain in the West Coast Rifles; that I married a young
lady of great personal attractions; and completed my misfortunes by taking
the chairmanship of the Vichnasehneshee silver mines, that very soon left
me with nothing but copper in my own pocket, and sent me to Judge Dobbs
and his Court on the Inns Quay.
Like the rest of my countrymen, I was always hoping the Government would
“do something” for me. I have not missed a levee for fourteen years, and I
have shown the calves of my legs to every viceroyalty since Lord
Clarendon’s day; but though they all joked and talked very pleasantly with
me, none said, “O’Dowd, we must do something for you;” and if it was to
rain commissionerships in lunacy, or prison inspectorships, I don’t
believe one would fall upon C. O’D. I never knew rightly how it was, but
though I was always liked at the Bar mess, and made much of on circuit, I
never got a brief. People were constantly saying to me, “Con, if you were
to do this, that, or t’other,” you’d make a hit; but it was always
conditional on my being somewhere, or doing something that I never had
attempted before.
It was clear, if I was the right man, I wasn’t in the right place; and
this was all the more provoking, because, let me do what I would, some one
was sure to exclaim, “Con, my boy, don’t try that; it is certainly not
your line.” “What a capital agent for a new assurance company you’d be!”
“What a success you’d have had on the stage! You’d have played Sir Lucius
better than any living actor. Why don’t you go on the boards? Why not
start a penny newspaper? Why not give readings?” I wonder why they didn’t
tell me to turn organist or a painter in oils.
“You’re always telling us how much you know of the world, Mr O’Dowd,” said
my wife; “I wish you could turn the knowledge to some account.”
This was scarcely generous, to say the least of it.
Mrs O’D. knew well that I was vain of the quality—that I regarded it
as a sort of specialty. In fact, deeming, with the poet, that the proper
study of mankind was man, I had devoted a larger share of my life to the
inquiry than quite consisted with professional advancement; and while
others pored over their Blackstone, I was “doing Baden;” and instead of
term reports and Crown cases, I was diverting myself in the Oberland or on
the Lago Maggiore.
“And with all your great knowledge of life,” continued she, “I don’t
exactly see what it has done for you.”
Now, Mrs O’Dowd being, as you may apprehend, a woman, I didn’t waste my
time in arguing with her—I didn’t crush her, as I might, by telling
her that the very highest and noblest of a man’s acquirements are, ipso
facto, the least marketable; and that the boasted excellence of all
classical education is in nothing so conspicuous as in the fact that Greek
and Latin cannot be converted into money as readily as vulgar fractions
and a bold handwriting. Being a woman, as I have observed, Mrs O’D. would
have read the argument backwards, and stood out for the rule-of-three
against Sophocles and “all his works.” I simply replied, with that dignity
which is natural to me, “I am proud of my knowledge of life; I do
recognise in myself the analyst of that strange mixture that makes up
human chemistry; but it has never occurred to me to advertise my discovery
for sale, like Holloway’s Pills or somebody’s cod-liver oil.” “Perhaps you
knew nobody would buy it,” cried she, and flounced out of the room, the
bang of the door being one of the “epigrams in action” wives are skilled
in.
Now, with respect to my knowledge of life, I have often compared myself to
those connoisseurs in art who, without a picture or an engraving of their
own, can roam through a gallery, taking the most intense pleasure in all
it contains, gazing with ecstasy at the Raffaeles, and lingering delighted
over the sunny landscapes of Claude. To me the world has, for years,
imparted a sense of much enjoyment. Human nature has been my gallery, with
all its variety, its breadth, its effect, its warm colouring, and its cold
tints.
It has been my pride to think that I can recognise every style and every
“handling,” and that no man could impose a copy upon me for an original.
“And can it be possible,” cried I aloud, “that while picture-dealers revel
in fortune—fellows whose traffic goes no higher than coloured
canvass—that I, the connoisseur of humanity, the moral toxicologist—I,
who read men as I read a French comedy—that I should be obliged to
deny myself the generous claret my doctor thinks essential to my system,
and that repose and change of scene he deems of more consequence to me
than mere physic?”
I do not—I will not—I cannot, believe it. No class of persons
could be less spared than pilots. Without their watchful skill the rich
argosy that has entered the chops of the Channel would never anchor in the
Pool. And are there no sand-banks, no sunk rocks, no hidden reefs, no
insidious shoals, in humanity? Are there no treacherous lee-shores, no
dangerous currents, no breakers? It is amidst these and such as these I
purpose to guide my fellow-men, not pretending for a moment to the
possession of any heaven-born instinct, or any inspired insight into
Nature. No; I have toiled and laboured in the cause. The experience that I
mean to offer for sale I have myself bought, occasionally far more dearly
than I intend to dispose of it. Haud ignarus mali; I am willing to
tell where I have been shipwrecked, and who stole my clothes. “Don’t tell
me of your successes,” said a great physician to his colleague, “tell me
of your blunders; tell me of the people you’ve killed.” I am ready to do
this, figuratively of course, for they were all ladies; and more, I will
make no attempt to screen myself from the ridicule that may attach to an
absurd situation, nor conceal those experiences which may subject me to
laughter.
You may deem me boastful if I have to set forth my qualifications; but
what can I do? It is only when I have opened my pack and displayed my
wares that you may feel tempted to buy. I am driven, then, to tell you
that I know everybody that is worth knowing in Europe, and some two or
three in America; that I have been everywhere—eaten of everything—seen
everything. There’s not a railway guard from Norway to Naples doesn’t grin
a recognition to me; not a waiter from the Trois Frères to the Wilde Mann
doesn’t trail his napkin to earth as he sees me. Ministers speak up when I
stroll into the Chamber, and prima donnas soar above the orchestra,
and warble in ecstasy as I enter the pit.
I don’t like—I declare to you I do not like—saying these
things; it smacks of vanity. Now for my plan. I purpose to put these my
gifts at your disposal The year before us will doubtless be an eventful
one. What between Danes, Poles, and Italians, there must be a row
somewhere. The French are very eager for war; and the Austrians, as Paddy
says, “are blue-moulded for want of a beatin’.” There will be grand
“battle-pieces” to paint; but, better than these, portraits, groups,
“tableaux de genre”—Teniers bits, too, at the porch of an ale-house,
and warm little interiors, in the style of Mieris. I shall be instructive
at times—very instructive; and whenever I am very nice and dull, be
assured that I’m “full of information, and know my subject thoroughly.”
As “your own correspondent,” I am free to go wherever I please. I have
left Mrs O’D. in Ireland, and I revel in an Arcadian liberty. These are
all my credentials; and if with their aid I can furnish you any amusement
as to the goings-on of the world and its wife, or the doings of that
amiable couple in politics, books, theatres, or socialities, I seek for
nothing more congenial to my taste, nor more adapted to my nature, as a
bashful Irishman.
If I will not often obtrude, I will not altogether avoid, my personal
experiences; for there is this to be said, that no testimony is worth much
unless we know something of the temper, the tastes, and the character of
the witness. We have all heard, for instance, of the gentleman who
couldn’t laugh at Munden’s drolleries on the stage for thinking of a debt
of ten pounds that the actor owed him: and this same spirit has a great
deal to do—far more than we like to own—with our estimate of
foreign countries. It is so hard to speak well of the climate where we had
that horrible rheumatism, or laud the honesty of a people when we think of
that rascally scoundrel of the Hotel d’Odessa. For these reasons I mean to
come into the witness-box occasionally, and give you frankly, not merely
my opinions, but the way they were come by. I don’t affect to be superior
to prejudices; I have as many of these as a porcupine has bristles.
There’s all the egotism I mean to inflict on you, unless it comes under
the guise of an incident—“a circumstance which really occurred to
the author”—and now, en route.
I wonder am I right in thinking that the present race of travelling
English know less about the Continent and foreigners generally than their
predecessors of, say, five-and-twenty years ago. Railroads and rapid
travelling might be one cause; another is, that English is now more
generally spoken by all foreigners than formerly; and it may be taken as a
maxim, that nothing was ever asked or answered in broken phraseology that
was worth the hearing. People with a limited knowledge of a strange
language do not say what they wish, but what they can; and
there is no name for the helplessness of him who is tied up in his
preter-pluperfect tense. Now we English are not linguists; even our
diplomatists are remarkable for their little proficiency in French. I’m
not sure that we don’t benefit by this in the long-run. “Reden ist silber,
aber Schweigen ist gold”—“Speech is silver, but silence is gold,”
says the German adage; and what a deal of wisdom have I seen attributed to
a man who was posed by his declensions into a listener! One of the only
countrymen of my own who has made a great career lately in public life is
not a little indebted to deafness for it. He was so unlike those rash,
impetuous, impatient Irish, who would interrupt—he listened,
or seemed to listen, and he even smiled at the sarcasms that he did not
hear.
Listening, if we did but know it, sits more gracefully on us than speech,
when that speech involves the denial of genders, and the utter confusion
of all cases and tenses.
Next to holding their tongues, there’s another thing I wish you English
would do abroad, which is, to dress like sane and responsible people. Men
are simply absurd; but the women, with their ill-behaved hoops and short
petticoats, are positively indecent; but the greatest of all their
travelling offences is the proneness to form acquaintance at tables-d’hôte.
It is, first of all, a rank indiscretion for any but men to dine at these
places. They are almost, as a rule, the resort of all that is disreputable
in both sexes. You are sure to eat badly, and in the very worst of
company. My warning is, however, meant for my countrywomen only: men can,
or at least ought, to take care of themselves. As for myself, don’t be
shocked; but I do like doubtful company—that is, I am immensely
interested by all that class of people which the world calls adventurers,
whether the same be railroad speculators, fortune-hunters, discoverers of
inexhaustible mines, or Garibaldians. Your respectable man, with a
pocket-book well stored with his circular notes, and his passport in
order, is as uninteresting as a “Treckshuyt” on a Dutch canal; but your
“martyr to circumstance” is like a smart felucca in a strong Levanter; and
you can watch his course—how he shakes out his reefs or shortens
sail—how he flaunts out his bunting, or hides his colours—with
an unflagging interest I have often thought what a deal of cleverness—what
stores of practical ability—were lost to the world in these
out-at-elbow fellows, who speak every language fluently, play every game
well, sing pleasingly, dance, ride, row, and shoot, especially with the
pistol, to perfection. There they are, with a mass of qualities that win
success! and, what often is harder, win goodwill in life! There they are,
by some unhappy twist in their natures, preferring the precarious
existence of the race-course or the billiard-table; while others, with
about a tithe of their talents, are high in place and power. I met one of
these men to-day, and a strong specimen of the class, well dressed, well
whiskered, very quiet in manner, almost subdued in tone, but with a slight
restlessness in his eye that was very significant. We found ourselves at
table, over our coffee, when the others had left, and fell into
conversation. He declined my offered cigar with much courtesy, preferring
to smoke little cigarettes of his own making; and really the manufacture
was very adroit, and, in its way, a study of the maker’s habits. We talked
over the usual topics—the bad dinner we had just eaten, the
strange-looking company, the discomfort of the hotel generally, and
suchlike.
“Have we not met before?” asked he, after a pause. “If I don’t mistake, we
dined together aboard of Leslie’s yacht, the Fawn.”
I shook my head. “Only knew Sir Francis Leslie by name; never saw the
Fawn.”
The shot failed, but there was no recoil in his gun, and he merely bowed a
half apology.
“A yacht is a mistake,” added he, after another interval. “One is obliged
to take, not the men one wants, but the fellows who can bear the sea.
Leslie, for instance, had such a set that I left him at Messina. Strange
enough, they took us for pirates there.”
“For pirates!”
“Yes. There were three fishing-boats—what they call Bilancelle—some
fifteen or sixteen miles out at sea, and when they saw us coming along
with all canvass set, they hauled up their nets and ran with all speed for
shore. Rather absurd, wasn’t it? but, as I told Leslie about his friends,
‘the blunder wasn’t so great after all; there was only a vowel between
Raffs and Riffs.’”
The disparagement of “questionable people” is such an old device of
adventurers, that I was really surprised such a master of his art as my
present friend would condescend to it. It belonged altogether to an
inferior practitioner; and, indeed, he quickly saw the effect it had
produced upon me, as he said, “Not that I care a straw for the fellows I
associate with; my theory is, a gentleman can know any one.”
Richard was himself again as he uttered this speech, lying well back in
his chair, and sending a thin cloud of incense from the angle of his
mouth.
“What snobs they were in Brummel’s day, for instance, always asking if
this or that man was fit to be known! Why, sir, it was the very fellows
they tabooed were the cream of the set; ‘it was the cards they threw out
were the trumps.’”
The illustration came so pat that he smiled as he perceived by a twinkle
of my eye that I appreciated it.
“My father,” continued he, “knew Brummel well, and he told me that his
grand defect was a want of personal courage—the very quality, of all
others, his career required. His impertinences always broke down when
brought to this test. I remember an instance he mentioned.
“Amongst the company that frequented Carlton House was a certain old
Admiral P———, whom the Prince was fond of inviting,
though he did not possess a single agreeable quality, or any one convivial
gift, except a great power of drinking the very strongest port without its
producing the slightest show of effect upon him.
“One night Brummel, evidently bent on testing the old sailor’s head,
seated himself next him, making it his business to pass the decanters as
briskly as he could. The admiral asked nothing better; filled and drank
bumpers. Not content with this legitimate test, Brummel watched his
opportunity when the admiral’s head was turned, and filled his glass up to
the brim. Four or five times was the trick repeated, and with success;
when at last the admiral, turning quickly around, caught him in the very
act, with the decanter still in his hand. Fixing his eyes upon him with
the fierceness of a tiger, the old man said, ‘Drink it, sir—drink
it!’ and so terrified was Brummel by the manner and the look that he
raised the glass to his lips and drained it, while all at the table were
convulsed with laughter.”
The Brummel school—that is, the primrose-glove adventurers—were
a very different order of men from the present-day fellows, who take a
turn in Circassia or China, or a campaign with Garibaldi; and who, with
all their defects, are men of mettle and pluck and daring. Of these latter
I found my new acquaintance to be one.
He sketched off the early part of the “expedition” graphically enough for
me, showing the disorder and indiscipline natural to a force where every
nationality of Europe was represented, and not by its most favourable
types.
“I had an Irish servant,” said he, “whose blunders would fill a volume.
His prevailing impression, perhaps not ill-founded on the whole, was, that
we all had come out for pillage; and while a certain reserve withheld most
of us from avowing this fact, he spoke of it openly and freely,
expatiating admiringly on Captain This and Major That, who had done a fine
stroke of work in such a store, or such another country-house. As for his
blunders, they never ceased. I was myself the victim of an absurd one. On
the march from Melazzo I got a severe strain in the chest by my horse
falling and rolling over me. No bone was broken, but I was much bruised,
and a considerable extravasation of blood took place under the skin. Of
course I could not move, and I was provided with a sort of litter, and
slung between two mules. The doctor prescribed a strong dose of laudanum,
which set me to sleep, and despatched Peter back to Melazzo with an order
for a certain ointment, which he was to bring without delay, as the case
was imminent; this was impressed upon him, as the fellow was much given to
wandering off, when sent of a message, after adventures of his own.
“Fully convinced that I was in danger, away went Peter, very sad about me,
but even more distressed lest he should forget what he was sent for. He
kept repeating the words over and over as he went, till they became by
mere repetition something perfectly incomprehensible, so that when he
reached Melazzo nobody could make head or tail of his message. Group after
group gathered about and interrogated him, and at last, by means of
pantomime, discovered that his master was very ill. Signs were made to
inquire if bleeding was required, or if it was a case for amputation, but
he still shook his head in negative. ‘Is he dying?’ asked one, making a
gesture to indicate lying down. Peter assented. ‘Oh, then it is the unzione
estrema he wants!’ ‘That’s it,’ cried Peter, joyfully—‘unzione
it is.’ Two priests were speedily found and despatched; and I awoke out of
a sound sleep under a tree to see three lighted candles on each side of
me, and two priests in full vestments standing at my feet and gabbling
away in a droning sort of voice, while Peter blubbered and wrung his hands
unceasingly. A jolly burst of laughter from me soon dispelled the whole
illusion, and Peter had to hide himself for shame for a week after.”
“What became of the fellow—was he killed in the campaign?”
“Killed! nothing of the kind; he rose to be an officer, served on Nullo’s
staff, and is at this very hour in Poland, and, if I mistake not, a
major.”
“Men of this stamp make occasionally great careers,” said I, carelessly.
“No, sir,” replied he, very gravely. “To do anything really brilliant, the
adventurer must have been a gentleman at one time or other: the common
fellow stops short at petty larcenies; the man of good blood always goes
in for the mint.”
“There was, then,” asked I, “a good deal of what the Yankees call
‘pocketing’ in that campaign of Garibaldi’s?”
“Less than one might suppose. Have you not occasionally seen men at a
dinner-party pass this and refuse that, waiting for the haunch, or the
pheasant, or the blackcock that they are certain is coming, when all of a
sudden the jellies and ices make their appearance, and the curtain falls?
So it was with many of us; we were all waiting for Rome, and licking our
lips for the Vatican and the Cardinals’ palaces, when in came the
Piedmontese and finished the entertainment. If I meet you here to-morrow,
I can tell you more about this;” and so saying he arose, gave me an easy
nod, and strolled away.
“Who is that most agreeable gentleman who took his coffee with me?” asked
I of the waiter as I entered the salle.
“It’s the Generale Inglese, who served with Garibaldi.”
“And his name?”
“Ah, per bacco! I never heard his name—Garibaldi calls him
Giorgio, and the ladies who call here to take him out to drive now and
then always say Giorgino—not that he’s so very small, for all that.”
My Garibaldian friend failed in his appointment with me this morning. We
were to have gone together to a gallery, or a collection of ancient
armour, or something of this sort, but he probably saw, as your clever
adventurer will see, with half an eye, that I could be no use to
him—that I was a wayfarer like himself on life’s highroad; and
prudently turned round on his side and went to sleep again.
There is no quality so distinctive in this sort of man or woman—for
adventurer has its feminine—as the rapid intuition with which he
seizes on all available people, and throws aside all the unprofitable
ones. A money-changer detecting a light napoleon is nothing to it. What
are the traits by which they guide their judgment—what the tests by
which they try humanity, I do not know, but that they do read a stranger
at first sight is indisputable. That he found out Cornelius O’Dowd wasn’t
a member of the British Cabinet, or a junior partner in Baring’s, was, you
may sneeringly conjecture, no remarkable evidence of acuteness. But why
should he discover the fact—fact it is—that he’d never be one
penny the richer by knowing me, and that intercourse with me was about as
profitable as playing a match at billiards “for the table”?
Say what people will against roguery and cheating, rail as they may at the
rapacity and rascality one meets with, I declare and protest, after a good
deal of experience, that the world is a very poor world to him who is not
the mark of some roguery! When you are too poor to be cheated, you are too
insignificant to be cherished; and the man that is not worth humbugging
isn’t very far from bankruptcy.
It gave me a sort of shock, therefore, when I saw that my friend took this
view of me, and I strolled down moodily enough to the Chamber of Deputies.
Turin is a dreary city for a lounger; even a resident finds that he must
serve a seven years’ apprenticeship before he gets any footing in its
stiff ungenial society—for of all Italians, nothing socially is less
graceful than a Piedmontese. They have none of the courteous civility,
none of the urbane gentleness of the peninsular Italians. They are cold,
reserved, proud, and eminently awkward; not the less so, perhaps, that
their habitual tongue is the very vilest jargon that ever disfigured a
human mouth. Of course this is an efficient barrier against intercourse
with strangers; and though French is spoken in society, it bears about the
same relation to that language at Paris, as what is called pigeon-English
at Hong-Kong does to the tongue in use in Belgravia.
When I reached the Palazzo Carignan, as the Chamber is called, the séance
was nearly over, and a scene of considerable uproar prevailed. There had
been a somewhat sharp altercation between General Bixio and the “Left,”
and M. Mordini had repeatedly appealed to the President to make the
General recall some offensive epithets he had bestowed on the “party of
movement.” There were the usual cries and gesticulations, the shouts of
derision, the gestures of menace; and, above all, the tinkle-tinkle of the
Presidents bell, which was no more minded than the summons for a waiter in
an Irish inn; and on they went in this hopeless way, till some one, I
don’t know why, cried out, “That’s enough—we are satisfied;” by
which it seemed that somebody had apologised, but for what, or how, or to
whom, I have not the very vaguest conception.
With all their depreciation of France, the Italians are the most
persistent imitators of Frenchmen, and the Chamber was exactly a copy of
the French Chamber in the old Louis Philippe days—all violence,
noise, sensational intensity, and excitement.
I have often heard public speakers mention the difficulty of adjusting the
voice to the size of a room in which they found themselves for the first
time, and the remark occurred to me as figuratively displaying one of the
difficulties of Italian public men. The speakers in reality never clearly
knew how far their words were to carry—whether they spoke to the
Chamber or to the Country.
Is there or is there not a public opinion in Italy? Can the public speaker
direct his words over the heads of his immediate surrounders to countless
thousands beyond them? If he cannot, Parliament is but a debating-club,
with the disadvantage of not being able to select the subjects for
discussion.
The glow of patriotism is never rightly warm, nor is the metal of party
truly malleable, without the strong blast of a public opinion.
The Turin Chamber has no echo in the country; and, so far as I see, the
Italians are far more eager to learn what is said in the French Parliament
than in their own.
I remember an old waiter at the Hibernian Hotel in Dublin, who got a prize
in the lottery and retired into private life, but who never could hear a
bell ring without crying out, “Coming, sir.” The Italians remind me
greatly of him: they have had such a terrible time of flunkeyism, that
they start at every summons, no matter what hand be on the bell-rope.
To be sure the French did bully them awfully in the last war. Never was an
alliance more dearly paid for. We ourselves are not a very compliant or
conciliating race, but we can remember what it cost us to submit to French
insolence and pretension in the Crimea; and yet we did submit to it, not
always with a good grace, but in some fashion or other.
Here comes my Garibaldino again, and with a proposal to go down to Genoa
and look at the Italian fleet. I don’t suppose that either of us know much
of the subject; and indeed I feel, in my ignorance, that I might be a
senior Lord of the Admiralty—but that is only another reason for the
inquiry. “One is nothing,” says Mr Puff, “if he ain’t critical” So Heaven
help the Italian navy under the conjoint commentaries of myself and my
friend! Meanwhile, and before we start, one word more of Turin.
A FRIEND OF GIOBERTS: BEING A REMINISCENCE OF SEVENTEEN YEARS AGO.
Here I am at the “Feder” in Turin—as dirty a hotel, be it said
passingly, as you’ll find out of Ireland, and seventeen long years it is
since I saw it first. Italy has changed a good deal in the meanwhile—changed
rulers, landmarks, systems, and ideas; not so my old acquaintance, the
Feder! There’s the dirty waiter flourishing his dirtier napkin; and
there’s the long low-ceilinged table-d’hôte room, stuffy and smoky,
and suffocating as ever; and there are the little grinning coteries of
threes and fours round small tables soaking their rolls in chocolate, and
puffing their “Cavours,” with faces as innocent of soap as they were
before the war of the liberation. After all, perhaps, I’d have no
objection if some friend would cry out, “Why, Con, my boy, you don’t look
a day older than when I saw you here in ‘46, I think! I protest you have
not changed in the least. What elixir vitæ have you swallowed, old
fellow? Not a wrinkle, nor a grey hair,” and so on. And yet seventeen
years taken out of the working part of a man’s life—that period that
corresponds with the interval between after breakfast, we’ll say, and an
hour before dinner—makes a great gap in existence; for I did very
little as a boy, being not an early riser, perhaps, and now, in the
evening of my days, I have got a theory that a man ought to dine early and
never work after it. Though I’m half ashamed, on so short an acquaintance
with my reader, to mention a personal incident, I can scarcely avoid—indeed
I cannot avoid—relating a circumstance connected with my first visit
to the “Hotel Feder.”
I was newly married when I came abroad for a short wedding-tour. The world
at that time required new-married people to lay in a small stock of
Continental notions, to assist their connubiality and enable them to wear
the yoke with the graceful ease of foreigners; and so Mrs O’D. and I
started with one heart, one passport, and—what’s not so pleasant—one
hundred pounds, to comply with this ordinance. Of course, once over the
border—once in France—it was enough. So we took up our abode
in a very unpretending little hotel of Boulogne-sur-Mer called “La Cour de
Madrid,” where we boarded for the moderate sum of eleven francs fifty
centimes per diem—the odd fifty being saved by my wife not taking
the post-prandial cup of coffee and rum.
There was not much to see at Boulogne, and we soon saw it. For a week or
so Mrs O’D. used to go out muffled like one of the Sultan’s five hundred
wives, protesting that she’d surely be recognised; but she grew out of the
delusion at last, and discovered that our residence at the Cour de Madrid
as effectually screened us from all remark or all inquiry as if we had
taken up our abode in the Catacombs.
Now when one has got a large stock of any commodity on hand—I don’t
care what it is—there’s nothing so provoking as not to find a
market. Mrs O’D.‘s investment was bashfulness. She was determined to be
the most timid, startled, modest, and blushing creature that ever wore
orange-flowers; and yet there was not a man, woman, or child in the whole
town that cared to know whether the act for which she left England was a
matrimony or a murder.
“Don’t you hate this place, Cornelius?”—she never called me Con in
the honeymoon. “Isn’t it the dullest, dreariest hole you have ever been
in?”
“Not with you.”
“Then don’t yawn when you say so. I abhor it. It’s dirty, it’s vulgar,
it’s dear.”
“No, no. It ain’t dear, my love; don’t say, dear.”
“Billiards perhaps, and filthy cigars, and that greenish bitter—anisette,
I think they call it—are cheap enough, perhaps; but these are all
luxuries I can’t share in.”
Here was the cloud no bigger than a man’s hand that presaged the first
connubial hurricane. A married friend—one of much experience and
long-suffering—had warned me of this, saying, “Don’t fancy you’ll
escape, old fellow; but do the way the Ministry do about Turkey—put
the evil day off; diplomatise, promise, cajole, threaten a bit if needs
be, but postpone;” and, strong with these precepts, I negotiated, as the
phrase is, and, with a dash of reckless liberality that I tremble at now
as I record it, I said, “You’ve only to say where—nothing but where
to, and I’ll take you—up the Rhine, down the Danube, Egypt, the
Cataracts———”
“I don’t want to go so far,” said she, dryly. “Italy will do.”
This was a stunner. I hoped the impossible would have stopped her, but she
caught at the practicable, and foiled me.
“There’s only one objection,” said I, musing.
“And what may that be? Not money, I hope.”
“Heaven forbid—no. It’s the language. We get on here tolerably well,
for the waiter speaks broken English; but in Italy, dearest, English is
unknown.”
“Let us learn Italian, then. My aunt Groves said I had a remarkable talent
for languages.”
I groaned inwardly at this, for the same aunt Groves had vouched for a sum
of seventeen hundred and odd pounds as her niece’s fortune, but which was
so beautifully “tied up,” as they called it, that neither Chancellor nor
Master were ever equal to the task of untying it.
“Of course, dearest, let us learn Italian;” and I thought how I’d crush a
junior counsel some day with a smashing bit of Dante.
We started that same night—travelled on day after day—crossed
Mont Cenis in a snow-storm, and reached the Feder as wayworn and
wretched-looking a pair as ever travelled on an errand of bliss and
beatitude.
“In for a penny” is very Irish philosophy, but I can’t help that; so I
wrote to my brother Peter to sell out another hundred for me out of the
“Threes,” saying “dear Paulina’s health required a little change to a
milder climate” (it was snowing when I wrote, and the thermometer over the
chimneypiece at 9° Reaumur, with windows that wouldn’t shut, and a marble
floor without carpet)—“that the balmy air of Italy” (my teeth
chattered as I set it down) “would soon restore her; and indeed already
she seemed to feel the change.” That she did, for she was crouching over a
pan of charcoal ashes, with a railroad wrapper over her shoulders.
It’s no use going over what is in every one’s experience on first coming
south of the Alps—the daily, hourly difficulty of not believing that
you have taken a wrong road and got into Siberia; and strangest of all it
is to see how little the natives think of it. I declare I often thought
soap must be a great refrigerant, and I wish some chemist would inquire
into the matter.
“Are we ever to begin this blessed language?” said Mrs O’D. to me, after
four days of close arrest—snow still falling and the thermometer
going daily down, down, lower and lower. Now I had made inquiries the day
before from the landlord, and learned that he knew of a most competent
person, not exactly a regular teacher who would insist upon our going to
work in school fashion, but a man of sense and a gentleman—indeed, a
person of rank and title, with whom the world had gone somewhat badly, and
who was at that very moment suffering for his political opinions, far in
advance, as they were, of those of his age.
“He’s a friend of Gioberti,” whispered the landlord in my ear, while his
features became animated with the most intense significance. Now, I had
never so much as heard of Gioberti, but I felt it would be a deep disgrace
to confess it, and so I only exclaimed, with an air of half-incredulity,
“Indeed!”
“As true as I’m here,” replied he. “He usually drops in about noon to read
the ‘Opinione,’ and, if you permit, I’ll send him up to you. His name is
Count Annibale Castrocaro.”
I hastened forthwith to Mrs O’D., to apprise her of the honour that
awaited us; repeating, a little in extenso, all that the host had
said, and finishing with the stunning announcement, “and a friend of
Gio-berti.” Mrs O’Dowd never flinched under the shock, and, too proud to
own her ignorance, she pertly remarked, “I don’t think the more of him for
that.”
I felt that she had beat me, and I sat down abashed and humiliated.
Meanwhile Mrs O’D. retired to make some change of dress; but, reappearing
after a while in her smartest morning toilette, and a very coquettish
little cap, with cherry-coloured ribbons, I saw what the word Count had
done at once.
Just as the clock struck twelve, the waiter flung wide the double doors of
our room, and announced, as pompously as though for royalty, “II Signor
Conte di Castrocaro,” and there entered a tall man slightly stooping in
the shoulders, with a profusion of the very blackest hair on his neck and
shoulders, his age anything from thirty-five to forty-eight, and his dress
a shabby blue surtout, buttoned to the throat and reaching below the
knees. He bowed and slid, and bowed again, till he came opposite where my
wife sat, and then, with rather a dramatic sort of grace, he lifted her
hand to his lips and kissed it. She reddened a little, but I saw she
wasn’t displeased with the air of homage that accompanied the ceremony,
and she begged him to be seated.
I own I was disappointed with the Count, his hair was so greasy, and his
hands so dirty, and his general get-up so uncared for; but Mrs O’D. talked
away with him very pleasantly, and he replied in his own broken English,
making little grimaces and smiles and gestures, and some very tender
glances, do duty where his parts of speech failed him. In fact, I watched
him as a sort of psychological phenomenon, and I arrived at the conclusion
that this friend of Gioberti’s was a very clever artist.
All was speedily settled for the lessons—hour, terms, and mode of
instruction. It was to be entirely conversational, with a little
theme-writing, no getting by heart, no irregular verbs, no declensions, no
genders. I did beg hard for a little grammar, but he wouldn’t hear of it.
It was against his “system,” and so I gave in.
We began the next day, but the Count ignored me altogether, directing
almost all his attentions to Mrs O’D.; and as I had already some small
knowledge of the elementary part of the language, I was just as well
pleased that she should come up, as it were, to my level. From this cause
I often walked off before the lesson was over, and sometimes, indeed, I
skulked it altogether, finding the system, as well as Gioberti’s friend,
to be an unconscionable bore. Mrs O’D., on the contrary, displayed an
industry I never believed her to possess, and would pass whole evenings
over her exercises, which often covered several sheets of letter-paper.
We had now been about five weeks in Turin, when my brother wrote to
request I would come back as speedily as I could, that a case in which I
held a brief was high in the cause-list, and would be tried very early in
the session. I own I was not sorry at the recall. I detested the dreary
life I was leading. I hated Turin and its bad feeding and bad theatres,
its rough wines and its rougher inhabitants.
“Did you tell the Count we are off on Saturday?” asked I of Mrs O’D.
“Yes,” said she, dryly.
“I suppose he’s inconsolable,” said I, with a sneer.
“He’s very sorry we’re going, if you mean that, Mr O’Dowd; and so am I
too.”
“Well, so am not I; and you may call me a Dutchman if you catch me here
again.”
“The Count hopes you will permit him to see you. He asked this morning
whether he might call on you about four o’clock.”
“Yes, I’ll see him with sincere pleasure for once,” I cried; “since it is
to say good-bye to him.”
I was in my dressing-room, packing up for the journey, when the Count was
announced and shown in. “Excuse me, Count,” said I, “for receiving you so
informally, but I have a hasty summons to call me back to England, and no
time to spare.”
“I will, notwithstanding, ask you for some of that time, all precious as
it is,” said he in French, and with a serious gravity that I had never
observed in him before.
“Well, sir,” said I, stiffly; “I am at your orders.”
It is now seventeen long years since that interview, and I am free to own
that I have not even yet attained to sufficient calm and temper to relate
what took place. I can but give the substance of our conversation. It is
not over-pleasant to dwell on, but it was to this purport:—The Count
had come to inform me that, without any intention or endeavour on his
part, he had gained Mrs O’Dowd’s affections and won her heart! Yes,
much-valued reader, he made this declaration to me, sitting opposite to me
at the fire, as coolly and unconcernedly as if he was apologising for
having carried off my umbrella by mistake. It is true, he was most
circumstantial in showing that all the ardour was on one side, and that
he, throughout the whole adventure, conducted himself as became a Gran’
Galantuomo, and the friend of Gioberti, whatever that might mean.
My amazement—I might almost call it my stupefaction—at the
unparalleled impudence of the man, so overcame me, that I listened to him
without an effort at interruption.
“I have come to you, therefore, to-day,” said he, “to give up her
letters.”
“Her letters!” exclaimed I; “and she has written to you!”
“Twenty-three times in all,” said he, calmly, as he drew a large black
pocket-book from his breast, and took out a considerable roll of papers.
“The earlier ones are less interesting,” said he, turning them over. “It
is about here, No. 14, that they begin to develop feeling. You see she
commences to call me ‘Caro Animale’—she meant to say Annibale, but,
poor dear! she mistook. No. 15 is stronger—‘Animale Mio’—the
same error; and here, in No. 17, she begins, ‘Diletto del mio cuore,
quando non ti vedo, non ti sento, il cielo stesso, non mi sorride piu. Il
mio Tiranno’—that was you.”
I caught hold of the poker with a convulsive grasp, but quick as thought
he bounded back behind the table, and drew out a pistol, and cocked it. I
saw that Gioberti’s friend had his wits about him, and resumed the
conversation by remarking that the documents he had shown me were not in
my wife’s handwriting.
“Very true,” said he; “these, as you will perceive by the official stamp,
are sworn copies, duly attested at the Prefettura—the originals are
safe.”
“And with what object,” asked I, gasping—“safe for what?”
“For you, lllustrissimo,” said he, bowing, “when you pay me two thousand
francs for them.”
“I’ll knock your brains out first,” said I, with another clutch at the
poker, but the muzzle of the pistol was now directly in front of me.
“I am moderate in my demands, signor,” said he, quietly; “there are men in
my position would ask you twenty thousand; but I am a galantuomo——”
“And the friend of Gioberti,” added I, with a sneer.
“Precisely so,” said he, bowing with much grace.
I will not weary you, dear reader, with my struggles—conflicts that
almost cost me a seizure on the brain—but hasten to the result. I
beat down the noble Count’s demand to one-half and for a thousand francs I
possessed myself of the fatal originals, written unquestionably and
indisputably by my wife’s hand; and then, giving the Count a final piece
of advice, never to let me see more of him, I hurried off to Mrs O’Dowd.
She was out paying some bills, and only arrived a few minutes before
dinner-hour.
“I want you, madam, for a moment here,” said I, with something of Othello,
in the last act, in my voice and demeanour.
“I suppose I can take off my bonnet and shawl first, Mr O’Dowd,” said she,
snappishly.
“No, madam; you may probably find that you’ll need them both at the end of
our interview.”
“What do you mean, sir?” asked she, haughtily.
“This is no time for grand airs or mock dignity, madam,” said I, with the
tone of the avenging angel. “Do you know these? are these in your hand?
Deny it if you can.”
“Why should I deny it? Of course they’re mine.”
“And you wrote this, and this, and this?” cried I, almost in a scream, as
I shook forth one after another of the letters.
“Don’t you know I did?” said she, as hotly; “and nothing beyond a venial
mistake in one of them!”
“A what, woman? a what?”
“A mere slip of the pen, sir. You know very well how I used to sit up half
the night at my exercises?”
“Exercises!”
“Well, themes, if you like better; the Count made me make clean copies of
them, with all his corrections, and send them to him every day—here
are the rough ones;” and she opened a drawer filled with a mass of papers
all scrawled over and blotted. “And now, sir, once more, what do you
mean?”
I did not wait to answer her, but rushed down to the landlord. “Where does
that Count Castrocaro live?” I asked.
“Nowhere in particular, I believe, sir; and for the present he has left
Turin—started for Genoa by the diligence five minutes ago. He’s a
Gran’ Galantuomo, sir,” added he, as I stood stupefied.
“I am aware of that,” said I, as I crept back to my room to finish my
packing.
“Did you settle with the Count?” asked my wife at the door.
“Yes,” said I, with my head buried in my trunk.
“And he was perfectly satisfied?”
“Of course he was—he has every reason to be so.”
“I am glad of it,” said she, moving away—“he had a deal of trouble
with those themes of mine. No one knows what they cost him.” I could have
told what they cost me; but I never did, till the present moment.
I need not say with what an appetite I dined on that day, nor with what
abject humility I behaved to my wife, nor how I skulked down in the
evening to the landlord to apologise for not being able to pay the bill
before I left, an unexpected demand having left me short of cash. All
these, seventeen years ago as they are, have not yet lost their
bitterness, nor have I yet arrived at the time when I can think with
composure of this friend of Gioberti.
Admiral Dalrymple tells us, amongst his experiences as a farmer, that he
gave twenty pounds for a dung-hill, “and he’d give ten more to any one
who’d tell him what to do with it.” I strongly suspect this is pretty much
the case with the Italians as regards their fleet. There it is—at
least, there is the beginning of it; and when it shall be complete, where
is it to go? what is it to protect? whom to attack?
The very last thing Italians have in their minds is a war with England. If
we have not done them any great or efficient service, we have always
spoken civilly of them, and bade them a God-speed. But, besides a certain
goodwill that they feel for us, they entertain—as a nation with a
very extended and ill-protected coast-line ought—a considerable
dread of a maritime power that could close every port they possess, and
lay some very important towns in ashes.
Now, it is exactly by the possession of a fleet that, in any future war
between England and France, these people may be obliged to ally themselves
to France. The French will want them in the Mediterranean, and they cannot
refuse when called on.
Count Cavour always kept telling our Foreign Office, “A strong Italy is
the best thing in the world for you. A strong Italy is the surest of all
barriers against France.” There may be some truth in the assertion if
Italy could spring at once—Minerva fashion—all armed and ready
for combat, and stand out as a first-rate power in Europe; but to do this
requires years of preparation, long years too; and it is precisely in
these years of interval that France can become all-dominant in Italy—the
master, and the not very merciful master, of her destinies in everything.
France has the guardianship of Italy—with this addition, that she
can make the minority last as long as she pleases.
Perhaps my Garibaldian companion has impregnated me with an unreasonable
amount of anti-French susceptibility, for certainly he abuses our dear
allies with a zeal and a gusto that does one’s heart good to listen to;
and I do feel like that honest Bull, commemorated by Mathews, that “I hate
prejudice—I hate the French.” So it is: these revolutionists, these
levellers, these men of the people, are never weary of reviling the French
Emperor for being a parvenu. Human inconsistency cannot go much
farther than this. Not but I perfectly agree with my Garibaldian, that we
have all agreed to take the most absurdly exaggerated estimate of the
Emperor’s ability. Except in some attempts, and not always successful
attempts, to carry out the policy and plans of the first Empire, there is
really nothing that deserves the name of statesmanship in his career.
Wherever he has ventured on a policy, and accompanied it by a prediction,
it has been a failure. Witness the proud declaration of Italy from the
Alps to the Adriatic, with its corroboration in the Treaty of Villafranca!
The Emperor, in his policy, resembles one of those whist-players who never
plan a game, but play trick by trick, and rather hope to win by
discovering a revoke than from any honest success of their own hand. It is
all the sharp practice of statecraft that he employs: nor has he many
resources in cunning. The same dodge that served him in the Crimea he
revived at Villafranca. It is always the same ace he has in his sleeve!
The most ardent Imperialist will not pretend to say that he knows his road
out of rome or Mexico, or even Madagascar. For small intrigue, short
speeches to deputations, and mock stag-hunts, he has not his superior
anywhere. And now, here we are in Genoa, at the Hotel Feder, where poor
O’Connell died, and there’s no fleet, not a frigate, in the port.
“Where are they?”
“At Spezia.”
“Where is Spezia?”
The landlord, to whom this question is propounded, takes out of a
pigeon-hole of his desk a large map and unfolds it, saying, proudly,
“There, sir, that is Spezia—a harbour that could hold Portsmouth,
and Plymouth, and Brest, and Cherbourg “—I’m not sure he didn’t say
Calais—“and yet have room for our Italian fleet, which, in two
years’ time, will be one of the first in Europe.”
“The ships are building, I suppose?” said I.
“They are.”
“And where?”
“In America, at Toulon, and in England.”
“None in Italy?”
“Pardon me; there is a corvette on the stocks at Leghorn, and they are
repairing a boiler at Genoa. Ah! Signor John Bull, take care; we have iron
and coal mines, we have oak and hemp, and tallow and tar. There was a
winged lion once that swept the seas before people sang ‘Rule Britannia.’
History is going to repeat itself.”
“Let me be called at eight to-morrow morning, and my coffee be ready by
nine.”
“And we shall want a vetturino for Spezia,” added my Garibaldian; “let him
be here by eleven.”
GARIBALDI’S WORSHIPPERS.
The road from Genoa to Spezia is one of the most beautiful in Europe. As
the Apennines descend to the sea they form innumerable little bays and
creeks, alongside of which the road winds—now coasting the very
shore, now soaring aloft on high-perched cliffs, and looking down into
deep dells, or to the waving tops of tall pine-trees. Seaward, it is a
succession of yellow-stranded bays, land-locked and narrow; and on the
land side are innumerable valleys, some waving with horse-chestnut and
olive, and others stern and rock-bound, but varying in colour from the
bluish-grey of marble to every shade of porphyry.
For several miles after we left Genoa, the road presented a succession of
handsome villas, which, neglected and uncared for, and in most part
untenanted, were yet so characteristically Italian in all their vast-ness—their
massive style and spacious plan—as to be great ornaments of the
scenery. Their gardens, too—such glorious wildernesses of rich
profusion—where the fig and the oleander, the vine and the orange,
tangle and intertwine—and cactuses, that would form the wonder of
our conservatories, are trained into hedgerows to protect cabbages. My
companion pointed out to me one of these villas on a little jutting
promontory of rock, with a narrow bay on one side, almost hidden by the
overhanging chestnut-trees. “That,” said he, “is the Villa Spinola. It was
from there, after a supper with his friend Vecchi, that Garibaldi sailed
on his expedition to Marsala. A sort of decent secrecy was maintained as
to the departure of the expedition; but the cheers of those on shore, as
the boats pulled off, told that the brave buccaneers carried with them the
heartfelt good wishes of their countrymen.” Wandering on in his talk from
the campaign of Sicily and Calabria, my companion spoke of the last wild
freak of Garibaldi and the day of Aspromonte, and finally of the hero’s
imprisonment at Varignano, in the Gulf of Spezia.
It appeared from his account that the poor wounded sufferer would have
fared very ill, had it not been for the provident kindness and care of his
friends in England, who supplied him with everything he could want and a
great deal he could by no possibility make use of. Wine of every kind, for
instance, was largely sent to one who was a confirmed water-drinker, and
who, except when obliged by the impure state of the water, never ventured
to taste wine. If now and then the zealous anxiety to be of service had
its ludicrous side—and packages arrived of which all the ingenuity
of the General’s followers failed to detect what the meaning might be—there
was something very noble and very touching in this spontaneous sympathy of
a whole people, and so Garibaldi felt it.
The personal homage of the admirers—the worshippers they might be
called—was, however, an infliction that often pushed the patience of
Garibaldi’s followers to its limit, and would have overcome the gentle
forbearance of any other living creature than Garibaldi himself. They came
in shoals. Steamboats and diligences were crammed with them, and the
boatmen of Spezia plied as thriving a trade that summer as though
Garibaldi were a saint, at whose shrine the devout of all Europe came to
worship. In vain obstacles were multiplied and difficulties to entrance
invented. In vain it was declared that only a certain number of visitors
were daily admitted, and that the number was already complete. In vain the
doctors announced that the General’s condition was prejudiced, and his
feverish state increased, by these continual invasions. Each new arrival
was sure to imagine that there was something special or peculiar in his
case to make him an exception to any rule of exclusion.
“I knew Garibaldi in Monte Video. You have only to tell him it’s Tomkins;
he’ll be overjoyed to see me.” “I travelled with him from Manchester to
Bridgeport; he’ll remember me when he sees me; I lent him a wrapper in the
train.” “I knew his son Menotti when at school.” “I was in New York when
Garibaldi was a chandler, and I was always asking for his candles;” such
and suchlike were the claims which would not be denied. At last the
infliction became insupportable. Some nights of unusual pain and suffering
required that every precaution against excitement should be taken, and
measures were accordingly concerted how visitors should be totally
excluded. There was this difficulty in the matter, that it might fall at
this precise moment some person of real consequence might have, or some
one whose presence Garibaldi would really have been well pleased to enjoy.
All these considerations were, however, postponed to the patient’s safety,
and an order was sent to the several hotels where strangers usually
stopped to announce that Garibaldi could not be seen.
“There is a story,” said my companion, “which I have heard more than once
of this period, but for whose authenticity I will certainly not vouch. Se
non vero e’ ben trovato, as regards the circumstance. It was said that
a party of English ladies had arrived at the chief hotel, having come as a
deputation from some heaven-knows-what association in England, to see the
General, and make their own report on his health, his appearance, and what
they deemed his prospect of perfect recovery. They had come a very long
journey, endured a considerable share of fatigues and certain police
attentions, which are not exactly what are called amenities. They had
come, besides, on an errand which might warrant a degree of insistance
even were they—which they were not—of an order that patiently
puts up with denial. When their demand for admission was replied to by a
reference to the general order excluding all visitors, they indignantly
refused to be classed in such a category. They were not idle tourists, or
sensation-hunting travellers. They were a deputation! They came from the
Associated Brothers and Sisters of Freedom—from the Branch Committee
of the Ear of Crying Nationalities—they were not to be sent away in
this light and thoughtless manner.
“The correspondence was animated. It lasted the whole day, and the
last-sent epistle of the ladies bore the date of half-past eleven at
night. This was a document of startling import; for, after expressing, and
not always in most measured phrase, the indignant disappointment of the
writers, it went on to throw out, but in a cloud-like misty sort of way,
the terrible consequences that might ensue when they returned to England
with the story of their rejection.
“Perhaps this was a mere chance shot; at all events, it decided the
battle. The Garibaldians read it as a declaration of strict blockade; and
that, from the hour of these ladies’ arrival in England, all supplies
would be stopped. Now, as it happened that, in by far the greater number
of cases, the articles sent out found their way to the suite of Garibaldi,
not to the General himself, and that cambric shirts and choice hosiery,
silk vests, and fur-lined slippers, became the ordinary wear of people to
whom such luxuries were not known even by description, it was no mean
menace that seemed to declare all this was to have an end.
“One used to sleep in a rich fur dressing-gown; another took a bottle of
Arundel’s port at his breakfast; a third was habituating himself to that
English liqueur called ‘Punch sauce,’ and so on; and they very reasonably
disliked coming back to the dietary supplied by Victor Emmanuel.
“It was in this critical emergency that an inventive genius developed
itself. There was amongst the suite of Garibaldi an old surgeon, Eipari,
one of the most faithful and attached of all his followers, and who bore
that amount of resemblance to Garibaldi which could be imparted by hair,
mustache, and beard of the same yellowish-red colour, and eyes somewhat
closely set. To put the doctor in bed, and make him personate the General,
was the plan—a plan which, as it was meant to save his chief some
annoyance, he would have acceded to were it to cost him far more than was
now intended.
“To the half-darkened room, therefore, where Eipari lay dressed in his
habitual red shirt, propped up by pillows, the deputation was introduced.
The sight of the hero was, however, too much for them. One dropped,
Madonna-wise, with hands clasped across her bosom, at the foot of his bed;
another fainted as she passed the threshold; a third gained the bedside to
grasp his hand, and sank down in an ecstasy of devotion to water it with
her tears; while the strong-minded woman of the party took out her
scissors and cut four several locks off that dear and noble head. They
sobbed over him—they blubbered over him—they compared him with
his photograph, and declared he was libelled—they showered cards
over him to get his autograph; and when, at length, by persuasion, not
unassisted by mild violence, they were induced to withdraw, they declared
that, for those few moments of ecstasy, they’d have willingly made a
pilgrimage to Mecca.
“It is said,” continued my informant, “that Ripari never could be induced
to give another representation; and that he declared the luxuries that
came from England were dear at the cost of being caressed by a deputation
of sympathisers.
“But to Garibaldi himself, the sympathy and the sympathisers went on to
the last; and kind wishes and winter-clothing still find their way, with
occasionally very tiresome visitors, to the lone rock at Caprera.”
SOMETHING ABOUT SOLFERINO AND SHIPS.
Our host of the Feder was not wrong. There was not a word of exaggeration
in what he said of Spezia. It could contain all the harbours of France and
England, and have room for all the fleets of Europe besides. About seven
miles in depth, and varying in width from two to three and a half, it is
fissured on every side by beautiful little bays, with deep water
everywhere, and not a sunk rock, or shoal, or a bar, throughout the whole
extent. Even the sea-opening of the Gulf has its protection by the long
coast-line of Tuscany, stretching away to the southward and eastward, so
that the security is perfect, and a vessel once anchored within the
headlands between Lerici and Palmaria is as safe as in dock.
The first idea of making a great arsenal and naval depot of Spezia came
from the Great Emperor. It is said that he was not more than one day
there, but in that time he planned the fort which bears his name, and
showed how the port could be rendered all but impregnable. Cavour took up
the notion, and pursued it with all his wonted energy and activity during
the last three or four years of his life. He carried through the Chamber
his project, and obtained a vote for upwards of two millions sterling; but
his death, which occurred soon after, was a serious blow to the
undertaking; and, like most of the political legacies of the great
statesman, the arsenal of Spezia fell into the hands of weak executors.
The first great blunder committed was to accord the chief contract to a
bubble company, who sold it, to be again resold; so that it is said
something like fifteen changes of proprietary occurred before the first
spadeful of earth was turned.
The inordinate jealousy Italians have of foreigners, and their fear lest
they should “utilise” Italy, and carry away all her wealth with them, has
been the source of innumerable mistakes. From this, and their own
ignorance of marine engineering, Spezia has already, without the slightest
evidence of a commencement, swallowed up above eight millions of francs—the
only palpable results being the disfigurement of a very beautiful road,
and the bankruptcy of some half-dozen contractors.
There is nothing of which one hears more, than of the readiness and
facility with which an Italian learns a new art or a new trade, adapts
himself to the use of new tools, and acquires a dexterity in the
management of new machinery.
Every newly-come English engineer was struck with this, and expressed
freely his anticipations of what so gifted a people might become. After a
while, however, if questioned, he would confess himself disappointed—that
after the first extraordinary show of intelligence no progress was made—that
they seemed marvellous in the initiative, but did nothing after. They
speedily grew weary of whatever they could do or say, no matter in what
fashion, and impatiently desired to try something new. The John Bull
contentedness to attain perfection in some one branch, and never ask to go
beyond it, was a sentiment they could not understand. Every one, in fact,
would have liked to do everything, and, as a consequence, do it
exceedingly ill.
Assuredly the Count Cavour was the political Marquis de Carabas of Italy.
Everything you see was his! No other head seemed to contrive, no other eye
to see, nor ear to hear. These railroads—as much for military
movements as passenger traffic—this colossal harbour, even to the
two iron-clads that lie there at anchor—were all of his designing.
They are ugly-looking craft, and have a look of pontoons rather than ships
of war; but they are strong, and have a low draught of water, and were
intended especially for the attack of Venice, just when the Emperor pulled
up short at Villafranca. It is not generally known, I believe, but I can
vouch for the fact, that so terrified were the Austrians on receiving at
Venice the disastrous news of Solferino, that three of the largest
steamers of the Austrian Lloyd’s Company were brought up, and sunk within
twelve hours after the battle. So hurriedly was the whole done that no
time was given to remove the steward’s stores, and the vessels went down
as they stood!
This reminds me of a little incident, for whose exact truth I can
guarantee. On the day of the battle of Solferino, the Austrian Envoy at
Rome dined with the Cardinal Antonelli. It was a very joyous little
dinner, each in the highest spirits—satisfied with the present, and
full of hope for the future. The telegram which arrived at mid-day told
that the troops were in motion, and that the artillery fire had already
opened. The position was a noble one—the army full of spirit, and
all confident that before the sun should set the tide of victory would
have turned, and the white legions of the Danube be in hot pursuit of
their flying enemy. Indeed, the Envoy came to dinner fortified with a mass
of letters from men high in command, all of which assumed as indisputable
that the French must be beaten. Of the Italians they never spoke at all.
As the two friends sat over the dessert, they discussed what at that
precise moment might be going on over the battle-field. Was the conflict
still continuing? Had the French reserves been brought up? Had they, too,
been thrown back, beaten and disordered? and where was the fourth corps
under the Prince Napoleon? They were forty thousand strong—could
they have arrived in time from the Po? All these casualties, and many
others, did they talk over, but never once launching a doubt as to the
issue, or ever dreaming that the day was not to reverse all the late past,
and bring back the Austrians in triumph to Milan.
As they sat, the Prefect of Police was announced and introduced. He came
with the list of the persons who were to be arrested and sent to prison—they
were one hundred and eighteen, some of them among the first families of
Rome—so soon as certain tidings of the victory arrived, and the game
of reaction might be safe to begin.
“No news yet, Signor Prefetto! come back at ten,” said the Cardinal
At ten he presented himself once more. The Cardinal and his friend were
taking coffee, but less joyous, it seemed, than before. At least they
looked anxious for news, and started at every noise in the street that
might announce new-come tidings. “We have heard nothing since you were
here,” said the Cardinal. “His Excellency thinks that, at a moment of
immense exigency, they may not have immediately bethought them of sending
off a despatch.”
“There can be no doubt what the news will be when it comes,” said the
Envoy, “and I’d say, make the arrests at once.”
“I don’t know; I’m not sure. I think I’d rather counsel a little more
patience,” said the Cardinal. “What if you were to come back at, let us
say, midnight.” The Prefect bowed, and withdrew.
At midnight it was the same scene, only that the actors were more
agitated; the Envoy, at least, worked up to a degree of impatience that
bordered on fever; for while he persisted in declaring that the result was
certain, he continued to censure, in very-severe terms, the culpable
carelessness of those charged with the transmission of news. “Ah!” cried
he, “there it comes at last!” and a loud summons at the bell resounded
through the house.
“A telegram, Eminence,” said the servant, entering with the despatch. The
Envoy tore it open: there were but two words,—“Sanglante déroute.”
The Cardinal took the paper from the hands of the overwhelmed and
panic-struck minister, and read it. He stood for a few seconds gazing on
the words, not a line or lineament in his face betraying the slightest
emotion; then, turning to the Envoy, he said, “Bon soir; allons dormir;”
and moved away with his usual quick little step, and retired.
And all this time I have been forgetting the Italian fleet, which lies
yonder beneath me. The Garibaldi, that they took from the Neapolitans; the
Duca di Genova, the Maria Adelaide, and the Regina are there, all
screw-propellers of fifty guns each; the Etna, a steam-corvette; and some
six or seven old sailing craft, used as school ships; and, lastly, the two
cuirassée gunboats, Formidabile and Terribile, and which, with a jealousy
imitated from the French, no one is admitted on board of. They are
provided with “rams” under the water-line, and have a strange apparatus by
which about one-third of the deck towards the bow can be raised, like the
lid of a snuff-box, leaving the forepart of the ship almost on a level
with the water. Under what circumstances, and how, this provision is to be
made available, I have not the very vaguest conception.
These vessels were never intended as sea-going ships; and the batteries
are an exaggeration of the mistake in the Gloire, for even with the
slightest sea the ports must be closed. Besides this defect, they roll
abominably, and with a full head of steam on they cannot accomplish seven
knots.
Turning from the ships to the harbour, I could not help thinking of Sydney
Smith’s remark on the Reform Club, “I prefer your room to your company;”
for, after all, what a sorry stud it is for such a magnificent stable! It
is but a beginning, you will say. True enough, and so is everything just
now here; but, except the Genoese, the Italians have few real sailors.
There are no deep-sea fisheries, and the small craft which creep along
close to shore are not the nurseries of seamen. The world, however, has
resolved, by a large vote, to be hopeful about Italy; and, of course, she
will have a fleet, as she will have all the trade of the Levant, immensely
productive mines, and vast regions of cotton. “What for no?” as Meg Dodds
says; but I can’t help thinking there are no people in Europe so much
alike as the Italians and the Irish; and I ask myself, How is it that
every one is so sanguine about the one, and so hopeless about the other?
Why do we hear of the capacity and the intelligence of the former, and
only of the latter what pertains to their ignorance and their sloth? Oh!
unjust generation of men! have not my poor countrymen all the qualities
you extol in these same Peninsulars, plus a few others not to be
disparaged?
THE STRANGER AT THE CROCE DI MALTA.
At the Croce di Malta, where we stopped—the Odessa, we heard, was
atrociously bad—we met a somewhat depressed countryman, whose
familiarity with place and people was indicated by several little traits.
He rebuked the waiter for the salad oil, and was speedily supplied with
better; he remonstrated about the wine, and a superior “cru” was served
the day following. The book of the arrivals, too, was brought to him each
day as he sat down to table, and he grunted out, I remember, in no very
complimentary fashion as he read our names, “Nobodies.”
My Garibaldian friend had gone over to Massa, so that I found myself alone
with this gentleman on the night of my arrival; for, when the company of
the table-d’hôte withdrew, he and I were discovered, as the
stage-people say, seated opposite to each other at the fire.
It blew hard without; the sea beat loudly on the shingly shore, and even
sent some drifts of spray against the windows; while within doors a
cheerful wood-fire blazed on the ample hearth, and the low-ceilinged room
did not look a whit the worse that it suggested snugness instead of
splendour. I had got my cup of coffee and my cognac on a little table
beside me; and while I filled the bowl of my pipe, I bethought me how
cheap and come-at-able are often the materials of our comfort, if one had
but the prudence which ignores all display. My companion, apparently
otherwise occupied in thought, sat gazing moodily at the fire, and to all
seeming unaware of my presence.
“Will my smoking annoy you, sir?” asked I, as I was ready to begin.
“No,” said he, without looking up. “I’d like to know where one could go to
live nowadays if it did.”
“Very true,” said I; “the practice is almost universal”
“So is child-murder, so is profane swearing, so is wearing a beard, and
poisoning by strychnine.”
I was somewhat struck by his enumeration of modern atrocities, and I said,
in a tone intended to invite converse, “You are no admirer, then, of what
some are fain to call progress?”
He started, and, turning a fierce sharp glance on me, said, “I’d rather
you’d touch me with that hot poker there, sir, than hurl that hateful word
at my ears. If there’s a thing I hate the most, it’s what cant—a
vile modern slang—calls ‘Progress.’ You’re just in the spot at this
moment to mark one of its high successes. Do you know Spezia?” “Not in the
least; never was here before.” “Well, sir, I have known it, I’ll not stop
to count how many years; but I knew it when that spot yonder, where you
see that vile tall chimney, with its tail of murky smoke, was a beautiful
little villa, all overgrown with fig and olive trees. Where you perceive
that red glare—the flame of a smelting furnace—there was an
orangery. I ought to know the spot well. There, where a summerhouse stood,
on that rocky point, they have got a crane and a windlass. Now, turn to
this other side. The road you saw to-day, crossed with four main lines,
cut up, almost impassable between mud, rubbish, and fallen timber, with
swampy excavations on one side and brick-fields on the other, led—ay,
and not four years ago—along the margin of the sea, with a forest of
chestnuts on the other side, two lines of acacias forming a shade along
it, so that in the mid-day of an Italian July you might walk it in
delicious shadow. In the Gulf itself the whole scene was mirrored, and not
a headland, nor rock, nor cliff, that was not pictured below. It was, in a
word, a little paradise; nor were the people all unworthy of their lovely
birthplace. They were a quiet, civil, obliging, simple-minded set—if
not inviting strangers to settle amongst them, never rude or repelling to
them; equitable in dealings, and strange to all disturbance or outrage.
What they are now is no more easy to say than what a rivulet is when a
torrent has carried away its banks and swept its bed. Two thousand
navvies, the outsweepings of jails and the galleys, have come down to the
works; a horde of contractors, sub-contractors, with the several staffs of
clerks, inspectors, and suchlike, have settled on the spot, ravaging its
beauty, uprooting its repose, vulgarising its simple rusticity, and
converting the very gem of the Mediterranean into a dreary swamp—a
vast amphitheatre, where liberated felons, robbing contractors, foul
miasma, centrifugal pumps, and tertian fevers, fight all day for the
mastery. And for what?—for what? To fill the pockets of knavish
ministers and thieving officials—to make an arsenal that will never
be finished, for a fleet that will never be built.” My companion, it is
needless to say, was no optimist; but the strange point was, that while he
was unsparing of his censure on Cavour and the “Piedmontese party,” he was
no apologist for the old state of things in Italy. So far from it, that he
launched out freely in attack of Papal bigotry, superstition, and
corruption, and freely corroborated our own Premier’s assertions, by
calling the Pope’s the “worst government in Europe.” In fact, he showed
very clearly that the smaller states of Italy were well or ill
administered in the direct ratio that they admitted or rejected Papal
interference,—Modena being the worst, and Tuscany the best of them.
Though he certainly knew his subject so far as details went—for he
not merely knew Italy well in its several provinces, but he understood the
characters and tempers of the leading Italians—yet, with all this, I
could not help asking him, If he was not satisfied with the old Italy, and
yet did not like the new, what he did wish for?
“I have my theory on that subject, sir,” said he; “nor am I the less
enamoured of it that I never yet met the man I could induce to adopt it.”
“It is no worse than the fate of all discoverers, I suppose,” said I;
“Columbus saw land two whole days before his followers.”
“Columbus was a humbug, sir, and no more discovered America than you did.”
I was so afraid of a digression here that I stammered out a partial
concurrence, and asked for some account of his project for Italy.
“I’d unite her to Greece, sir. These people, with the exception of a small
circle around Rome, are not Latins—they are Greeks. I’d bring them
back to the parent stock, who are the only people in Europe with craft and
subtlety to rule them. Take my word for it, sir, they’d not cheat the
‘Hellenes’ as they do the French and the English; and as the only true way
to reform a nation is to make vice unprofitable, I’d unite them to a race
that could outrogue and outwit them on every hand. What is it, I ask you,
makes of the sluggish, indolent, careless Irishman, the prudent,
hard-working, prosperous fellow you see him in the States? Simply the
fact, that the craft by which he outwitted John Bull no longer serves him.
The Yankee is too shrewd to be jockeyed by it, and Paddy must use his
hands instead of his head. The same would happen with the Italian. Give
him a Greek master, and you’ll see what he’ll become.”
“But the Greeks, after all,” said I, “do not present such a splendid
example of order and prosperity. They are little better than brigands.”
“And don’t you see why?” broke he in. “Have you ever looked into a
gambling-house when the company had no ‘pigeon,’ and were obliged to play
against each other. They have lost all decency—all the semblance of
good manners and decorum. Whatever little politeness they had put on to
impose upon the outsider was gone, and there they were in all the naked
atrocity of their bad natures. It is thus you see the Greeks. You have
dropped in upon them unfairly; you have invaded a privacy they had hoped
might be respected. Give them a nation to cheat, however; let the pigeon
be introduced, and you’ll not see a better bred and a more courtly people
in Europe.”
That they had great social qualities he proceeded to show from a number of
examples. They were, in fact, in the world of long ago what the French are
to our own day, and there was no reason to suppose that the race had lost
its old characteristics. According to my companion’s theory, Force had
only its brief interval of domination anywhere; the superior intelligence
was sure to gain the upper hand at last; and we, in our opposition to this
law, were supply retarding an inevitable tendency of nature—protracting
the fulfilment of what we could not prevent.
I got him back from these speculations to speak of himself, and he told me
some experiences which will, perhaps, account for the displeasure with
which he regards the changed fortunes of Spezia. I shall give his
narrative as nearly as I can in his own words, and in a chapter to itself.
THE STRANGE MAN’S SORROW.
“When I first knew Spezia, it was a very charming spot to pass the summer
in. The English had not found it out A bottle of Harvey sauce or a copy of
‘Galignani’ had never been seen here; and the morning meal, which now
figures in my bill as ‘Dejeuner complet—two francs.’ was then called
‘Coffee,’ and priced twopence. I used to pass my day in a small sail-boat,
and in my evenings I played halfpenny whist with the judge and the
commander of the forces and a retired envoy, who, out of a polite
attention to me as a stranger, agreed to play such high stakes during my
sojourn at the Baths.
“They were excellent people, of unblemished character, and a politeness I
have rarely seen equalled. Nobody could sneeze without the whole company
rising to wish him a long and prosperous life, or a male heir to his name;
and as for turning the trump card without a smile and a bow all round to
the party, it was a thing unheard of.
“I thought if I could only secure a spot to live in in such an Arcadia, it
would be charming, but this was a great difficulty. No one had any
accommodation more than he wanted for himself. The very isolation that
gave the place its charm excluded all speculation, and not a house was to
be had. In my voyagings, however, around the Gulf, I landed one day at a
little inlet, surrounded with high lands, and too small to be called a
bay, and there, to my intense astonishment, I discovered a small villa. It
looked exactly like the houses one sees in a toy-shop, and where you take
off the roof to peep in and see how neatly the stairs are made and the
rooms divided; but there was a large garden at one side and an orangery at
the other, and it all looked the neatest and prettiest little thing one
ever saw off the boards of a minor theatre. I drew my boat on shore and
strolled into the garden, but saw no one, not even a dog. There was a deep
well with a draw-bucket, and I filled my gourd with ice-cold water; and
then plucking a ripe orange that had just given me a bob in the eye, I sat
down to eat it. While I was engaged, I heard a wicket open and shut, and
saw an old man, very shabbily dressed, and with a mushroom straw hat,
coming towards me. Before I could make excuses for my intrusion, he had
welcomed me to Pertusola—‘The Nook,’ in English—and invited me
to step in and have a glass of wine.
“I took him for the steward or fattore, and acceded, not sorry to ask some
questions about the villa and its owner. He showed me over the house,
explaining with much pride how a certain kitchen-range came from England,
though nobody ever knew the use of it, but it was all very comfortable.
The silk-worms and dried figs and salt-fish occupied more space, and
contributed more odour, perhaps, than a correct taste would have approved
of. Yet there were capabilities—great capabilities; and so, before I
left, I took it from the old gentleman in the rusty costume, who turned
out to be the proprietor, a marquis, the ‘commendatore’ of I don’t know
what order, and various other dignities beside, all recited and set forth
in the lease.
“I suppose I have something of Robinson Crusoe in my nature, for I loved
the isolation of this spot immensely. It wasn’t an island, but it was all
but an island. Towards the land, two jutting promontories of rock denied
access to anything not a goat; the sea in front; an impenetrable pine wood
to the rear: and there I lived so happily, so snugly, that even now, when
I want a pleasant theme to doze over beside my wood-fire of an evening, I
just call up Pertusola, and ramble once again through its olive groves, or
watch the sunset tints as they glow over the Carara mountains.
“I smartened the place up wonderfully, within doors and without. I got
flowers, roots, and annuals, and slips of geraniums, and made the little
plateau under my drawing-room window a blaze of tulips and ranunculuses,
so that the Queen—she was at Spezia for the bathing—came once
to see my garden, as one of the show spots of the place. Her Majesty was
as gracious as only royalty knows how to be, and so were all her suite in
their several ways; but there was one short, fat, pale-faced man, with
enormous spectacles, who, if less polite than the rest, was ten times as
inquisitive. He asked about the soil, and the drainage, the water and its
quality—was it a spring—did it ever fail—and when, and
how? Then as to the bay itself, was it sheltered, and from what winds?
What the anchorage was like—mud—and why mud? And when I said
there was always a breeze even in summer, he eagerly pushed me to explain,
why? and I did explain that there was a cleft or gully between the hills,
which acted as a sort of conductor to the wind; and on this he went back
to verify my statement, and spent some time poking about, examining
everything, and stationing himself here and there on points of rock, to
experience the currents of air. ‘You are right,’ said he, as he got into
his boat, ‘quite right; there is a glorious draught here for a
smelting-furnace.’
“I thought it odd praise at the time, but before six months I received
notice to quit.
“Pertusola had been sold to a lead company, one of the directors having
strongly recommended the site as an admirable harbour, with good water,
and a perpetual draught of wind, equal to a blast-furnace.”
Looking at the dress-coat in which you once captivated dinner-parties, on
a costeimonger—seeing the strong-boned hunter that has carried you
over post and rail, in a cab,—are sore trials; but nothing,
according to my companion’s description, to the desecration of your house
and home by its conversion into a factory. Such an air of the “Inferno,”
too, pervades the smelting-house, with its lurid glow, its roar, its
flash, and its furious heat, that I could readily forgive him the
passionate warmth with which he described it.
“They had begun that chimney, sir,” cried he, “before I got out of the
house. I had to cross on a plank over a pit before my door, where they
were riddling the ore. The morning I left, I covered my eyes, not to see
the barbaric glee with which they destroyed all around, and I left the
place for ever. I crossed over the Gulf, and I took that house you can see
on the rocky point called Marola. It had no water; there was no depth to
anchor in; and not a breath of air could come at it except in stillness.
No more terrors of smelting-house here, thought I. Well, sir, I must be
brief; the whole is too painful to dwell on. I hadn’t been eight months
there when a little steamer ran in one morning, and four persons in plain
clothes landed from her, and pottered about the shore—I thought
looking for anemones. At last they strolled up to my house, and asked
permission to have a look at the Gulf from my terrace. I acceded, and in
they came. They were all strangers but one, and who do you think he was?
The creature with the large spectacles! My blood ran cold when I saw him.
“‘You used to live yonder, if I mistake not,’ said he to me, coolly.
“‘Yes, and I might have been living there still,’ replied I, ‘if it had
not been for the prying intrusion of a stranger, to whom I was weak enough
to be polite.’
“He never noticed my taunt in the least, but, calmly opening the window,
passed out upon the terrace. The others speedily gathered around him, and
I saw that he knew the whole place as if it had been his bedroom; for not
only did he describe the exact measurements between various points, but
the depth of water, the character of the bottom, the currents, and the
prevailing winds. He went on, besides, to show how, by running out a pier
here, and a breakwater there—by filling up this, and deepening that—safe
anchorage could be secured in all weathers; while the headlands could be
easily fortified, and ‘at a moderate cost,’ I quote himself, ‘of say
twenty two or three millions of francs, while a fort erected on the island
there would command the whole entrance.’
“‘And who, in the name of all Utopia, wants to force it?’ cried I; for, as
they talked so openly, I thought I might interpose as frankly.
“He never seemed to resent my remark as obtrusive, but said quietly, ‘Who
knows? the French perhaps—perhaps your own people one of these
days.’
“I’d like to have said, but I didn’t, ‘We could walk in and walk out here,
with our iron-clads, as coolly as a man goes out in the rain with a
mackintosh.’
“They remained fully an hour, talking as freely as if I was born deaf and
dumb. At last they arose to leave, and the owl-faced man—he looked
exactly like an owl—said, with a little grin, ‘We’re going to
disturb you again.’
“‘How so?’ cried I; ‘you can’t smelt lead here.’
“‘No, but we’re going to make an arsenal. Where you stand now will be a
receiving-dock, and that garden of yours a patent slip. You’ll have to
clear out before the New Year.’
“‘Who is he? who is that with the spectacles?’ asked I of one of the
servants, who waited outside with cloaks and umbrellas.
“‘That’s the Conte di Cavour,’ said the fellow, haughtily; and thus was
the whole murder out at once. They turned me out, sir, in two months, and
I never ventured to take a lease of a place till he died. After that
event, I purchased a little spot on the island of Tino yonder, and built
myself a cottage. They could neither smelt metal nor build a ship there,
and I hugged myself at the thought of safety. But, would you believe it?
last week—only last week—his successor, in rummaging over
Cavour’s papers in the Foreign Office, comes upon a packet labelled
‘Spezia,’ and discovers a memorandum in these words, ‘The English Admiral,
at dinner to-day, laughed at the idea of defending the mouth of the Gulf
from the island. He said the entrance should be two-thirds closed by a
breakwater, and a strong fort à fleur d’eau built on Tino. I have
thought of it all night; he is perfectly right, and I’ll do it;’ and here,
sir,” said my companion, drawing a paper from his pocket, “is a
‘sommation’ from the minister to surrender my holding on Tino, receiving a
due compensation for the same, and once more betake myself, heaven knows
where; for, though the great Count Cavour is dead and gone, his grand
intentions are turning up every day, out of drawers and pigeonholes, and I
shrewdly suspect that neither Pio Nono nor myself will live to see the
last of them.”
ITALIAN LAW AND JUSTICE.
My Garibaldian friend has returned, but only to bid me good-bye and be off
again. The Government, it would seem, are rather uneasy as to the
movements of the “Beds,” and quietly intimated to my friend that they were
sure he had something particular to do—some urgent private affairs—at
Geneva; and, like the well-bred dog in the story, he does not wait for any
further suggestions, but goes at once.
He revenged himself, however, all the time at breakfast, by talking very
truculently before the waiters of what would happen when Garibaldi took
the field again, and how miserably small Messrs Batazzi & Co. would
look under the circumstances. Indeed, as he warmed with his subject, he
went the length of declaring that, without a very ample apology for the
events of Aspromonte, he did not believe Garibaldi would consent to take
Venice, or drive the French out of Rome.
With a spirit of tantalising he prolonged this same breakfast for upwards
of two hours, during which the officer of the gendarmerie came and went,
and came again, very eager to see him depart, but evidently with
instructions neither to molest nor interfere with him.
“Just look at that beggar,” cried the Garibaldian; “if he has come in here
once during the last hour, he has come a dozen times, and all on my
account! And I mean to smoke three ‘cavours’ over my anisetto before I
leave. Waiter, tell the vetturino he’ll have plenty of time to throw a
feed to his cattle before I start. You know,” added he, “if I was disposed
to be troublesome, I’d not budge: I’d write up to Turin to the Legation
and claim British protection; and I’d have these fellows on the hip, for
they stupidly gave me a reason for my expulsion. They said I was
conspiring. Now I could say, Prove it; and if we only went to law, it
would take ten or twelve years to decide it.”
My companion now went on to show that, by a small expenditure of money and
a very ordinary exercise of ingenuity, a lawsuit need never end in Italy.
“First of all, you could ask the opposite party, Who was his advocate? and
on his naming him, you could immediately set to work to show that this man
was a creature so vile and degraded, no man with the commonest pretension
to honesty would dream of employing him. The history of his father could
be adduced, and any private little anecdotes of his mother would find a
favourable opportunity for mention. Though a mere skirmish, if judiciously
managed, this will occupy a week or two, and at the same time serve to
indicate that you mean to show fight; for by this time the ‘Legale’s’
blood will be up, and he is certain to make reprisals on your man,
so that for a month or so you and the other principal are in the position
of men who, having come out to fight a duel, are first gratified with the
spectacle of a row between the seconds. However, at last it is arranged
that the lawyers are worthy of each other; and the next step is to demand
the names of all the witnesses. This opens a campaign of unlimited
duration, for, as nobody is rash enough to trust himself or his cause to
real and bonâ-fide testimony, witnesses are usually selected
amongst the most astute and ready-witted persons of your acquaintance.”
“Oh,” cried I, “this is a little too strong, isn’t it?” “Let me give you
an instance,” said he, good-humouredly, and not in the least disposed to
be displeased with my expression of distrust. “Some time back an American
gentleman took up his abode for some weeks on the Chiaja at Naples, and in
the same house there lived an Italian, with whom, from frequently meeting
on the stairs and corridors, a sort of hat-touching acquaintance had grown
up. At length one day, as the American was passing hastily out, the
Italian accosted him with a courteous bow and smile, and said, ‘When will
it be your perfect convenience, signor, to repay me that little loan of
two hundred ducats it was my happy privilege to have lent you last month?’
“The American, astounded as he was, had yet patience to inquire whether he
had not mistaken him for another.
“The other smiled somewhat reproachfully, as he said, ‘I trust, signor,
you are not disposed to ignore the obligation. You are the gentleman who
lives, I believe, on the second floor left?’
“‘Very true; I do live there, and I owe you nothing. I never borrowed a
carlino from you—I never spoke to you before; and if you ever take
the liberty to speak to me again, I’ll knock you down.’
“The Italian smiled again, not so blandly, perhaps, but as significantly,
and saying, ‘We shall see,’ bowed and retired.
“The American thought little more of the matter till, going to the
Prefecture to obtain his visé for Borne, he discovered that his passport
had been stopped, and a detainer put upon him for this debt. He hastened
at once to his Minister, who referred him to the law-adviser of the
Legation for counsel. The man of law looked grave; he neither heeded the
angry denunciations of the enraged Yankee, nor his reiterated assurances
that the whole was an infamous fraud. He simply said, ‘The case is
difficult, but I will do my best.’ After the lapse of about a week, a
message came from the Prefect to say that the stranger’s passport was at
his service whenever he desired to have it.
“‘I knew it would be so!’ cried the American, as he came suddenly upon his
lawyer in the street. ‘I was certain that you were only exaggerating the
difficulty of a matter that must have been so simple; for, as I never owed
the money, there was no reason why I should pay it.’
“‘It was a case for some address, notwithstanding,’ said the other,
shaking his head.
“‘Address! fiddle-stick! It was a plain matter of fact, and needed neither
skill nor cunning. You of course showed that this fellow was a stranger to
me—that we had never interchanged a word till the day he made this
rascally demand?’
“‘I did nothing of the kind, sir. If I had put in so contemptible a plea,
you would have lost your cause. What I did was this: I asked what
testimony he could adduce as to the original loan, and he gave me the name
of one witness, a certain Count well known in this city, who was at
breakfast with him when you called to borrow this money, and who saw the
pieces counted out and placed in your hand.’
“‘You denounced this fellow as a perjurer?’
“‘Far from it, sir. I respect the testimony of a man of station and
family, and I would not insult the feelings of the Count by daring to
impugn it; but as the plaintiff had called only one witness to the loan, I
produced two just as respectable, just as distinguished, who saw you repay
the debt! You are now free; and remember, sir, that wherever your
wanderings lead you, never cease to remember that, whatever be our
demerits at Naples, at least we can say with pride, The laws are
administered with equal justice to all men!’”
The entrance of the gendarme at this moment cut short the question I was
about to ask, whether I was to accept this story as a fact or as a
parable.
“Here he comes again. Only look at the misery in the fellow’s face! and
you see he has his orders evidently enough; and he dare not hurry me. I
think I’ll have a bath before I start.”
“It is scarcely fair, after all,” said I. “I suppose he wants to get back
to his one o’clock dinner.”
“I could no more feel for a gendarme than I could compassionate a
scorpion. Take the best-natured fellow in Europe—the most generous,
the most trustful, the most unsuspecting—make a brigadier of
Gendarmerie of him for three months, and he’ll come out scarcely a shade
brighter than the veriest rascal he has handcuffed! Do you know what our
friend yonder is at now?”
“No. He appears to be trying to take a stain out of one of his yellow
gauntlets.”
“No such thing. He is noting down your features—taking a written
portrait of you, as the man who sat at breakfast with me on a certain
morning of a certain month. Take my word for it, some day or other when
you purchase a hat too tall in the crown, or you are seen to wear your
whiskers a trifle too long or bushy, an intimation will reach you at your
hotel, that the Prefect would like to talk with you; the end of which will
be the question, ‘Whether there is not a friend you are most anxious to
meet in Switzerland, or if you have not an uncle impatient to see you at
Trieste?’ And yet,” added he, after a pause, “the Piedmontese are models
of liberality and legality in comparison with the officials in the south.
In Sicily, for instance, the laws are more corruptly administered than in
Turkey. I’ll tell you a case, which was, however, more absurd than
anything else. An English official, well known at Messina, and on the most
intimate terms with the Prefect, came back from a short shooting-excursion
he had made into the interior, half frantic with the insolence of the
servants at a certain inn. The proprietor was absent, and the waiter and
the cook—not caring, perhaps, to be disturbed for a single traveller—had
first refused flatly to admit him; and afterwards, when he had obtained
entrance, treated him to the worst of food, intimating at the same time it
was better than he was used to, and plainly giving him to understand that
on the very slightest provocation they were prepared to give him a sound
thrashing. Boiling over with passion, he got back to Messina, and hastened
to recount his misfortunes to his friend in power.
“‘Where did it happen?’ asked the hard-worked Prefect, with folly enough
on his hands without having to deal with the sorrows of Great Britons.
“‘At Spalla deMonte.’
“‘When?’
“‘On Wednesday last, the 23d.’
“‘What do you want me to do with them?’
“‘To punish them, of course.’
“‘How—in what way?’
“‘How do I know? Send them to jail.’
“‘For how long?’
“‘A month if you can—a fortnight at least.’
“‘What are the names?’ asked the Prefect, who all this time continued to
write, filling up certain blanks in some printed formula before him.
“‘How should I know their names? I can only say that one was the cook, the
other the waiter.’
“‘There!’ said the Prefect, tossing two sheets of printed and written-over
paper towards him—‘there! tell the landlord to fill in the fellows’
names and surnames, and send that document to the Podesta. They shall have
four weeks, and with hard labour.’
“The Englishman went his way rejoicing. He despatched the missive, and
felt his injuries were avenged.
“Two days after, however, a friend dropped in, and in the course of
conversation mentioned that he had just come from Spalla de Monte, where
he had dined so well and met such an intelligent waiter; ‘which, I own,’
said he, ‘surprised me, for I had heard of their having insulted some
traveller last week very grossly.’
“The Englishman hurried off to the Prefecture. ‘We are outraged, insulted,
laughed at!’ cried he: ‘those fellows you ordered to prison are at large.
They mock your authority and despise it.’
“A mounted messenger was sent off at speed to bring up the landlord to
Messina, and he appeared the next morning, pale with fear and trembling.
He owned that the Prefect’s order had duly reached him, that he had
understood it thoroughly; ‘but, Eccellenza,’ said he, crying, ‘it was the
shooting season; people were dropping in every day. Where was I to find a
cook or a waiter? I must have closed the house if I parted with them; so,
not to throw contempt on your worship’s order, I sent two of the stablemen
to jail in their place, and a deal of good it will do them.’”
While I was laughing heartily at this story, my companion turned towards
the gendarme and said, “Have you made a note of his teeth? you see they
are tolerably regular, but one slightly overlaps the other in front.”
“Signor Générale,” said the other, reddening, “I’ll make a note of your
tongue, which will do quite as well.”
“Bravo!” said the Garibaldian; “better said than I could have given you
credit for. I’ll not keep you any longer from your dinner. Will you bear
me company,” asked he of me, “as far as Chiavari? It’s a fine day, and we
shall have a pleasant drive.”
I agreed, and we started.
The road was interesting, the post-horses which we took at Borghetto went
well, and the cigars were good, and somehow we said very little to each
other as we went.
“This is the real way to travel,” said my companion; “a man to smoke with
and no bother of talking; there’s Chiavari in the hollow.”
I nodded, and never spoke.
“Are you inclined to come on to Genoa?”
“No.”
And soon after we parted—whether ever to meet again or not is not so
easy to say, nor of very much consequence to speculate on.
THE ORGAN NUISANCE AND ITS REMEDY.
There is scarcely any better measure of the amount of comfort a man enjoys
than in the sort of things of which he makes grievances. When the princess
in the Eastern story passed a restless night on account of the rumpled
rose-leaf she lay on, the inference is, that she was not, like another
character of fiction, accustomed to “lie upon straw.”
Thus thinking, I was led to speculate on what a happy people must inhabit
the British Islands, seeing the amount of indignation and newspaper wrath
bestowed upon what is called the Organ Nuisance. Now, granting that it is
not always agreeable to have a nasal version of the march in ‘William
Tell,’ ‘Home, sweet Home,’ or ‘La Donna è mobile,’ under one’s window at
meal-times, in the hours of work, or the darker hours of headache, surely
the nation which cries aloud over this as a national calamity must enjoy
no common share of Fortune’s favour, and have what the Yankees call a
“fine time” here below.
Scarcely a week, however, goes over without one of these persecutors of
British ears being brought up to justice, and some dreary penny-a-liner
appears to prosecute in the person of a gentleman of literary pursuits,
whose labours, like those of Mr Babbage, may be lost to the world, if the
law will not hunt down the organs, and cry “Tally high-ho” to the
“grinders.”
It might be grave matter of inquiry whether the passing annoyance of
‘Cherry ripe’ was not a smaller infliction than some of the tiresome
lucubrations it has helped to muddle; and I half fancy I’d as soon listen
to the thunder as drink the small beer it has soured into vinegar.
However, as the British Public is resolved on making it a grievance, and
as some distinguished statesman has deemed it worth his while to devise a
bill for its suppression, it is in vain to deny that the evil is one of
magnitude. England has declared she will not be ground down by the
Savoyard, and there is no more to be said of it.
A great authority in matters of evasion once protested that he would
engage to drive a coach-and-six through any Act of Parliament that ever
was framed, and I believe him. So certain is language to be too wide or
too narrow—to embrace too much, and consequently fail in
distinctness, or to include too little, and so defeat the attempt to
particularise—that it does not call for more than an ordinary amount
of acuteness to detect the flaws of such legislation. Then, when it comes
to a discussion, and amendments are moved, and some honourable gentleman
suggests that after the word “Whereas” in section 93 the clause should run
“in no case, save in those to be hereafter specified,” &c., there
comes a degree of confusion and obscurity that invariably renders the
original parent of the measure unable to know his offspring, and probably
intently determined to destroy it. That in their eagerness for law-making
the context of these bills is occasionally overlooked, one may learn from
the case of an Irish measure where a fine was awarded as the punishment of
a particular misdemeanour, and the Act declared that one-half of the sum
should go to the county, one-half to the informer. Parliament, however,
altered the law, but overlooked the context. Imprisonment with hard labour
was decreed as the penalty of the offence, and the clause remained—“one-half
to the county, one-half to the informer.”
A Judge of no mean acuteness, the Chief Baron O’Grady, once declared, with
respect to an Act against sheep-stealing, that after two careful readings
he could not decide whether the penalties applied to the owner, of the
sheep, the thief, or the sheep itself, for that each interpretation might
be argumentatively sustained.
How will you suppress the organ-grinder after this? What are the limits of
a man’s domicile? How much of the coast does he own beyond his
area-railings? Is No. 48 to be deprived of the ‘Hat-catcher’s Daughter’
because 47 is dyspeptic? Are the maids in 32 not to be cheered by ‘Sich a
gettin’ up stairs’ because there is a nervous invalid in 33? How long may
an organ-man linger in front of a residence to tune or adjust his barrels—the
dreariest of all discords? Can legislation determine how long or how loud
the grand chorus in ‘Nabucco’ should be performed? What endless litigation
will be instituted by any attempt to provide for all these and a score
more of similar casualties, not to speak of the insolent persecution that
may be practised by the performance of tunes of a party character. Fancy
Dr Wiseman composing a pastoral to the air of ‘Croppies, lie down,’ or the
Danish Minister writing a despatch to the inspiriting strains of
‘Schleswig-Holstein meer-umschlungen.’ There might come a time, too, when
‘Sie sollen ihm nicht haben’ might grate on a French ambassador’s ears.
Can your Act take cognisance of all these?
I see nothing but inextricable confusion in the attempt—confusion,
difficulty, and defeat. There will be an Act, and an Act to amend that
Act, and another Act to alter so much of such an Act, and then a final Act
to repeal them all; so that at last the mover of a bill on the subject
will be the greatest “organ nuisance” that the world has yet heard of.
It was “much reflecting” over these things, as my Lord Brougham says, that
I sauntered along the Riviera from Genoa, and came to the little town of
Chiavari, with its long sweep of yellow beach in front and its glorious
grove of orange-trees behind—sure, whether the breeze came from land
or sea, to inhale health and perfume. There is a wide old Piazza in the
centre of the town, with a strange, dreary sort of inn with a low-arched
entrance, under whose shade sit certain dignitaries of the place of an
evening, sipping their coffee and talking over what they imagine to be the
last news of the day. From these “Conscript Fathers” I learned that
Chiavari is the native place of the barrel-organ, that from this little
town go forth to all the dwellers in remotest lands the grinders of the
many-cylindered torment, the persecutor of the prose-writer, the curse of
him who calculates. Just as the valleys of Savoy supply white-mice men,
and Lucca produces image-carriers, so does Chiavari yield its special
product, the organ-grinder. Other towns, in their ambitions, have
attempted the “industry,” but they have egregiously failed; and Chiavari
remains as distinctive in its product as Spitalfields for its shawls, or
Dresden for its china. Whether there may be some peculiarity in the biceps
of the Chiavarian, or some ulnar development which imparts power to his
performance, I know not. I am forced to own that I have failed to discover
to what circumstance or from what quality this excellence is derivable;
but there is the fact, warranted and confirmed by a statistical return,
that but for Chiavari we should have no barrel-organs.
“Never imagine,” said a wise prelate, “that you will root Popery out of
England till you destroy Oxford. If you want to get rid of the crows, you
must pull down the rookery.” The words of wisdom flashed suddenly over my
mind as I walked across the silent Piazza at midnight; and I exclaimed—“Yes!
here is the true remedy for the evil. With two hours of a gunboat and four
small Armstrongs the thing is done; batter down Chiavari, and Bab-bage
will bless you with his last breath. Pull down the cookery, and crush the
young rooks in the ruins. Smash the cradle and the babe within it, and you
need not fear the man!”
There is a grand justice in the conception that is highly elevating. There
is something eminently fine in making Chiavari, like the Cities of the
Plain, a monument over its own iniquity. Leave not one stone upon another
of it, and there will be peace in our homes and stillness in our streets.
No more shall the black-bearded tormentor terrorise over Baker Street, or
lord it in the Edgeware Road.
Commander Snort of the Sneezer will in a brief forenoon emancipate not
only Europe and America, but the dweller beyond Jordan and the inhabitant
of the diggings by Bendigo. Lay Chiavari in ashes, and you will no longer
need Inspector D, nor ask aid from the head-office. Here is what the age
especially worships, a remedy combining cheapness with efficiency. It may
be said that we have no more right to destroy Chiavari than Kagosima, but
that question is at least debatable. Are not the headaches of tens of
thousands of more avail than the head of one? What becomes of that noble
principle, the greatest happiness of the greatest number? The Italians,
too, might object: true, but they are neither Americans nor French. They
come into the category of states that may be bullied. The countries which
have an extended seaboard and weak naval armaments are like people with a
large glass frontage and no shutters. There is nothing to prevent us
shying a stone at the Italian window as we pass up to Constantinople, even
though we run away afterwards. I repeat, therefore, the plan is feasible.
As to its cheapness, it would not cost a tithe of what we spent in
destroying the tea-tray fortifications of Satsuma; and as we have a
classic turn for monuments, a pyramid of barrel-organs in Charing Cross
might record to a late posterity the capture of Chiavari.
I am not without a certain sort of self-reproach in all this. I feel it is
a weakness perhaps, but I feel that we are all of us too hard on these
organ fellows—for, after all, are they not, in a certain sense, the
type and embodiment of our age? Is not repetition, reiteration, our
boldest characteristic? Is there, I ask, such a “Grind” in the world as
Locke King, and his motion for Reform? What do you say to “Rest and be
thankful,” and, above all, what to the “Peace-at-any-price people”?
Is ‘Cherry ripe’ more wearisome than these? Would all Chiavari assembled
on Wimbledon make up a drearier discord than a ministerial explanation? In
all your experience of bad music, do you know anything to equal a Foreign
Office despatch? and we are without a remedy against these. Bring up John
Bright to-morrow for incessantly annoying the neighbourhood of Birmingham,
by insane accusations against his own country and laudations of America,
and I doubt if you could find a magistrate on the bench to commit him; and
will you tell me that the droning whine of ‘Garibaldi’s March’ is worse
than this? As to the Civis Romanus cant, it is too painful to dwell
on, now that we are derided, ridiculed, and sneered at from Stockholm to
Stamboul. Like Canning’s philanthropist, we have been asking every one for
his story; never was there a soul so full of sympathy for sorrow. We have
heard the tale of Italy, the sufferings of the Confederates, the crying
wrongs of Poland, and the still more cruel, because less provoked, trials
of Denmark. We have thrown up hands and eyes—sighed, groaned, wept;
we have even denounced the ill-doers, and said, What a terrible
retribution awaited them! but, like our great prototype, when asked for
assistance, we have said,
“I’ll see you ——— first.”
Let us be merciful, therefore, and think twice before we batter down
Chiavari. The organ nuisance is a bore, no doubt; but what are the most
droning ditties that ever addled a weary head, compared to the tiresome
grind of British moral assistance, and the greatness of that Civis
Romanus who hugs his own importance and helps nobody?
R. N. F. THE GREAT CHEVALIER D’INDUSTRIE OF OUR DAY.
I was struck the other day by an account of an application made to the
Lord Mayor of London by a country clergyman, to give, as a warning to
others, publicity to a letter he had just received from the East. The
clergyman, it seems, had advertised in the ‘Times’ for pupils, and gave
for address a certain letter of the Greek alphabet. To this address there
came in due time an answer from a gentleman, dated Constantinople, stating
that he was an Anglo-Indian on his way to England, to place his two sons
in an educational establishment; but that having, by an excursion to
Jerusalem, exhausted his immediate resources, he was obliged to defer the
prosecution of his journey till the arrival of some funds he expected from
India—certain to arrive in a month or two. Not wishing, however, to
delay the execution of his project, and being satisfied with the promises
held forth by the advertiser, he purposed placing his sons under his care,
and to do so, desired that forty pounds might be remitted him at once, to
pay his journey to England, for which convenience he, the writer, would
not alone be obliged, but also extend his patronage to the lender, by
recommending him to his friend Sir Hugh Rose, who was himself desirous of
sending his sons to be educated in England. The address of a banker was
given to whom the money should be remitted, and an immediate reply
requested, or “application should be made in some other quarter.”
Now, the clergyman did not answer this strange appeal, but he inserted
another advertisement, changing, however, the symbol by which he was to be
addressed, and appearing in this way to be a different person. To this new
address there came another letter, perfectly identical in style and
matter: the only change was, that the writer was now at the Hôtel de la
Reine d’Angleterre at Buda; but all the former pledges of future
protection were renewed, as well as the request for a prompt reply, or
“application will be made in another quarter.”
The clergyman very properly laid the matter before the Lord Mayor, who,
with equal propriety, stamped the attempt as the device of a swindler,
against which publicity in the newspapers was the best precaution. The
strangest thing of all, however, was, that nobody appeared to know the
offender; nor was there in the ‘Times,’ or in the other newspapers where
the circumstances were detailed, one single surmise as to the identity of
this ingenious individual. It is the more singular, since this man is a
specialty—an actual personification of some of the very subtlest
rogueries of the age we live in!
If any of my readers can recall a very remarkable exposure the ‘Times’
newspaper made some ten or twelve years ago, of a most shameful fraud
practised upon governesses, by which they were induced to deposit a sum
equivalent to their travelling expenses from England to some town on the
Continent, as a guarantee to the employer, they will have discovered the
gentleman with the two sons to be educated—the traveller in Syria,
the friend of Sir Hugh Rose, the Anglo-Indian who expects eight hundred
pounds in two months, but has a present and pressing necessity for forty.
The governess fraud was ingenious. It was done in this way: An
advertisement appeared in the ‘Times,’ setting forth that an English
gentleman, travelling with his family abroad, wanted a governess—the
conditions liberal, the requirements of a high order. The family in
question, who mixed with the very best society on the Continent, required
that the governess should be a lady of accomplished manners, and one in
every respect qualified for that world of fashion to which she would be
introduced as a member of the advertiser’s family. The advertiser,
however, found that all the English ladies who had hitherto filled this
situation in his family had, through the facilities thus presented them of
entrance into life, made very advantageous marriages; and to protect
himself against the loss entailed by the frequent call on him for
travelling expenses—bringing out new candidates for the hands of
princes and grand-dukes—he proposed that the accepted governess
should deposit with him a sum—say fifty pounds—equivalent to
the charge of the journey; and which, if she married, should be
confiscated to the benefit of her employer.
The scheme was very ingenious; it was, in fact, a lottery in which you
only paid for your ticket when you had drawn a prize. Till the lucky
number turned up, you never parted with your money. Was there ever any
such bribe held forth to a generation of unmarried and marriageable women?
There was everything that could captivate the mind: the tour on the
Continent—the family who loved society and shared it so generously—the
father so parental in his kindness, and who evidently gave the governess
the benediction of a parent on the day she may have married the count; and
all secured for what—for fifty pounds? No; but for the deposit, the
mere storing up of fifty pounds in a strong box; for if, after two years,
the lady neither married nor wished to remain, she could claim her money
and go her way.
The success was immense; and as the advertiser wrote replies from
different towns to different individuals, governesses arrived at Brussels,
at Coblentz, at Frankfort, at Mayence, at Munich, at Nice—and heaven
knows where besides—whose deposits were lodged in the hands of N. F.
That ingenious gentleman straightway departed, and was no more seen, and
only heard of when the distress and misery of these unhappy ladies had
found their way to the public press. The ‘Times,’ with all that ability
and energy it knows how to employ, took the matter up, published some of
the statements—very painful and pathetic they were—of the
unfortunate victims of this fraud, and gave more than one “leader” to its
exposure. Nor was the Government wanting in proper activity. Orders were
sent out from the Foreign Office to the different legations and consulates
abroad, to warn the police in the several districts against the
machinations of this artful scoundrel, should he chance to be in their
neighbourhood. Even more distinct instructions were sent out to certain
legations, by which R. N. F. could be arrested on charges that would at
least secure his detention till the law officers had declared what steps
could be taken in his behalf. It was not the age of photography, but a
very accurate description of the man’s appearance and address was
furnished, and his lofty stature, broad chest, burly look, and bushy
whiskers—a shade between red and auburn—were all duly posted
in each Chancellerie of the Continent.
For a while it seemed as if he lived in retirement—his late success
enabled this to be an “elegant retirement”—and it is said that he
passed it on the Lake of Como, in a villa near that of the once Queen
Caroline. There are traditions of a distinguished stranger—a man of
rank and a man of letters—who lived there estranged from all the
world, and deeply engaged in the education of his two sons. One of these
youths, however, not responding to all this parental devotion, involved
himself in some scrape, fled from his father’s roof, and escaped into
Switzerland. N. F., as soon as he could rally from the first shock of the
news, hastened after, to bring him back, borrowing a carriage from a
neighbouring nobleman in his haste. With this he crossed the frontier at
Chiasso, but never to come back again. The coachman, indeed, brought
tidings of the sale of the equipage, which the illustrious stranger had
disposed of, thus quitting a neighbourhood he could only associate with a
sorrowful past, and a considerable number of debts into the bargain.
Another blank occurs here in history, which autobiography alone perhaps
could fill. It would be unfair and un-philosophical to suppose that
because we cannot trace him he was inactive: we might as reasonably imply
that the moon ceased to move when we lost sight of her. At all events,
towards the end of autumn of that last year of the war in the Crimea, a
stout, well-dressed, portly man, with an air of considerable assurance,
swaggered into the Chancellerie of her Majesty’s Legation at Munich,
notwithstanding the representations of the porter, who would, if he had
dared, have denied him admittance, and asked, in a voice of authority, if
there were no letters there for Captain F. The gentleman to whom the
question was addressed was an attaché of the Legation, and at that time in
“charge” of the mission, the Minister being absent. Though young in years,
F. could scarcely, in the length and breadth of Europe, have fallen upon
one with a more thorough insight into every phase and form of those
mysteries by which the F. category of men exist. Mr L. was an actual
amateur in this way, and was no more the man to be angry with F. for being
a swindler, than with Ristori for being Medea or Macready being Macbeth.
Not that he had the slightest suspicion at the time of F.‘s quality, as he
assured him that there were no letters for that name.
“How provoking!” said the Captain, as he bit his lip. “They will be so
impatient in England,” muttered he to himself, “and I know Sidney Herbert
is sure to blame me.” Then he added aloud, “I am at a dead-lock
here. I have come from the Crimea with despatches, and expected to find
money here to carry me on to England; and these stupid people at the War
Office have forgotten all about it. Is it not enough to provoke a saint?”
“I don’t know; I never was a saint,” said the impassive attaché.
“Well, it’s trying to a sinner,” said F., with a slight laugh; for he was
one of those happy-natured dogs who are not indifferent to the absurd side
of even their own mishaps. “How long does the post take to England?”
“Three days.”
“And three back—that makes six; a week—an entire week.”
“Omitting Sunday,” said the grave attaché, who really felt an interest in
the other’s dilemma.
“All I can say is, it was no fault of mine,” cried F., after a moment. “If
I am detained here through their negligence, they must make the best
excuse they can. Have you got a cigar?” This was said with his eyes fixed
on a roll of Cubans on the table.
“Take one,” said the other.
“Thanks,” said F., as he selected three. “I’ll drop in to-morrow, and hope
to have better luck.”
“How much money do you want?” asked Mr L.
“Enough to carry me to London.”
“How much is that?”
“Let me see. Strasbourg—Paris, a day at Paris; Cowley might detain
me two days: fifteen or twenty pounds would do it amply.”
“You shall have it.”
“All right,” said F., who walked to the fire, and, lighting his cigar,
smoked away; while the other took some notes from a table-drawer and
counted them.
“Shall I give you a formal receipt for this?” asked F.
“You can tell them at the Office,” said L., as he dipped his pen into the
ink and continued the work he had been previously engaged in. F. said a
few civil words—the offhand gratitude of a man who was fully as much
in the habit of bestowing as of receiving favours, and withdrew. L.
scarcely noticed his departure; he was deep in his despatch, and wrote on.
At length he came to the happy landing-place, that spot of rest for the
weary foot—“I have the honour to be, my Lord,” and he arose and
stood at the fire.
As L. smoked his cigar he reflected, and as he reflected he remembered;
and, to refresh his memory, he took out some papers from a pigeon-hole,
and at last finding what he sought, sat down to read it. The document was
a despatch, dated a couple of years back, instructing H.M.‘s
representative at the Court of Munich to secure the person of a certain N.
F., and hold him in durance till application should be made to the
Bavarian Government for his extradition and conveyance to England. Then
followed a very accurate description of the individual—his height,
age, general looks, voice, and manner—every detail of which L. now
saw closely tallied with the appearance of his late visitor.
He pondered for a while over the paper, and then looked at his watch. It
was five o’clock! The first train to Augsburg was to start at six. There
was little time, consequently, to take the steps necessary to arrest a
person on suspicion; for he should first of all have to communicate with
the Minister for Foreign Affairs, who should afterwards back his
application to the Prefect of Police. The case was one for detail, and for
what the Germans insist upon, much writing—and there was very little
time to do it in. L., however, was not one to be easily defeated.
If baffled in one road, he usually found out another. He therefore wrote a
brief note to the Minister, stating that he might require his assistance
at a later hour of the evening, and at a time not usually official. This
done, he despatched another note to Captain E. F., saying familiarly it
was scarcely worth while trying to catch the mail-train that night, and
that perhaps instead he would come over and take a tétè-à-tête
dinner with him at the Legation.
F. was overjoyed as he read it! No man ever felt a higher pleasure in good
company, nor knew better how to make it profitable. If he had been asked
to choose, he would infinitely rather have had the invitation to dine than
the twenty pounds he had pocketed in the morning. The cognate men of the
world—and all members of the diplomatic career are to a certain
extent in this category—were in F.‘s estimation the “trump cards” of
the pack, with which he could “score tricks” innumerable, and so he
accepted at once; and, in a very few minutes after his acceptance, made
his appearance in a correct dinner-dress and a most unexceptionable white
tie.
“Couldn’t refuse that pleasant offer of yours, L.” (he was familiar at
once, and called him L.), “and here I am!” said he, as he threw himself
into an easy-chair with all the bland satisfaction of one who looked
forward to a good dinner and a very enjoyable evening.
“I am happy to have secured you,” said L., with a little laugh to himself
at the epigram of his phrase. “Do you like caviar?”
“Delight in it!”
“I have just got some fresh from St Petersburg, and our cook here is
rather successful in his caviar soup. We have a red trout from the Tegen
See, a saddle of Tyrol mutton, and a pheasant—voilà votre
diner! but I can promise you a more liberal carte in
drinkables; just say what you like in the way of wine!”
F.‘s face beamed over with ecstasy. It was one of the grand moments of his
life; and if he could, hungry as he was, he would have prolonged it! To be
there the guest of her Majesty’s mission; to know, to feel, that the arms
of England were over the door! that he was to be waited on by flunkies in
the livery of the Legation, fed by the cook who had ministered to official
palates, his glass filled with wine from the cellar of him who represented
royalty! These were very glorious imaginings; and little wonder that F.,
whose whole life was a Poem in its way, should feel that they almost
overcame him. In fact, like the woman in the nursery song, he was ready to
exclaim, “This is none of me!” but still there were abundant evidences
around him that all was actual, positive, and real.
“By the way,” said L., in a light, careless way, “did you ever in your
wanderings chance upon a namesake of yours, only that he interpolates
another Christian name, and calls himself R. Napoleon F.?”
The stranger started: the fresh, ruddy glow of his cheek gave way to a
sickly yellow, and, rising from his chair, he said, “Do you mean to
‘split’ on me, sir?”
“I’m afraid, F.,” said the other, jauntily, “the thing looks ugly. You are
R. N. F.!”
“And are you, sir, such a scoundrel—such an assassin—as to ask
a man to your table in order to betray him?”
“These are strong epithets, F., and I’ll not discuss them; but if you ask,
Are you going to dine here today? I’d say, No. And if you should ask,
Where are, you likely to pass the evening? I’d hint, In the city jail.”
At this F. lost all command over himself, and broke out into a torrent of
the wildest abuse. He was strong of epithets, and did not spare them. He
stormed, he swore, he threatened, he vociferated; but L., imperturbable
throughout all, only interposed with an occasional mild remonstrance—a
subdued hint—that his language was less than polite or
parliamentary. At length the door opened, two gendarmes appeared, and N.
F. was consigned to their hands and removed.
The accusations against him were manifold; from before and since the day
of the governesses, he had been living a life of dishonesty and fraud.
German law proceedings are not characterised by any rash impetuosity; the
initial steps in F.‘s case took about eighteen months, during which he
remained a prisoner. At the end of this time the judges discovered some
informality in his committal; and as L. was absent from Munich, and no one
at the Legation much interested in the case, the man was liberated on
signing a declaration—to which Bavarian authorities, it would seem,
attach value—that he was “a rogue and a vagabond;” confessions which
the Captain possibly deemed as absurd an act of “surplusage” as though he
were to give a written declaration that he was a vertebrated animal and a
biped.
He went forth once more, and, difficult as it appears to the intelligence
of honest and commonplace folk, he went forth to prosper and live
luxuriously—so gullible is the world, so ready and eager to be
cheated and deceived. Sir Edward Lytton has somewhere declared that a
single number of the ‘Times’ newspaper, taken at random, would be the very
best and most complete picture of our daily life—the fullest
exponent of our notions, wants, wishes, and aspirations. Not a hope, nor
fear, nor prejudice—not a particle of our blind trustfulness, or of
our as blind unbelief, that would not find its reflex in the broadsheet.
R. N. F. had arrived at the same conclusion, only in a more limited sense.
The advertisement columns were all to him. What cared he for foreign wars,
or the state of the Funds? as little did he find interest in railway
intelligence, or “our own correspondent.” What he wanted was, the people
who inquired after a missing relative—a long-lost son or brother,
who was supposed to have died in the Mauritius or Mexico: an affectionate
mother who desired tidings as to the burial-place of a certain James or
John, who had been travelling in a particular year in the south of Spain:
an inquirer for the will of Paul somebody: or any one who could supply
evidence as to the marriage of Sarah Meekins alias Crouther,
supposed to have been celebrated before her Majesty’s Vice-Consul at
Kooroobakaboo—these were the paragraphs that touched him.
Never was there such a union of intelligence and sympathy as in him! He
knew everybody, and seemed not alone to have been known to, but actually
beloved by, every one. It was in his arms poor Joe died at Aden. He
gave away Maria at Tunis. He followed Tom to his grave at Corfu; and he
was the mysterious stranger who, on board the P. and O. boat, offered his
purse to Edward, and was almost offended at being denied. The way in which
this man tracked the stories of families through the few lines of a
newspaper advertisement was positively marvellous. Whatever was wanting in
the way of evidence of this, or clue to that, came at once into his
attributions.
A couple of years ago, an English lady, the wife of a clergyman, passed a
winter at Rome with her daughter, and in the mixed society of that capital
made acquaintance with a Polish Count of most charming manners and
fascinating address. The acquaintance ripened into intimacy, and ended in
an attachment which led to the marriage of the young lady with the
distinguished exile.
On arriving in England, however, it was discovered that the accomplished
Count was a common soldier, and a deserter from the Prussian army; and
means were accordingly had recourse to in order to obtain a divorce, and
the breach of a marriage accomplished under a fraudulent representation.
While the proceedings were but in the initiative, there came a letter from
Oneglia, near Nice, to the afflicted mother of the young lady, recalling
to her mind the elderly gentleman with the blue spectacles who usually sat
next her at the English Church at Rome. He was the writer of the present
letter, who, in turning over the columns of the ‘Times’ read the
melancholy story of her daughter’s betrayal and misery. By one of those
fortunate accidents more frequent in novels than in life, he had the means
of befriending her, and very probably of rescuing her from her present
calamity. He, the writer, had actually been present at the wedding, and as
a witness had signed the marriage-certificate of that same soi-disant
Count Stanislaus Sobieski Something-or-other, at Lemberg, in the year ‘49,
and knew that the unhappy but deserted wife was yet living. A certain
momentary pressure of money prevented his at once coming to England to
testify to this fact; but if a small sum, sufficient to pay a little
balance he owed his innkeeper and wherewithal to make his journey to
England, were forwarded to the address of Frederick Brooks, Esq., or
lodged to his account at the Bank of French & Co., Florence, he would
at once hasten to London and depose formally to every fact he had stated.
By the merest accident I myself saw this letter, which the lady had, for
more accurate information about the writer, sent to the banker at
Florence, and in an instant I detected the fine Roman hand of R. N. F. It
is needless to say that this shot went wide of the mark.
But that this fellow has lived for upwards of twenty years, travelling the
Continent in every direction, eating and drinking at the best hotels,
frequenting theatres, cafés, and public gardens, denying himself nothing,
is surely a shame and a disgrace to the police of Europe, which has been
usually satisfied to pass him over a frontier, and suffer him to continue
his depredations on the citizens of another state. Of the obloquy he has
brought upon his own country I do not speak. We must, I take it, have our
scoundrels like other people; the only great grievance here is, that the
fellow’s ubiquity is such that it is hard to believe that the swindler who
walked off with the five watches from Hamburg is the same who, in less
than eight days afterwards, borrowed fifty ducats from a waiter at Naples,
and “bolted.”
Of late I have observed he has dropped his second prénom of
Napoleon, and does not call himself by it. There is perhaps in this
omission a delicate forbearance, a sense of refined deference to the other
bearer of that name, whom he recognises as his master.
In the ingenuity of his manifold devices even religion has not escaped
him, and it would be impossible to count how often he has left the
“Establishment” for Rome, been converted, reconverted, reconciled, and
brought home again—always, be it noted, at the special charge of so
much money from the Church Fund, or a subscription from the faithful, ever
zealous and eager to assist a really devout and truly sincere convert!
That this man is an aspiring and ambitious vagabond may be seen in the
occasional raids he makes into the very best society, without having, at
least to ordinary eyes, anything to obtain in these ventures, beyond the
triumph of seeing himself where exposure and detection would be certain to
be followed by the most condign punishment. At Rome, for instance—how,
I cannot say—he obtained admission to the Duc de Grammont’s
receptions; and at Florence, under the pretext of being a proprietor, and
“a most influential” one, of the ‘Times,’ he breakfasted, by special
invitation, with Baron Ricasoli, and had a long and most interesting
conversation with him as to the conditions—of course political—on
which he would consent to support Italian unity. These must have been done
in pure levity; they were imaginative excursions, thrown off in the spirit
of those fanciful variations great violinists will now and then indulge
in, as though to say, “Is there a path too intricate for me to thread, is
there a pinnacle too fine for me to balance on?”
A great deal of this fellow’s long impunity results from the shame men
feel in confessing to have been “done” by him. Nobody likes the avowal,
acknowledging, as it does, a certain defect in discrimination, and a
natural reluctance to own to having been the dupe of one of the most
barefaced and vulgar rogues in Europe.
There is one circumstance in this case which might open a very curious
psychological question; it is this: F.‘s victims have not in general been
the frank, open, free-giving, or trustful class of men; on the contrary,
they have usually been close-fisted, cold, cautious people, who weigh
carefully what they do, and are rarely the dupes of their own
impulsiveness. F. is an Irishman, and yet his successes have been far more
with English—ay, even with Scotchmen—than with his own
countrymen.
In part this may be accounted for by the fact that F. did not usually
present himself as one in utter want and completely destitute; his appeal
for money was generally made on the ground of some speculation that was to
repay the lender; it was because he knew “something to your advantage”
that he asked for that £10. He addressed himself, in consequence, to the
more mercantile spirit of a richer community—to those, in fact, who,
more conversant with trade, better understood the meaning of an
investment.
But there was another, and, as I take it, a stronger and less fallible
ground for success. This fellow has, what all Irishmen are more or less
gifted with, an immense amount of vitality, a quality which undeniably
makes a man companionable, however little there may be to our taste in his
manner, his education, or his bearing. This same vitality imparts itself
marvellously to the colder temperaments of others, and gives out its own
warmth to natures that never of themselves felt the glow of an impulse, or
the glorious furnace-heat of a rash action.
This was the magnetism he worked with. “Canny” Scotchmen and shrewd
Yankees—ay, even Swiss innkeepers—felt the touch of his
quality. There was, or there seemed to be, a geniality in the fellow that,
in its apparent contempt for all worldliness, threw men off their guard,
and it would have smacked of meanness to distrust a fellow so open and
unguarded.
Now Paddy has seen a good deal of this at home, and could no more be
humbugged by it than he could believe a potato to be a truffle.
F. was too perfect an artist ever to perform in an Irish part to an Irish
audience, and so he owes little or nothing to the land of his birth.
Apart from his unquestionable success, which of course settles the
question, I would not have called him a great performer—indeed, my
astonishment has always been how he succeeded, or with whom.
“Don’t tell me of Beresford’s blunders,” said the Great Duke after
Albuera. “Did he beat Soult? if so, he was a good officer.”
This man’s triumphs are some twenty odd years of expensive living, with
occasional excursions into good society. He wears broadcloth, and dines on
venison, when his legitimate costume had been the striped uniform of the
galleys, and his diet the black bread of a convict.
The injury these men do in life is not confined to the misery their
heartless frauds inflict, for the very humblest and poorest are often
their victims: they do worse, in the way they sow distrust and suspicion
of really deserving objects, in the pretext they afford the miserly man to
draw closer his purse-strings, and “not be imposed on;” and, worst of all,
in the ill repute they spread of a nation which, not attractive by the
graces of manner or the charms of a winning address, yet cherished the
thought that in truthfulness and fair dealing there was not one could
gainsay it.
As I write, I have just heard tidings of R. N. F. One of our most
distinguished travellers and discoverers, lately returning from Venice to
the South, passed the night at Padua, and met there what he described as
an Indian officer—Major Newton—who was travelling, he said,
with a nephew of Lord Palmer-ston’s.
The Major was a man fall of anecdote, and abounded in knowledge of people
and places; he had apparently been everywhere with everybody, and, with a
communicativeness not always met with in old soldiers, gave to the
stranger a rapid sketch of his own most adventurous life. As the evening
wore on, he told too how he was waiting there for a friend, a certain N.
F., who was no other than himself, the nephew of Lord Palmerston being
represented by his son, an apt youth, who has already given bright promise
of what his later years may develop.
N. F. retired to bed at last, so much overcome by brandy-and-water that my
informant escaped being asked for a loan, which I plainly see he would not
have had the fortitude to have refused; and the following morning he
started so early that N. F., wide awake as he usually is, was not vigilant
enough to have anticipated.
I hope these brief details, pour servir à l’histoire de Monsieur R. N.
F., may save some kind-hearted traveller from the designs of a
thorough blackguard, and render his future machinations through the press
more difficult to effect and more certain of exposure.
I had scarcely finished this brief, imperfect sketch, when I read in
‘Galignani’ the following:—
“Swindling on the Continent.—A letter from Venice of March 29 gives
us the following piece of information which may still be of service to
some of our readers, though, from the fact with which it concludes, it
would seem that the proceedings, of the party have been brought to a
standstill, at least for some time. This is not, however, it may be
recollected, the first occasion we have had to bring the conduct of the
individual referred to under the notice of our readers for similar
practices:—
“‘I am informed that one Mr Newton, alias Neville, alias
Fane, and with a dozen other aliases, has been arrested at Padua
for swindling. This ubiquitous gentleman has been travelling for some
years at the expense of hotel-keepers, and other geese easily fleeced, on
the Continent In the year 1862, Mr Neville and his two sons made their
suspicious appearance at Venice, and they now, minus the younger son, have
visited Padua as Mr Robert N. Newton and son, taking up their residence at
the Stella d’Oro. They arrived without luggage and without money, both of
which had been lost in the Danube; but they expected remittances from
India! The obliging landlord lent money, purchased clothes, fed them
gloriously, and contrived, between the 8th Feb. and 25th of March, to
become the creditor of Newton and son for 1000 swanzig. The expenses
continued, but the remittances never came. The patient landlord began to
lose that virtue, and denounced these aliases as swindlers. The
police of Vienna, hearing of the event, sent information that these two
accommodating gentlemen had practised the victimising art for two months
in December last at the Hotel Regina Inghilterre, at Pesth, run up a
current account of 700 florins, and decamped; and a hotel-keeper
recognised the scamps as having re-resided at the Luna, in Venice, in
1862, and “plucked some profit from that pale-faced moon.” Mr Newton’s
handwriting proved him to be in 1863 one Major Fane, who had generously
proposed to bring all his family, consisting of ten persons, to pass the
winter at the Barbesi Hotel at Venice, if the proprietor would forward him
700 fr., as, owing to his wife’s prolonged residence at Rome and Naples,
he was short of money, which, however, he expected, would cease on the
arrival of supplies from Calcutta. These gentlemen are now in durance
vile, and there is no doubt but that this letter will lead to their
recognition by many other victims.’”
Let no sanguine enthusiast for the laws of property imagine, however, that
this great man’s career is now ended, and that R. N. F. will no more go
forth as of old to plunder and to rob. Imprisonment for debt is a grievous
violation of personal liberty certainly, but it is finite; and some fine
morning, when the lark is carolling high in heaven, and the bright
rivulets are laughing in the gay sunlight, R. N. F. will issue from his
dungeon to taste again the sweets of liberty, and to partake once more of
the fleshpots of some confiding landlord. F. is a man of great resources,
doubtless. When he repeats a part, he feels the same sort of repugnance
that Fechter would to giving a fiftieth representation of Hamlet, but he
would bow to the necessity which a clamorous public imposes, however his
own taste might rebel against the dreariness of the task. Still, I feel
assured that he will next appear in a new part. We shall hear of him—that
is certain. He will be in search of a lost will, by which he would inherit
millions, or a Salvator Rosa that he has been engaged to buy for the
Queen, or perhaps he will be a missionary to assist in that religious
movement now observable in Italy. How dare I presume, in my narrow
inventiveness, to suggest to such a master of the art as he is? I only
know that, whether he comes before the world as the friend of Sir Hugh
Rose, a proprietor of the ‘Times,’ the agent of Lord Palmerston, or a
recent convert from Popery, he will sustain his part admirably; and that
same world that he has duped, robbed, and swindled for more than a quarter
of a century will still feed and clothe him—still believe in the
luggage that never comes, and the remittance that will never turn up.
After all, the man must be a greater artist than I was willing to believe
him to be. He must be a deep student of the human heart—not,
perhaps, in its highest moods; and he must well understand how to touch
certain chords which give their response in unlimited confidence and long
credit.
No doubt there must be some wondrous fascination in these changeful
fortunes—these ups and downs of life—otherwise no man could
have gone, as he has, for nigh thirty years, hunted, badgered, insulted,
and imprisoned in almost every capital of Europe, and yet no sooner
liberated than, like a giant refreshed, he again returns to his old toil,
never weary wherever the bread of idleness can be eaten, and where a lie
will pay for his liquor.
Talk of novel-writers—this is the great master of fiction—the
man who brings the product of imagination to the real test of credibility—the
actual interest of his public. Let him fail in his description, his
narrative, the progress of his events, or their probability, and he is
ruined at once. He must not alone arrange the circumstances of his story,
but he must perform the hero, and that, too, as we saw lately at Padua,
without any adventitious aid of dress or costume. I can fancy what a sorry
figure some of our popular tale-writers would present if they had to
appeal to an innkeeper with this poor story of their luggage lost in the
Danube. What a contempt the rascal must have had for Italian notions of
geography, too, when he adopted a river so remote from where he stood! And
yet I’d swear he was as cool, as collected, and as self-sustained at that
moment, as ever was Mr Gladstone in the House as he rose to move a motion
of supply.
Well, he is in Padua now, doubtless dreaming of fresh conquests, and not
impossibly speculating on a world whose gullibility is indeed infinite,
and which actually seems to take the same pleasure in being cheated in
Fact as it does in being deceived in Fiction. Who knows if the time is not
coming when, instead of sending a box of new novels to the country, some
Mr Mudie will despatch one of these R. N. F. folk by a fast train, with a
line to say, “A great success: his Belgian rogueries most amusing; the
exploit at Madrid equal to anything in ‘Gil Bias’.”
GÀRIBÀLDI
We had a very witty Judge in Ireland, who was not very scrupulous about
giving hard knocks to his brothers on the bench, and who, in delivering a
judgment in a cause, found that he was to give the casting-vote between
his two colleagues, who were diametrically opposed to each other, and who
had taken great pains to lay down the reasons for their several opinions
at considerable length. “It now comes to my turn,” said he, “to declare my
view of this case, and fortunately I can afford to be brief. I agree with
my brother B. from the irresistible force of the admirable argument of my
brother M.”
The story occurred to me as I thought over Garibaldi and the enthusiastic
reception you gave him in England; for I really felt, if it had not been
for Carlyle, I might have been a bit of a hero-worshipper myself The grand
frescoes in caricature of the popular historian have, however, given me a
hearty and wholesome disgust to the whole thing; not to say that, however
enthusiastic a man may feel about his idol, he must be sorely ashamed of
his fellow-worshippers. “Lie down with dogs, and you’ll get up with
fleas,” says an old Irish adage; but what, in the name of all entomology,
is a man to get up with who lies down with these votaries of Garibaldi? So
fine a fellow, and so mangy a following, it would be hard to find. The
opportunity for all the blatant balderdash of shopkeeping eloquence, of
that high “Falootin” style so popular over the Atlantic, of those
grand-sounding periods about freedom and love of country, was not to be
lost by a set of people who, in all their enthusiasm for Garibaldi, are
intently bent on making themselves foreground figures in the tableau that
should have been filled by himself alone.
“Sir Francis Burdett call you his friend!—as well call a Bug
his bedfellow!” said the sturdy old yeoman, whose racy English I should
like to borrow, to characterise the stupid incongruity between Garibaldi
and his worshippers. It is not easy to conceive anything finer, simpler,
more thoroughly unaffected, or more truly dignified, than the man himself.
His noble head; his clear, honest, brown eye; his finely-traced mouth,
beautiful as a woman’s, and only strung up to sternness when anything
ignoble or mean had outraged him; and, last of all, his voice contains a
fascination perfectly irresistible, allied, as you knew and felt these
graces were, with a thoroughly pure, untarnished nature. The true measure
of the man lies in the fact that, though his life has been a series of the
boldest and most daring achievements, his courage is about the very last
quality uppermost in your mind when you meet him. It is of the winning
softness of his look and manner, his kind thoughtfulness for others, his
sincere pity for all suffering, his gentleness, his modesty, his manly
sense of brotherhood with the very humblest of the men who have loved him,
that you think: these are the traits that throw all his heroism into
shadow; and all the glory of the conqueror pales before the simple virtues
of the man.
He never looked to more advantage than in that humble life of Caprera,
where people came and went—some, old and valued friends, whose
presence warmed up their host’s heart; others, mere passing acquaintances,
or, as it might be, not even that; worshippers or curiosity-seekers—living
where and how they could in that many-roomed small house; diving into the
kitchen to boil their coffee; sallying out to the garden to pluck their
radishes; down to the brook for a cress, or to the seaside to catch a
fish,—all more or less busy in the midst of a strange idleness; for
there was not—beyond providing for the mere wants of the day—anything
to be done. The soil would not yield anything. There was no cultivation
outside that little garden, where the grand old soldier delved, or rested
on his spade-handle as he turned his gaze over the sea, doubtless thinking
of the dear land beyond it.
At dinner—and what a strange meal it was—all met, full of the
little incidents of an uneventful day. The veriest trifles they were, but
of interest to those who listened, and to none more than Garibaldi
himself, who liked to hear who had been over to Maddalena, and what sport
they had; or whether Albanesi had taken any mullet, and who it was said he
could mend the boat? and who was to paint her? Not a word was spoken of
the political events of the world, and every mention of them was as
rigidly excluded as though a government spy had been seated at the table.
He rarely spoke himself, but was a good listener—not merely hearing
with attention, but showing, by an occasional suggestion or a hint, how
his mind speculated on the subject before him. If, however, led to speak
of himself or his exploits, the unaffected ease and simplicity of the man
became at once evident. Never, by any chance, would an expression escape
him that redounded to his own share in any achievement; without any
studied avoidance the matter would somehow escape, or, if accidentally
touched on, be done so very lightly as to make it appear of no moment
whatever.
To have done one-tenth of what Garibaldi has done, a man must necessarily
have thrown aside scruples which he would never have probably transgressed
in his ordinary life. He must have been often arbitrary, and sometimes
almost cruel; and yet, ask his followers, and they will tell you that
punishment scarcely existed in the force under his immediate command—that
the most hardened offender would have quailed more under a few stern words
of reproof from “the General” than from a sentence that sent him to a
prison.
That, to effect his purpose, he would lay hands on what he needed, not
recklessly or indifferently, but thoughtfully and doubtless regretfully,
we all know. I can remember an instance of this kind, related to me by a
British naval officer, who himself was an actor in the scene. “It was off
La Plata,” said my informant, “when Garibaldi was at war with Rosas, that
the frigate I commanded was on that station, as well as a small gun-brig
of the Sardinian navy, whose captain never harassed his men by exercises
of gunnery, and, indeed, whose ship was as free from any ‘beat to
quarters,’ or any sudden summons to prepare for boarders, as though she
had been a floating chapel.
“Garibaldi came alongside me one day to say that he had learned the
Sardinian had several tons of powder on board, with an ample supply of
grape, shell, and canister, not to speak of twelve hundred stand of
admirable arms. ‘I want them all,’ said he; ‘my people are fighting with
staves and knives, and we are totally out of ammunition. I want them, and
he won’t let me have them.’
“‘He could scarcely do so,’ said I, ‘seeing that they belong to his
Government, and are not in his hands to bestow.’
“‘For that reason I must go and take them,’ said Garibaldi. ‘I mean to
board him this very night, and you’ll see if we do not replenish our
powder-flasks.’
“‘In that case,’ said I, ‘I shall have to fire on you. It will be Piracy;
nothing else.’
“‘You’ll not do so;’ said he, smiling.
“‘Yes, I promise you that I will. We are at peace and on good terms with
Sardinia, and I cannot behave other than as a friend to her ships of war.’
“‘There’s no help for it, then,’ said Garibaldi, ‘if you see the thing in
that light:’ and good-humouredly quitted the subject, and soon after took
his leave.”
“And were you,” asked I of my informant, Captain S.——“were you
perfectly easy after that conversation? I mean, were you fully satisfied
that he would not attempt the matter in some other way?”
“Never more at ease in my life. I knew my man; and that, having left me
under the conviction he had abandoned the exploit, nothing on earth would
have tempted him to renew it in any shape.”
It might be a matter of great doubt whether any greater intellectual
ability would not have rather detracted from than increased Garibaldi’s
power as a popular leader. I myself feel assured that the simplicity, the
trustfulness, the implicit reliance on the goodness of a cause as a reason
for its success, are qualities which no mere mental superiority could
replace in popular estimation. It is actually Love that is the sentiment
the Italians have for him; and I have seen them, hard-featured, ay, and
hard-natured men, moved to tears as the litter on which Garibaldi lay
wounded was carried down to the place of embarkation.
Garibaldi has always been a thoughtful, silent, reflective man, not
communicative to others, or in any way expansive; and from these qualities
have come alike his successes and his failures. Of the conversations
reported of him by writers I do not believe a syllable. He speaks very
little; and, luckily for him, that little only with those on whose
integrity he can rely not to repeat him.
Cavour, who knew men thoroughly, and studied them just as closely as he
studied events, understood at once that Garibaldi was the man he wanted.
He needed one who should move the national heart—who, sprung from
the people himself, and imbued with all the instincts of his class, should
yet not dissever the cause of liberty from the cause of monarchy. To
attach Garibaldi to the throne was no hard task. The King, who led the van
of his army, was an idol made for such worship as Garibaldi’s. The monarch
who could carry a knapsack and a heavy rifle over the cliffs of Monte Rosa
from sunrise to sunset, and take his meal of hard bread before he “turned
in” at night in a shepherd’s shieling, was a King after the bold
buccaneer’s own heart.
To what end inveigh against the luxuries of a court, its wasteful
splendours, or its costly extravagance, with such an example? This
strong-sinewed, big-boned, unpoetical King has been the hardest nut ever
republicanism had to crack!
It might be possible to overrate the services Garibaldi has rendered to
Italy—it would be totally impossible to exaggerate those he has
rendered the Monarchy; and out of Garibaldi’s devotion to Victor Emmanuel
has sprung that hearty, honest, manly appreciation of the King which the
Italians unquestionably display. A merely political head of the State,
though he were gifted with the highest order of capacity, would have
disappeared altogether from view in the sun-splendour of Garibaldi’s
exploits; not so the King Victor Emmanuel, who only shone the brighter in
the reflected blaze of the hero who was so proud to serve him.
Yet for all that friendship, and all the acts that grew out of it, natural
and spontaneous as they are, one great mind was needed to guide, direct,
encourage, or restrain. It was Cavour who, behind the scenes, pulled all
the wires; and these heroes—heroes they were too—were but his
puppets.
Cavour died, and then came Aspromonte.
If any other man than Garibaldi had taken the present moment to make a
visit—an almost ostentatious visit—to Mazzini, it might be a
grave question how far all the warm enthusiasm of this popular reception
could be justified. Garibaldi is, however, the one man in Europe from whom
no one expects anything but impulsive action. It is in the very
unreflectiveness of his generosity that he is great. There has not been, I
am assured, for many years back, any very close or intimate friendship
between these two men; but it was quite enough that Mazzini was in trouble
and difficulty, to rally to his side that brave-hearted comrade who never
deserted his wounded. Nor is there in all Garibaldi’s character anything
finer or more exalted than the steadfast adherence he has ever shown to
his early friendships. No flatteries of the great—no blandishments
of courts and courtiers—none of those seductive influences which are
so apt to weave themselves into a man’s nature when surrounded by
continual homage and admiration—not any of these have corrupted that
pure and simple heart; and there is not a presence so exalted, nor a scene
of splendour so imposing, as could prevent Garibaldi from recognising with
eager delight any the very humblest companion that ever shared hardship
and danger beside him.
To have achieved his successes, a man must of necessity have rallied
around him many besides enthusiasts of the cause; he must have recruited
amongst men of broken fortunes—reckless, lawless fellows, who
accepted the buccaneer’s life as a means of wiping off old scores with
that old world “that would have none of them.” It was not amidst the
orderly, the soberly-trained, and well-to-do that he could seek for
followers. And what praise is too great for him who could so inspire this
mass, heaving with passion as it was, with his own noble sentiments, and
make them feel that the work before them—a nation’s regeneration—was
a task too high and too holy to be accomplished by unclean hands? Can any
eulogy exaggerate the services of a man who could so magnetise his
fellow-men as to associate them at once with his nobility of soul, and
elevate them to a standard little short of his own? That he did do
this we have the proof. Pillage was almost unknown amongst the
Garibaldians; and these famished, ill-clad, shoeless men marched on from
battle to battle with scarcely an instance of crime that called for the
interference of military law.
Where is the General who could boast of doing as much? Where is the leader
who could be bold enough to give such a pledge for his followers? Is there
an army in Europe—in the world—for whom as much could be said?
All honour, therefore, to the man—not whose example only, but whose
very contact suggests high intent and noble action. All honour to him who
brings to a great cause, not alone the dazzling splendour of heroism, but
the more enduring brightness of a pure and unsullied integrity!
Such a man may be misled; he can never be corrupted.
A NEW INVESTMENT.
I am not so sure how far we ought to be grateful for it, but assuredly the
fact is so, that nothing has so much tended to show the world with what
little wisdom it is governed than the Telegraph. It is not merely that
cabinets are no longer the sole possessors of early intelligence, though
this alone was once a very great privilege; and there is no
over-estimating the power conferred by the exclusive possession of a piece
of important news—a battle won or lost, the outbreak of a
revolution, the overthrow of a throne—even for a few hours before it
became the property of the public. The telegraph, however, is the great
disenchanter. The misty uncertainty, the cloud-like indistinctness that
used of old to envelop all ministerial action, converting Downing Street
into a sort of Olympus, and making a small mythology out of
Precis-writers, is all gone, all dispersed. Three or four cold hard lines,
thin and terse as the wire that conveyed them, are sworn enemies to all
style, and especially to all the evasive cajoleries of those dissolving
views of events diplomacy loves to revel in. What becomes of the graceful
drapery in which statesmen used to clothe the great facts of the world,
when a simple despatch, “fifteen words, exclusive of the address,” tells
the whole story? and when we have read that “the insurgents are triumphant
everywhere, the king left the capital at four o’clock, a provisional
government was proclaimed this morning,” and suchlike, what do we care for
the sonorous periods in which official priestcraft chants the downfall of
a dynasty?
The great stronghold of statecraft was, however, Speculation—I mean
that half-prophetic view of events which we always conceded to those who
looked over the world from a higher window than ourselves. What has become
of this now? Who so bold as to predict what, while he is yet speaking, may
be contradicted? who is there hardy enough to forecast what the events of
the last half-hour may have falsified, and five minutes more will serve to
publish to the whole world?
It may be amusing to read the comments of the speech or the leading
article, but the “despatch” is the substance: and however clever the
variations, the original melody remains unaltered. Let any one imagine to
himself a five-act drama, preceded by a telegraphic intimation of all its
incidents—how insupportable would the slow procession of events
become after such a revelation! Up to this, Ministers performed a sort of
Greek chorus, chanting in ambiguous phrase the woes that invaded those who
differed from them, and the heart-corroding sorrows that sat below the
“gangway.” There has come an end to all this. All the dramatic devices of
those days are gone, and we live in an age in which many men are their own
priests, their lawyers, and their doctors, and where, certes, each man is
his own prophet.
These reflections have been much impressed upon me by a ramble I took
yesterday in company with one of the most agreeable of all our
diplomatists—one of those men who seem to weld into their happy
natures all the qualities which make good companionship, and blend with
the polished manners of a courtier the dash of an Eton boy and the deep
reflectiveness of a man of the world—a man to whom nothing comes
wrong, and whom you would be puzzled to say whether he was more in his
element at a cabinet council, or one of a shooting-party in the Highlands.
“I say, O’Dowd,” cried he, after a pause of some time in our conversation,
“has it never struck you that those tall poles and wires are destined to
be the end of both your trade and mine, and that within a very few years
neither of our occupations will have a representative left? Take my word
for it,” said he, more solemnly, “in less than ten years from the present
date a penny-a-liner will be as rare as a posthorse, and a post-shay not
more a curiosity than a minister-plenipotentiary.”
“Do you really think so?”
“I am certain of it. People nowadays won’t travel eight miles an hour, or
be satisfied to hear of events ten days after they’ve happened. Life is
too short for all this now, and, as we can’t lengthen our days, we must
shorten our incidents. We are all more or less like that gentleman Mathews
used to tell us of at Boulogne, who said to the waiter, ‘Let me have
some-thing expensive; I am only here for an hour.’ Have you ever thought
seriously on the matter?”
“Never,” said I.
“You ought, then,” said he. “I tell you again, we are all in the same
category with flint locks and wooden ships—we belong to the past.
Don’t you know it? Don’t you feel it?”
“I don’t like to feel it,” said I, peevishly.
“Nonsense!” cried he, laughing. “Self-deception does nothing in the
matter, say what one will. A modern diplomatist is only a ‘smooth-Bore.’
What ‘our own correspondent’ represents, I leave to your own modesty.”
“It will be a bad day for us when the world comes to that knowledge,” said
I, gloomily.
“Of course it will, but there’s no help for it. Old novels go to the
trunkmakers; second-hand uniforms make the splendour of dignity-balls in
the colonies: who is to say that there may not be a limbo for us also? At
all events, I have a scheme for our transition state—a plan I have
long revolved in my mind—and there’s certainly something in it.
“First of all realise it, as the Yankees say, that neither a government
nor a public will want either of us. When the wires have told that the
Grand-Duke Strong-grog-enofif was assassinated last night, or that Prince
Damisseisen has divorced his wife and married a milliner, Downing Street
and Printing-house Square will agree that all the moral reflections the
events inspire can be written just as well in Piccadilly as from a palace
on the Neva, or a den on the Danube. Gladstone will be the better pleased,
and take another farthing off ‘divi-divi,’ or some other commodity in
general use and of universal appreciation. Don’t you agree to that?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know,” drawled he out, in mimicry of my tone: “are you so
conceited about your paltry craft that you fancy the world cares for the
manner of it, or that there is really any excellence in the cookery? Not a
bit of it, man. We are bores both of us; and what’s worse—far worse—we
are bygones. Can’t you see that when a man buys a canister of prepared
beef-tea, he never asks any one to pour on the boiling water—he
brews his broth for himself? This is what people do with the telegrams.
They don’t want you or me to come in with the kettle: besides, all tastes
are not alike; one man may like his Bombardment of Charleston weaker;
another might prefer his Polish Massacre more highly flavoured. This is
purely a personal matter. How can you suit the capricious likings of the
million, and of the million—for that’s the worst of it—the
million that don’t want you? What a practical rebuke, besides, to prosy
talkers and the whole long-winded race, the sharp, short tap of the
telegraph! Who would listen to a narrative of Federal finance when he has
read ‘Gold at 204—Chase rigged the market’? Who asks for strategical
reasons in presence of ‘Almighty whipping—lost eighty thousand—Fourth
Michigan skedaddled ‘?
“How graphic will description become—how laconic all comment! You
will no more listen to one of the old circumlocutionary conversers than
you would travel by the waggon, or make a voyage in a collier.
“How, I would ask, could the business of life go on in an age active as
ours if all coinage was in copper, and vast transactions in money should
be all conducted in the base metal? Imagine the great Kings of Finance
counting over the debts of whole nations in penny-pieces, and you have at
once a picture of what, until a few years ago, was our intellectual
condition. How nobly Demosthenic our table-talk will be!—how grandly
abrupt and forensic!
“There is nothing, however, over which I rejoice more than in the utter
extinction of the anecdote-mongers—the insufferable monsters who
related Joe Millers as personal experiences, or gave you their own
versions of something in the morning papers. Thank heaven they are done
for!
“Last of all, the unhappy man who used to be sneered at for his silence in
company, will now be on a par with his fellows. The most bashful will be
able to blurt out, ‘Poles massacred,’ ‘Famine in Ireland,’ ‘Feast at the
Mansion House,’ ‘Collision at Croydon,’ ‘Bank discount eleven.’
“Who will dare to propagate scandal, when all amplification is denied him?
How much adulteration will the liquor bear which is measured by drop? Nor
will the least of our benefits be the long, reflective pauses—those
brilliant ‘flashes of silence’ which will supersede the noise, turmoil,
and confusion of what we used to call conversation. No, no, Corneli mi.
The game is up. ‘Our own Correspondent’ is a piece that has run its
course, and there’s nothing to do but take a farewell benefit and quit the
boards.”
“If I could fall back on my pension like you, I’d perhaps take the matter
easier,” said I, gruffly.
“Well, I think you ought to be pensioned. If I was a Minister, I’d propose
it. My notion is this: The proper subjects for pension are those who, if
not provided for by the State, are likely to starve. They are,
consequently, the class of persons who have devoted their lives to an
unmarketable commodity—such as poonah-painting, Berlin-wool work,
despatch-writing, and suchlike. I’d include ‘penny-a-lining’—don’t
be offended because you get twopence, perhaps. I’d pension the whole of
them—pretty much as I’d buy off the organ-man, and request him to
move on.”
“As, however,” said I, “we are not fortunate enough to figure in the
Estimates, may I ask what is the grand scheme you propose for our
employment?”
“I’m coming to it. I’d have reached it ere this, if you had not required
such a positive demonstration of your utter uselessness. You have delayed
me by what Guizot used to call ‘an obstructive indisposition to believe.’”
“Go on; I yield—that is, under protest.” “Protest as much as you
like. In diplomacy a protest means, ‘I hope you won’t; but if you will, I
can’t help it,’ Vide the correspondence about the annexation of
Nice and Savoy. Now to my project. It is to start a monster hotel—one
of those gigantic establishments for which the Americans are famous—in
some much-frequented part of Europe, and to engage as part of the
household all the ‘own time’ celebrities of diplomacy and letters. Every
one knows—most of us have, indeed, felt—the desire experienced
to see, meet, and converse with the noticeable men of the world—the
people who, so to say, leave their mark on the age they live in—the
cognate signs of human algebra. Only fancy, then, with what ecstasy would
the traveller read the prospectus of an establishment wherein, as in a
pantheon, all the gods were gathered around him. What would not the Yankee
give for a seat at a table where the great Eltchi ladled out the soup, and
the bland-voiced author of ‘The Woman in White’ lisped out, ‘Sherry, sir?’
Only imagine being handed one’s fish by the envoy that got us into the
Crimean war, or taking a potato served by the accomplished writer of
‘Orley Farm’! Picture a succession of celebrities in motion around the
table, and conceive, if you can, the vainglorious sentiment of the man
that could say, ‘Lyons, a little more fat;’ or, ‘Carlyle, madeira;’ and
imagine the luxury of that cup of tea so gracefully handed you by ‘Lost
and Saved,’ and the culminating pride of taking your flat candlestick from
the fingers of ‘Eleanor’s Victory.’
“Who would not cross the great globe to live in such an atmosphere of
genius and grandeur? for if there be, as there may, souls dead to the
charms of literary greatness, who in this advanced age of ours is
indifferent to the claims of high rank and station and title? Fancy
sending a K.C.B. to call a cab, or ordering a special envoy to fetch the
bootjack! I dare not pursue the theme. I cannot trust myself to dwell on a
subject so imbued with suggestiveness—all the varying and wondrous
combinations such a galaxy of splendour and power would inevitably
produce. What wit, what smartness, what epigram would abound! What a
hailstorm of pleasantries, and what stories of wise aphorisms and profound
reflections! How I see with my mind’s eye the literary traveller trying to
overhear the Attic drolleries of the waiters as they wash up their
glasses, or endeavouring to decoy Boots into a stroll with a cigar, well
knowing his charming article on Dickens.
“The class-writers would of course have their specialties. ‘Soapy-Sponge’
would figure in the stable-yard, and ‘Proverbial Philosophy’ watch the
trains as a touter. Fabulous prices might be obtained for a room in such
an establishment, and every place at the table-d’hôte should be
five guineas at least. For, after all, what would be an invitation to
Compiègne to a sojourn here? Material advantages might possibly incline to
the side of the Imperial board; but would any one presume to say that the
company in the one was equal to the ‘service’ at the other? Who would
barter the glorious reality of the first for the mean and shallow mockery
of the last? Last of all, how widespread and powerful would be the
influence of such an establishment over the manners of our time! Would
Cockneyism, think you, omit its H’s in presence of that bland individual
who offers him cheese? Would presumption dare to criticise in view of that
‘Quarterly’ man who is pouring out the bitter beer? What a check on the
expansive balderdash of the ‘gent’ at his dessert to know and feel that
‘Adam Bede’ was behind him!
“Would Brown venture on that anecdote of Jones if the napkin-in-hand
listener should be an ex-envoy renowned for his story-telling? Who would
break down in his history, enunciate a false quantity, misquote a speech,
or mistake the speaker, in such hearing? Some one might object to the
position and to the functions I assign to persons of a certain
distinction, and say that it was unworthy of an ex-ambassador to act as a
hall-porter, or a celebrated prose-writer to clean the knives. I confess I
do not think so. I shrewdly suspect a great deal of what we are pleased to
call philosophy is only a well-regulated self-esteem, and that the man who
feels himself immeasurably above another in mind, capacity, and
attainments, and yet sees that other vastly superior in station and
condition, has within his heart a pride all the more exalting that it is
stimulated by the sense of a great injustice, and the profound
consciousness that it is to himself, to his own nature, he must look to
redress the balance that fortune would set against him.
“In the brilliant conversation of the servants’ hall, then, would these
many gifted men take their revenge; and what stores of good stories, what
endless drolleries, what views of life, and what traits of character,
would they derive from the daily opportunities! It has constantly been
remarked by foreigners that there is no trait of our national manners less
graceful in itself than the way in which inferiors, especially menials,
are addressed in England. It is alleged, perhaps with some truth, that we
mark every difference of class more decisively than other nations; and
certainly in our treatment of servants there is none of that same
confidential tone so amusing in a French vaudeville. The scheme I now
suggest will be the effective remedy for this.
“Will Jones, think you, presume to be imperative if it be Alfred Tennyson
who has brought up his hot water? Will Brown be critical about the polish,
if it be Owen Meredith has taken him his boots? Will even Snooks cry out,
‘Holloa, you fellow!’ to a passing waiter, if the individual so addressed
might chance to be an Oriental Secretary or a Saturday Reviewer?
“And would the most infatuated of Bagmen venture on what O’Connell used to
call a ‘chuck-under-the-chin manner,’ were the chamber-maid to be Margaret
Maitland?
“Such, in brief, is my plan, O’Dowd; nor is the least of its advantages
that it gets rid of the Pension List, and that beggarly £1200 a-year by
which wealthy England assumes to aid the destitute sons and daughters of
letters. As for myself, I have fixed on my station. I mean to be
swimming-master, and the prospectus shall announce that His Excellency the
late Minister at the Court of——-ducks ladies every morning
from eight till nine. Think over the project, and drop me a hint as to the
sort of place would suit you.”
ITALIAN TRAITS AND CHARACTERISTICS.
My diplomatic friend is rarely very serious in his humour; this morning,
however, he was rather disposed that way, and so I took the opportunity to
question him about Italy, a country where he has lived long, and whose
people he certainly understands better than most Englishmen. I gathered
from him that he considered the English were thoroughly well informed on
Italy, but in the most hopeless ignorance as to the Italians. “As for the
house and the furniture, you know it all.” said he; “but of the company
you know positively nothing.”
Byron understood them better than any other Englishman. He had his
admission par la petite porte—that is, he gained his
knowledge through his vices; and the Italians were so flattered to see a
great Milor adapt himself so readily to their lax notions and loose
morality that they grew frank and open with him.
His pretended—I suppose it was only pretended—dislike to
England disarmed them, too, of all distrust of him; and for the first time
they felt themselves judged by a man who did not think Charing Cross finer
than the Piazza del Popolo.
Byron’s rank and station gained him a ready acceptance where the masses of
our travelling countrymen would not be received; for the Italians love
rank, and respect all its gradations. Even the republics were great
aristocracies; and in all their imitations of France they have never
affected “equality.” They love splendour too, and display; and in all
their festivals you see something like an effort to recall a time when
their cities were the grandest and their citizens the proudest in all
Europe.
They are a very difficult people to understand. There are not so many
salient points in the Italian as in the German or the Frenchman; his
character is not so strongly accented; his traits are finer—his
shades of temperament more delicate.
Besides this, there is another difficulty: one is immensely aided in their
appreciation of a people by their lighter drama, which is in a measure a
reflex of the daily sayings and doings of those who listen to it. Now the
Italians have no comedy, or next to none; so barren are they in this
respect, that more than once have I asked myself, Can there be any
domesticity in a nation which has not mirrored itself on the stage? What
sort of a substance can that be that never had a shadow?
The immortal Goldoni, as they print him in all the play-bills, is
ineffably stupid, his characters ill drawn, his plots meagre, and his
dialogue as flat as the talk of a three-volume novel. The only palpable
lesson derivable from him is, that all ranks and classes stand pretty much
on an equality, and that as regards modes of expression the count and his
coachman are precisely on a level. There is scarcely a trait of humour in
these pieces—never, by any accident, anything bordering on wit. The
characters talk the veriest commonplaces, and announce the most humdrum
intentions in phraseology as flat and wearisome.
Now you will ask, perhaps, Is this a fair type of the present-day habits—are
the Italians of our time like those of Goldoni’s? My reply would be, that
it would be difficult to imagine a people who have changed less within a
century. The same small topics, the same petty interests engage them. They
display the same ardent enthusiasm about trifles, and the same thorough
indifference to great things, as their grandfathers; and they are
marvellously like the dreary puppets that the immortal dramatist has given
us as their representatives.
It has been reproached to Sheridan, that no people in real life ever
displayed such brilliancy in conversation as the characters in the ‘School
for Scandal;’ and tame as Goldoni reads, I verily believe his dialogue is
rather above the level of an Italian salon.
The great interests of Life, the game of politics, the contests and
reverses of party, literature in its various forms, and the sports of the
field, form topics which make the staple of our dinner-talk. Instead of
these the Italians have their one solitary theme—the lapses of their
neighbours, the scandals of the small world around them. Not that they are
uncharitable or malevolent; far from it. They discuss a frailty as a board
of physicians might a malady, and without the slightest thought of
imputing blame to “the patient.” They have now and then a hard word for an
unfortunate husband, but even him they treat rather as one ignorant of
conventional usages and the ways of the polite world, than as a man
radically bad or cruel.
They have in their blood the old Greek sensitiveness to suffering, and
they dislike painful scenes and disastrous catastrophes; and this
sentiment they carry to extremes. Although they have the finest
representative of Othello—Salvini—at this moment in Europe,
the terrible scene of the murder of Desdemona is a shock that many would
shrink from witnessing. They will bear any strain on the imagination, but
their fine-strung nerves revolt against the terrible in action. To this
natural refinement is owing much of that peculiar softness of manner and
reluctance to disoblige which foreigners frequently mistake for some
especial desire to win their favour.
The idleness which would make an Englishman awkward sits gracefully on the
Italian. He knows how to “do nothing” with dignity. Be assured, if
Hercules had been of Anglo-Saxon blood, Omphale would never have set him
down to spin; but being what he was, I could swear he went through his
tomfoolery gracefully.
And with all this, is it not strange that these are the people who furnish
the most reckless political enthusiasts of the world, and who, year after
year, go to the scaffold for “an idea”? There is something hysterical in
this Italian nature, which prompts to paroxysms like these—some of
that impulsive fury which, in the hill-tribes of India, sends down hordes
of fanatics to impale themselves on British bayonets. The men like Orsini
abound—calm of look, mild of speech, and gentle in manner, and yet
ready to commit the greatest of crimes and confront the most terrible of
deaths for a mere speculative notion—the possibility of certain
changes producing certain contingencies, and of which other changes are to
ensue, and Italy become something that she never was before, nor would the
rest of Europe suffer her to remain, if ever she attained to it.
Wine-tasters tell us it is vain to look for a bottle of unadulterated
port: I should in the same way declare that there are few rarer things to
be found than a purely Italian society. The charm of their glorious
climate; the beauty of their country, the splendour of their cities, rich
in centuries of associations, have attracted strangers from every corner
of the Old World and the New; and the salons of Italy are but
caravanserais, where all nations meet and all tongues are spoken.
The Italians like this; it flatters national pride, and it suits national
indolence. The outer barbarians from the Neva or the Thames have fine
houses and give costly entertainments. Their sterner looks and more robust
habits are meet subject for the faint little jests that are bandied in
some patois; and each thinks himself the superior of his neighbour.
But as for the home life of these people, who has seen it? What is known
of it? Into that long, lofty, arched-ceilinged drawing-room, lighted by
its one lamp, where sits the Signora with her daughter and the
grimy-looking, ill-shaven priest, there is not, perhaps, much temptation
to enter, nor is the conversation of a kind one would care to join in; and
there is but this, and the noisy, almost riotous, reception after the
opera, where a dozen people are contending at “Lansquenet,” while one or
perhaps two thump the piano, and some three or four shout rather than sing
the last popular melody of the season, din being accepted as gaiety, and a
clamour that would make deafness a blessing being taken for the delight of
a charmed assembly.
I have been told that Cavour once said, that no great change would be
accomplished in Italy till the Italians introduced the public-school
system of England. So long as the youth of the country were given up for
education to the priests—the most illiterate, narrow-minded, and
bigoted class in Europe—so long would they carry with them through
life the petty prejudices of their early days; or, in emancipating
themselves from these, fall into a scepticism whose baneful distrust would
damp the ardour of all patriotism, and sap the strength of every high and
generous emulation. As the great statesman said, “I want Italians to be
Italians, and not to be bad Frenchmen.”
With a Peninsular Eton or Rugby at work, who is to say what might not come
of a people whose intellectual qualities are unquestionably so great? The
system which imparts to boys the honourable sense of responsibility, the
high value of truthfulness, the scorn of all that is mean,—this is
what is wanting here. Let the Italian start in life with these, and it
would not be easy to set limits to what his country may become in
greatness.
I have never heard of a people with so little self-control; and their
crimes are, in a large majority of cases, the results of some passionate
impulse rather than of a matured determination to do wrong. It is by no
means uncommon to find that your butler or your coachman has taken to his
bed ill of a rabbia, as they call it—a fit of passion, in
plain words, brought on by a reproof he has considered unjust. This same
rabbia is occasionally a serious affair. Some short time ago, an
actor, who was hissed off the stage at Turin, went home and died of it;
and within a very few weeks, a case occurred in Florence which would be
laughable if it had not terminated so tragically. One of the new guardians
of the public safety, habited in a strange travestie of an English
police-costume, was followed through the streets by a crowd of boys, who
mocked and jeered him on his dress. Seeing that he resented their remarks
with temper, they only became more aggressive, and at last went so far as
to pursue him through the city with yells and cries. The man, overcome
with passion, got rabbia, and died. Ridicule is the one thing no
Italian can bear. When you lose temper with an Italian, and give way to
any show of violence before him, he is triumphant; his cheek glows, his
eye brightens, his chest expands, he sees he has you at a disadvantage,
and regards you as one who in a moment of passion has thrown his cards on
the table and exposed his hand. After this it is next to impossible to
regain your position before him. If you be calm, however, and if, besides
being calm, you can be sarcastic, he is overcome at once.
It is a rare thing—one of the rarest—to see this weapon
employed in the debates; but when it does occur, it is ever successful.
The fact is, that Wit, which forms the subtlety of other nations, is not
subtle enough for the Italian; and the edge that cuts so cleanly elsewhere
makes a jagged wound with them.
After all, they are very easy to live with. If the social atmosphere is
not very stimulating or invigorating, it is easy to breathe, and pleasant
withal; and one trait of theirs is not without its especial merit—they
are less under the control of conventionalities than any people I ever
heard of, and consequently have few affectations. If they do assume any
little part, or play off any little game, it is with the palpable object
of a distinct gain by it; never is it done for personal display or
individual glory. There are no more snobs in Italy than there are snakes
in Iceland; and that, after all, is, as the world goes, saying something
for a people.
Of all the nations of Europe, I know of none, save Italy, in which the
characters are the same in every class and gradation. The appeal you would
make to the Italian noble must be the same you would address to the humble
peasant on his property. The point of view is invariably identical; the
sympathies are always alike. No matter what differences education may have
instituted and habits implanted, the nobleman and his lackey think and
feel and reason alike. Separate them how you will in station, and they
will still approach the consideration of any subject in the same spirit,
and regard it with the same hopes and fears, the same expectations and
distrusts. To this trait, of whose existence Cavour well knew, was owing
the marvellous unanimity in the nation on the last war with Austria. The
appeal to the prince could be addressed, and was addressed, to the
peasant. There was not an argument that spoke to the one which was not
re-echoed in the heart of the other. In fact, the chain that binds the
social condition of Italy is shorter than elsewhere, and the extreme links
are less remote from each other than with most nations of Europe.
Every Italian is a conspirator, whether the question be the gravest or the
lightest; all must be done in it ambiguously—secretly—
mysteriously. Whatever is conducted openly is deemed to be done stupidly.
To take a house, buy a horse, or hire a servant without the intervention
of another man to disparage the article, chaffer over the price, and
disgust the vendor, is an act of impetuous folly. “Why didn’t you tell me!”
says your friend, “that you wished to have that villa? My coachman is
half-brother to the wife of the fattore. I could have learned
everything that could be urged against its convenience, and learned,
besides, what peculiar pressure for money affected the owner.” Besides
this, everything must be done as though by mere hazard: you really never
knew there was a house there, never noticed it; you even sneer at the
taste of the man who selected the spot, and wonder “what he meant by it.”
In nine cases out of ten the other party is not deceived by this
skirmishing; he fires a little blank-cartridge too, and so goes on the
engagement. All have great patience; life, at least in Italy, is quite
long enough for all this; no one is overburdened with business; the days
are usually wearisome, and the theatres are only open of an evening!
It is, besides, so pleasant and so interesting to the Italian to pit his
craft against another man’s, and back his own subtlety against his
neighbour’s. It is a sort of gambling of which he never wearies; for the
game is one that demands not merely tact, address, and cunning, but face,
voice, manner, and bearing. It is temperament. Individuality itself is on
the table; and so is it, that you may assume it as certain that the higher
organisation will invariably rise the winner.
Imagine Bull in such a combat, and you have a picture of the most hopeless
incapacity. He frets, fumes, storms, and sulks; but what avails it? he is
“done” in the end; but he is no more aware that the struggle he has been
engaged in is an intellectual one, than was the Bourgeois Gentilhomme
conscious that he had been for forty years “talking prose.”
The Priest was doubtless the great originator of all this mechanism of
secrecy and fraud. For centuries the Church has been the Tyrant of Italy.
The whole fate and fortunes of families depended on the will of a poor,
ill-clad, ignoble-looking creature, who, though he sat at meals with the
master, ate and talked like a menial. To this man was known everything—all
that passed beneath the roof. Not alone was he aware of the difficulties,
the debts, the embarrassments of the family, but to him were confided
their feelings, their shortcomings, their sorrows, and it might be their
shame. From him there was nothing secret; and he sat there, in the midst
of them, a sort of Fate, wielding the power of one who knew every spring
and motive that could stir them, every hope that could thrill, every
terror that could appal them. There was no escape from him—cold,
impassive spectator of good or evil fortune, without one affection to
attach him to life, grimly watching the play of passions which made men
his slaves, and only interested by the exercise of a power that degraded
them. The layman could not outwit him, it is true, but he could steal
something of the craft that he could not rival. This he has done; how he
has employed it any one can at least imagine who has had dealings in
Italy.
THE DECLINE OF WHIST.
What is the reason of the decline of Whist? Why is it that every year we
find fewer players, and less proficiency in those who play? It is a far
graver question than it may seem at first blush, and demands an amount of
investigation much deeper than I am able to give it here.
Of course I am prepared to hear that people nowadays are too accomplished
and too intellectual to be obliged to descend for their pastime to a mere
game at cards; that higher topics engage and higher interests occupy them;
that they read and reflect more than their fathers and grandfathers did;
and that they would look down with disdain upon an intellectual combat
where the gladiators might be the last surviving veterans of a bygone
century.
Now, if the conversational tone of our time were pre-eminently brilliant—if
people were wiser, wittier, more amusing, and more instructive than
formerly—if we lived in an age of really good talkers,—I might
assent to the force of this explanation; but what is the truth? Ours is,
of all the times recorded by history, the dullest and dreariest: rare as
whist-players are, pleasant people are still rarer. It is not merely that
the power of entertaining is gone, but so has the ambition. Nobody tries
to please, and the success is admirable! It is fashionable to be stupid,
and we are the most modish people in the universe. It is absurd, then, in
a society whose interchange of thought is expressed in monosyllables, and
a certain haw-haw dreariness pervades all intercourse, to say that people
are above Whist. Why, they are below Push-pin!
It would be sufficient to point to the age when Whist was most in vogue,
to show that it flavoured a society second to none in agreeability; and
who were the players? The most eminent divines, the greatest ministers,
the most profound jurists, the most subtle diplomatists. What an influence
a game so abounding in intellectual teaching must have exercised on the
society where it prevailed, can scarcely be computed. Blackstone has a
very remarkable passage on the great social effect produced upon the
Romans by their popular games; and he goes so far as to say that society
imbibes a vast amount of those conventionalities which form its laws, from
an Tin-conscious imitation of the rules which govern its pastimes. Take
our own time, and I ask with confidence, should we find such want of
purpose as our public men exhibit, such uncertainty, such feebleness, and
such defective allegiance to party, in a whist-playing age? Would men be
so ready as we see them to renounce their principles, if they bore fresh
in their mind all the obloquy that follows “a revoke”? Would they misquote
their statistics in face of the shame that attends on “a false score”?
Would they be so ready to assert what they know they must retract, if they
had a recent recollection of being called on “to take down the honours”?
Think, then, of the varied lessons—moral as well as mental—that
the game instils; the caution, the reserve, the patient attention, the
memory, the deep calculation of probabilities, embracing all the rules of
evidence, the calm self-reliance, and the vigorous daring that shows when
what seems even rashness may be the safest of all expedients. Imagine the
daily practice of these gifts and faculties, and tell me, if you can, that
he who exercises them can cease to employ them in his everyday life. You
might as well assert that the practice of gymnastics neither develops the
muscle nor increases strength.
I cannot believe a great public man to have attained a fall development of
his power if he has not been a whist-player; and for a leader of the
House, it is an absolute necessity. Take a glance for a moment at what
goes on in Parliament in this non-whist age, and mark the consequences.
Look in at an ordinary sitting of the House, and see how damaging to his
party that unhappy man is, who will ask a question to-day which
this day week would be unanswerable. What is that but “playing his card
out of time”? See that other who rises to know if something be true; the
unlucky “something” being the key-note to his party’s politics which he
has thus disclosed. What is this but “showing his hand”? Hear that dreary
blunderer, who has unwittingly contradicted what his chief has just
asserted—“trumping,” as it were, “his partner’s trick.” Or that
still more fatal wretch, who, rising at a wrong moment, has taken “the
lead out of the hand” that could have won the game. I boldly ask, would
there be one—even one—of these solecisms committed in an age
when Whist was cultivated, and men were brought up in the knowledge and
practice of the odd trick?
Look at the cleverness with which Lord Palmerston “forces the hand” of the
Opposition. Watch the rapidity with which Lord Derby pounces upon the card
Lord Russell has let drop, and “calls on him to play it.” And in the face
of all this you will see scores of these bland whiskered creatures Leech
gives us in ‘Punch,’ who, if asked, “Can they play?” answer with a
contemptuous ha-ha laugh, “I rather think not.”
To the real player, besides, Whist was never so engrossing as to exclude
occasional remark; and some of the smartest and wittiest of Talleyrand’s
sayings were uttered at the card-table. Imagine, then, the inestimable
advantage to the young man entering life, to be privileged to sit down in
that little chosen coterie, where sages dropped words of wisdom, and
brilliant men let fall those gems of wit that actually light up an era. By
what other agency—through what fortuitous combination of events
other than the game—could he hope to enjoy such companionship? How
could he be thrown not merely into their society, but their actual
intimacy?
It would be easy for me to illustrate the inestimable benefits of this
situation, if we possessed what, to the scandal of our age, we do not
possess—any statistics of Whist. Newspapers record the oldest
inhabitant or the biggest gooseberry, but tell us nothing biographical of
those who have illustrated the resources and extended the boundaries of
this glorious game. We even look in vain for any mention of Whist in the
lives of some of its first proficients. Take Cavour, for instance. Not one
of his biographers has recorded his passion for Whist, and yet he was a
good player: too venturous, perhaps—too dashing—but splendid
with “a strong hand!” During all the sittings of the Paris Congress he
played every night at the Jockey Club, and won very largely—some say
above twenty thousand pounds.
The late Prince Metternich played well, but not brilliantly. It was a
patient, cautious, back-game, and never fully developed till the last card
was played. He grew easily tired too, and very seldom could sit out more
than twelve or fourteen rubbers; unlike Talleyrand, who always arose from
table, after perhaps twelve hours’ play, fresher and brighter than when he
began. Lord Melbourne played well, but had moments of distraction, when he
suffered the smaller interests of politics to interfere with his
combinations. I single him out, however, as a graceful compliment to a
party who have numbered few good players in their ranks; for certainly the
Tories could quote folly ten to one whisters against the Whigs. The Whigs
are too superficial, too crotchety, and too self-opinionated to be
whist-players; and, worse than all, too distrustful. A Whig could never
trust his partner—he could not for a moment disabuse himself of the
notion that his colleague meant to outwit him. A Whig, too, would
invariably try to win by something not perfectly legitimate; and, last of
all, he would be incessantly appealing to the bystanders, and asking if he
had not, even if egregiously beaten, played better than his opponents.
The late Cabinet of Lord Derby contained some good players. Two of the
Secretaries of State were actually fine players, and one of them adds
Whist to accomplishments which would have made their possessor an
Admirable Crichton, if genius had not elevated him into a far loftier
category than Crichtons belong to. Rechberg plays well, and likes his
game; but he is in Whist, as are all Germans, a thorough pedant. I
remember an incident of his whist-life sufficiently amusing in its way,
though, in relation, the reader loses what to myself is certainly the
whole pungency of the story: I mean the character and nature of the person
who imparted the anecdote to me, and who is about the most perfect
specimen of that self-possession, which we call coolness, the age we live
in can boast of.
I own that, in a very varied and somewhat extensive experience of men in
many countries, I never met with one who so completely fulfilled all the
requisites of temper, manner, face, courage, and self-reliance, which make
of a human being the most unabashable and unemotional creature that walks
the earth.
I tell the story as nearly as I can as he related it to me. “I used to
play a good deal with Rechberg,” said he, “and took pleasure in worrying
him, for he was a great purist in his play, and was outraged with anything
that could not be sustained by an authority. In fact, each game was
followed by a discussion of full half an hour, to the intense
mortification of the other players, though very amusing to me, and
offering me large opportunity to irritate and plague the Austrian.
“One evening, after a number of these discussions, in which Rechberg had
displayed an even unusual warmth and irritability, I found myself opposed
to him in a game, the interest of which had drawn around us a large
assembly of spectators—what the French designate as la galerie.
Towards the conclusion of the game it was my turn to lead, and I played a
card which so astounded the Austrian Minister, that he laid down his cards
upon the table and stared fixedly at me.
“‘In all my experience of Whist,’ said he, deliberately, ‘I never saw the
equal of that.’
“‘Of what?’ asked!
“‘Of the card you have just played,’ rejoined he. ‘It is not merely that
such play violates every principle of the game, but it actually stultifies
all your own combinations.’
“‘I think differently, Count,’ said I. ‘I maintain that it is good play,
and I abide by it.’
“‘Let us decide it by a wager,’ said he.
“‘In what way?’
“‘Thus: We shall leave the question to the galerie. You shall
allege what you deem to be the reasons for your play, and they shall
decide if they accept them as valid.’
“‘I agree. What will you bet?’
“‘Ten napoleons—twenty, fifty, five hundred if you like!’ cried he,
warmly.
“‘I shall say ten. You don’t like losing, and I don’t want to punish you
too heavily.’
“‘There is the jury, sir,’ said he, haughtily; ‘make your case.’
“‘The wager is this,’ said I, ‘that, to win, I shall satisfy these
gentlemen that for the card I played I had a sufficient and good reason.’
“‘Yes.’
“‘My reason was this, then—I looked into your hand!’
“I pocketed his ten napoleons, but they were the last I won of him.
Indeed, it took a month before he got over the shock.”
It would be interesting if we had, which unhappily we have not, any
statistical returns to show what classes and professions have produced the
best whist-players. In my own experience I have found civilians the
superiors of the military.
Diplomatists I should rank first; their game was not alone finer and more
subtle, but they showed a recuperative power in their play which others
rarely possessed: they extricated themselves well out of difficulties, and
always made their losses as small as possible. Where they broke down was
when they were linked with a bad partner: they invariably played on a
level which he could never attain to, and in this way cross purposes and
misunderstandings were certain to ensue.
Lawyers, as a class, play well; but their great fault is, they play too
much for the galerie. The habit of appealing to the jury jags and
blurs the finer edge of their faculties, and they are more prone to
canvass the suffrages of the surrounders than to address themselves to the
actual issue. For this reason, Equity practitioners are superior to the
men in the courts below.
Physicians are seldom first-rate players—they are always behind
their age in Whist, and rarely, if ever, know any of the fine points which
Frenchmen have introduced into the game. Their play, too, is timid—they
regard trumps as powerful stimulants, and only administer them in
drop-doses. They seldom look at the game as a great whole, but play on,
card after card, deeming each trick they turn as a patient disposed of,
and not in any way connected with what has preceded or is to follow it.
Divines are in Whist pretty much where geology was in the time of the
first Georges; still I have met with a bishop and a stray archdeacon or
two who could hold their own. I am speaking here of the Establishment,
because in Catholic countries the higher clergy are very often good
players. Antonelli, for instance, might sit down at the Portland or the
Turf; and even my old friend G. P. would find that his Eminence was his
match.
Soldiers are sorry performers, for mess-play is invariably bad; but
sailors are infinitely worse. They have but one notion, which is to play
out all the best cards as fast as they can, and then appeal to their
partner to score as many tricks as they have—an inhuman performance,
which I have no doubt has cost many apoplexies.
On the whole, Frenchmen are better players than we are. Their game is less
easily divined, and all their intimations (invites) more subtle and
more refined. The Emperor plays well. In England he played a great deal at
the late Lord Eglinton’s, though he was never the equal of that
accomplished Earl, whose mastery of all games, especially those of
address, was perfection.
The Irish have a few brilliant players—one of them is on the bench;
but the Scotch are the most winning of all British whisters. The Americans
are rarely first-rate, but they have a large number of good second-class
players. Even with them, however, Whist is on the decline; and Euchre and
Poker, and a score more of other similar abominations, have usurped the
place of the king of games. What is to be done to arrest the progress of
this indifferentism?—how are we to awaken men out of the stupor of
this apathy? Have they never heard of the terrible warning of Talleyrand
to his friend who could not play, as he said, “Have you reflected on the
miserable old age that awaits you?” How much of human nature that would
otherwise be unprofitable can be made available by Whist! What scores of
tiresome old twaddlers are there who can still serve their country as
whisters! what feeble intelligences that can flicker out into a passing
brightness at the sight of the “turned trump”!
Think of this, and think what is to become of us when the old, the feeble,
the tiresome, and the interminable will all be thrown broadcast over
society without an object or an occupation. Imagine what Bores will be let
loose upon the world, and fancy how feeble will be all efforts of wit or
pleasantry to season a mass of such incapables! Think, I say, think of
this. It is a peril that has been long threatening—even from that
time when old Lord Hertford, baffled and discouraged by the invariable
reply, “I regret, my Lord, that I cannot play Whist,” exclaimed, “I really
believe that the day is not distant when no gentleman can have a vice that
requires more than two people!”
ONE OF OUR “TWO PUZZLES”.
The two puzzles of our era are, how to employ our women, and what to do
with our convicts; and how little soever gallant it may seem to place them
in collocation, there is a bond that unites the attempt to keep the good
in virtue with the desire to reform the bad from vice, which will save me
from any imputation of deficient delicacy.
Let us begin with the Women. An enormous amount of ingenuity has been
expended in devising occupations where female labour might be
advantageously employed, and where the more patient industry and more
delicate handiwork of women might replace the coarser mechanism of men.
Printing, bookbinding, cigar-making, and the working of the telegraph,
have been freely opened—and, I believe, very successfully—to
female skill; and scores of other callings have been also placed at their
disposal: but, strange enough, the more that we do, the more there remains
to be done; and never have the professed advocates of woman’s rights been
so loud in their demands as since we have shared with them many of what we
used to regard as the especial fields of man’s industry. Women have taken
to the practice of Medicine, and have threatened to invade the Bar—steps
doubtless anticipatory of the time when they shall “rise in the House” or
sit on the Treasury benches. Now, I have very little doubt that we used
not to be as liberal as we might in sharing our callings with women. We
had got into the habit of underrating their capacities, and disparaging
their fitness for labour, which was very illiberal; but let us take care
that the reaction does not cany us too far on the other side, and that in
our zeal to make a reparation we only make a blunder, and that we
encourage them to adopt careers and crafts totally unsuited to their
tastes and their powers.
It is quite clear—in fact, a mere glance at the detail of the
preliminary studies will suffice to show it—that medicine and
surgery should not be shared with them. For a variety of reasons, they
ought not to be encouraged to take holy orders; and, on the whole, it is
very doubtful if it would be a wise step to introduce them into the army,
much less into the navy. Seeing this, therefore, the question naturally
arises, Are women to be the mere drudges—the Helots of our
civilisation? Are we only to employ them in such humble callings as
exclude all ideas of future distinction? A very serious question this, and
one over which I pondered for more than half an hour last night, as I lay
under the influence of some very strong tea and a slight menace of gout.
Women are very haughty creatures—very resentful of any supposed
slight—very aggressive, besides, if they imagine the time for attack
favourable. Will they sit down patiently as makers of pill-boxes and
artificial flowers? Will they be satisfied with their small gains and
smaller consideration? Will there not be ambitious spirits amongst them
who will ask, What do you mean to offer us? We are of a class who neither
care to bind books nor draw patterns. We are your equals—if we were
not distinctively modest, we might say something more than your equals—in
acquirement and information. We have our smattering of physical-science
humbug, as you have; we are read up in theological disputation, and are as
ready as you to stand by Colenso against Moses; in modern languages we are
more than your match. What have you to offer us if we are too proud, or
too poor, or too anything else, to stand waiting for a buyer in the
marriage-market of Belgravia? You will not suffer us to enter the learned
professions nor the Service; you will not encourage us to be architects,
attorneys, land-agents, or engineers. We know and we feel that there is
not one of these callings either above our capacity or unsuited to our
habits, but you deny us admittance; and now we ask, What is your scheme
for our employment? what project have you that may point out to us a
future of independence and a station of respect? Have you such a plan? or,
failing it, have you the courage to proclaim to the world that all your
boasted civilisation can offer us is to become the governesses to the
children of our luckier sisters? But there are many of us totally unsuited
to this, brought up with ways and habits that would make such an existence
something very like penal servitude—what will you do with us?
With this cry—for it became a cry—in my ears, I tried to go
asleep. I counted seventeen hundred and forty-four; I thought of the sea;
I imagined I was listening to Dr Cumming; and I endeavoured to repeat a
distich of Martin Tupper: but the force of conscience and the congo
carried the day, and I addressed myself vigorously to the question. I
thought of making them missionaries, lighthouse-keepers, lunacy
commissioners, Garter Kings-at-Arms, and suchlike, when a brilliant
thought flashed across my brain, and, with the instinct of a great
success, I saw I had triumphed. “Yes,” cried I aloud, “there is one grand
career for women—a career which shall engage not alone all the
higher and more delicate traits of their organisation, which will call
forth their marvellous clear-sightedness and quick perception, their tact,
their persuasiveness, and their ingenuity, but will actually employ the
less commendable features of female nature, and find work for their powers
of concealment, their craft in deception, and their passion for intrigue.
How is it that we have never hit upon it before? for of all the careers
meant by nature for women, was there any one could compare with
Diplomacy!”
Here we have at once the long-sought-for career—the desideratum
tanti studii—the occupation for which men are too coarse, too
clumsy, too inept, and which requires the lighter touch and more delicate
treatment of female fingers. It is the everyday reproach heard of us
abroad, that our representatives are deficient in those smaller and nicer
traits by which irritations are avoided and unpleasant situations
relieved. John, they say, always imagines that to be national he must be
“Bull,” and toss on his horns “all and every” that opposes him. Now, late
events might have disabused foreign cabinets on this score: a quieter
beast than he has shown himself need not be wished for. Still, he has
bellowed, and lashed his tail, and cut a few absurd capers, to show what
he would be at if provoked; but the world has grown too wise to be
terrified by such exhibitions, and quietly settled down to the opinion
that there is nothing to fear from him. Now, how very differently might
all this have been if the Duchess of S. were Ambassador at Paris, and the
Countess of C. at St Petersburg, and Lady N. at Vienna! There would have
been no bluster, no rudeness, no bullying—none of that blundering
about declining a Congress to-day because a Congress “ought to follow a
war,” and proposing one to-morrow, “to prevent a war.” Women despise
logic, and consequently would not stultify it. A temperance apostle is not
likely to adulterate the liquor that he does not drink; and for this
reason, female intelligence would have escaped this “muddle.” Her Ladyship
would have thrown her blandishments over Rechberg—he is now of the
age when men are easy victims—all the little cajoleries and
flatteries of women’s art would have been exerted first to find out, and
then to thwart, his policy. It is notorious that English diplomacy knows
next to nothing through secret agency. Would such be the case if we had
women as envoys? What mystery would stand the assault of a fine lady,
trained and practised by the habits of her daily life?
They tell us that our fox-hunters would form the finest scout-cavalry in
Europe; and I am convinced that a London leader of fashion—I have a
dozen in my eye at this moment—would track an intrigue through all
its stages, and learn its intimate details of place and time and agency,
weeks before a merely male intelligence began to suspect the thing was
possible.
Imagine what a blue-book would be in these times—would there be any
reading could compare with it? We used to admire a certain diplomatist—a
pleasant narrator of court gossip—giving, as he did, little traits
of Kings and Kaisers, and telling us the way in which majesty was
graciously pleased to blow his royal nose. Imagine a female pen engaged on
such themes! What clever and sharp little touches would reveal the whole
tone of a “reception”! We should not be told “His Majesty received me
coldly,” but we would have a beautiful analysis of the royal mind in all
its varied moods of displeasure, concealment, urbanity, reserve, and
deception. Compared with the male version of the same incident, it would
be like Faraday’s report on a case of supposed poisoning beside the
blundering narrative of a country apothecary!
It is a long time—a very long time—before an old country has
energy enough to throw off any of its accustomed ways. It requires the
vigorous assault of young and sturdy intelligences, and, above all,
immense persistence, to effect it.
Light comes very slowly indeed through the fog of centuries’ growth, and
there is hope always when even the faintest flicker of a ray pierces the
Boeotian cloud. Now, for some years back, it may have been remarked that a
sort of suspicion has been breaking on the minds of our rulers, that the
finer, the higher, and subtler organisations of women might find their
suitable sphere of occupation in the diplomatic service.
“I don’t speak German, but I play the German flute,” said the apologetic
gentleman; and so might we say. We don’t engage ladies in diplomacy, but
we employ all the old women of our own sex! Wherever we find a
well-mannered, soft-spoken, fussy old soul, with a taste for fine clothes
and fine dinners, fond of court festivities, and heart and soul devoted to
royalties, we promote him. If he speak French tolerably, we make him a
Minister; if he be fluent, an Envoy Extraordinary.
I remember an old medical lecturer in Dublin formerly, who used to hold
forth on the Materia Medica in the hall of the University, and who, seeing
a “student” whose studies had been for some time before pursued in
Germany, appear in the lecture-room, with a note-book and pen to take down
the lecture—
“Tell that young gentleman,” said the Professor, “to put up his writing
materials, for there’s not one word he’ll hear from me that he’ll not find
in the oldest editions of the ‘Dublin Pharmacopoeia.’” In the same spirit
our diplomatists may sneer at the call for blue-books. We have all of us
had the whole thing already in the ‘Times;’ and why? Because we choose to
employ unsuitable tools. We want to shave with a hatchet instead of a
razor; for be it remarked, as no things are so essentially unlike as those
that have a certain resemblance, there is nothing in nature so remote from
the truly feminine finesse as the mind of a male “old woman.”
It is simply to the flaws and failures of female intelligence that the
parallel applies. A very pleasant old parson, whom I knew when I was a
boy, and who used to discourse to me much about Edmund Burke and Gavin
Hamilton, told me once that he met old Primate Stewart one day returning
from a visitation, and turned his horse round to accompany the carriage
for some distance. “Doctor G.,” said the Archbishop, “you remind me most
strikingly of my friend Paley.”
“Oh, my Lord, it is too much honour: I have not the shadow of a pretension
to such distinction.”
“Well, sir, it is true; I have Paley before me as I look at you.”
“I am overwhelmed by your Lordship’s flattery.”
“Yes, sir; Paley rode just such another broken-down old grey nag as that.”
Do not therefore disparage my plan for the employment of women in
diplomacy by any ungenerous comparisons with the elderly ladies at present
engaged in it. This would be as unfair as it is ungallant.
There are a variety of minor considerations which I might press into the
cause, but some of them would appeal less to the general mind than to the
official, and I omit them—merely observing what facilities it would
give for the despatch of business, if the Minister, besieged, as he often
now is, by lady-applicants for a husband’s promotion, instead of the
tedious inquiry, “Who is Mr D.?—where has he been?—what has he
done?—what is he capable of?” could simply say, “Make Mrs T. Third
Secretary at Stuttgart, and send Mrs O’Dowd as Vice-Consul to Simoom!”
A MASTERLY INACTIVITY.
It is no small privilege to you “gentlemen of England who live at home at
ease,” or otherwise, that you cannot hear how the whole Continent is
talking of you at this moment. We have, as a nation, no small share of
self-sufficiency and self-esteem. If we do not thank God for it, we are
right well pleased to know that we are not like that Publican there, “who
eats garlic, or carries a stiletto, or knouts his servants, or indulges in
any other taste or pastime of ‘the confounded foreigner.’” The ‘Times’
proclaims how infinitely superior we are every morning; and each traveller—John
Murray in hand—expounds in his bad French, that an Englishman is the
only European native brought up in the knowledge of truth and the
wash-tub.
By dint of time, iteration, and a considerable amount of that same French
I speak of, an article expressly manufactured for exportation, we really
did at last persuade patient and suffering Europe to take us at our own
valuation. We got them to believe that—with certain little
peculiarities, certain lesser vices, rather amiable than otherwise—no
nation, ancient or modern, could approach us. That we were at one and the
same time the richest, the strongest, the most honourable, the most
courageous people recorded in history; and not alone this, but the
politest and the most conciliatory, with the largest coal-fields and the
best cookery in Europe. Now, there is nothing more damaging than the
witness who proves too much. Miss Edgeworth tells us somewhere, I think,
of an Irish peer who, travelling in France with a negro servant, directed
him, if questioned on the subject, always to say his master was a
Frenchman. He was punctiliously faithful to his orders; but whenever he
said, “My massa a Frenchman,” he always added, “So am I.”
In the same spirit has Bull gone and damaged himself abroad. He might have
enjoyed an unlimited credit for his stories of English wealth and
greatness—how big was our fleet, and how bitter our beer; he might
have rung the changes over our just pride in our insular position and our
income-tax, and none dared to dispute him; but when, in the warm
expansiveness of his enthusiasm, he proceeded to say, not merely that we
dressed better and dined better than the foreigner, but that our manners
were more polished, our address more insinuating, and the amiability of
our whole social tone more conspicuous, “Mossoo,” taking him to represent
all from Stockholm to Sicily, began to examine for himself, and after some
hesitation to ask, “What if the wealth be only like the politeness? What
if the national character be about as rude as the cookery? What if English
morality turn out to be a jumble and confusion, very like English-French?
Who is to tell us that the coal-fields may not be as easily exhausted as
the civility?” These were very ugly doubts, and for some years back
foreigners, after that slow fashion in which public opinion moves amongst
them, have been turning them over and over, but in a manner that showed a
great revulsion had taken place on the Continent with regard to the
estimate of England.
A nation usually judges another nation by the individuals and by the
Government. Now it is no calumny to say that, taking them en masse,
the English who travel abroad, whether it be from indifference, from
indolence, from a rooted confidence in their own superiority, or from some
defect in character, neither win favour for themselves, nor affection for
their country from foreigners. So long as we were looked upon, however, as
colossal in wealth and power, a certain rude and abrupt demeanour was
taken as the type of a people too practical to be polished. It grew to be
thought that intense activity and untiring energy had no time to bestow on
mere forms. When, however, a suspicion began to get abroad—it was a
cloud no bigger at first than a man’s hand—that if we had the money
it was to hoard it, and if we had the power it was to withhold its
exercise; that we wanted, in fact, to impose on the world by the menace of
a force we never meant to employ, and to rule Europe as great financiers
“bear” the Stock Exchange—then, and then for the first time, there
arose that cry against England as a sham and an imposition, of which, as I
said before, it is very pleasant for you at home if the sounds have not
reached you.
All our late policy has led to this. Ever ready to join with France, we
always leave her in the lurch. We went with her to Mexico, and left her
when she landed. We did our utmost to launch her into a war for Poland, in
which we had never the slightest intention of joining. Always prompt for
the initiative, we stop short immediately after. I have a friend who says,
“I am very fond of going to church, but I don’t like going in.” This is
exactly the case of England. She won’t go in.
Now, I am fully persuaded it would have been a mistake to have joined in
the Mexican campaign. I cannot imagine such a congeries of blunders as a
war for the Poles. But why entertain these questions? Why discuss them in
cabinets, and debate them in councils? Why convey the false impression
that you are indignant when you are indifferent, or feel sympathy for
sufferings of which you will do nothing but talk?
“Masterly inactivity” was as unlucky a phrase as ever was coined. It has
led small statesmanship into innumerable blunders, and made second-rate
politicians fancy that whenever they folded their arms they were
dignified. To obtain the credit for a masterly inactivity, it is first of
all essential you should show that you could do something very great if
you would. There would be no credit in a man born deaf and dumb having
observed a discreet silence. To give England, therefore, the prestige for
this high quality, it was necessary that she should seem to bestir
herself. The British lion must have got up, rolled his eyes fearfully, and
even lashed his tail, before he resolved on the masterly inactivity of
lying down again.
In Knickerbocker’s ‘History of New York’ we have a very graphic
description of the ship in which the first Dutch explorers sailed for the
shores of North America. “The vessel was called the Goede Vrouw
(Good Woman), a compliment to the wife of the President of the West India
Company, who was allowed by every one, except her husband, to be a
sweet-tempered lady—when not in liquor. It was, in truth, a gallant
vessel of the most approved Dutch construction—made by the ablest
ship-carpenters of Amsterdam, who, as is well known, always model their
ships after the fair forms of their countrywomen. Accordingly, it had one
hundred feet in the keel, one hundred feet in the beam, and one hundred
feet from the bottom of the stern-post to the taffrel. Like the beauteous
model, who was declared to be the greatest belle of Amsterdam, it was full
in the bows, with a pair of enormous cat-heads, a copper-bottom, and
withal a prodigious poop.”
It is, however, with her sailing qualities we are more interested than
with her build. “Thus she made as much lee-way as head-way—could get
along nearly as fast with the wind ahead as at poop, and was particularly
great in a calm.” Would not one say, in reading this description, that the
humorist was giving prophetically a picture of the England of the present
day, making as much lee-way as head-way, none the better, wherever the
winds came from, and only great in a calm? The very last touch he gives is
exquisite. “Thus gallantly furnished, she floated out of harbour sideways,
like a majestic goose.” Can anything be more perfect; can anything more
neatly typify the course the vessel of the State is taking, “floating out
sideways, like a majestic goose!” amidst the jeers and mockeries of
beholding Europe.
Our whole policy consists in putting forward some hypothetical case, in
which, if certain other states were to do something which would cause
another country to do something else, then England would be found in that
case—— God forgive me!
I was going to quote some of that balderdash which reminds one of ‘The
Rivals,’ where Acres says, “If you had called me a poltroon, Sir Lucas!”
“Well, sir, and if I had?”
“In that case I should have thought you a very ill-bred man.”
See what it is to have a literary Foreign Secretary; see how he goes back
to our great writers, not alone for his style, but his statesmanship. We
have been insulted, mocked, and sneered at; our national honour derided,
our national strength defied; but we are told it is all right: our policy
is a “masterly inactivity,” and the Funds are at ninety-one and
one-eighth!
The ‘Times.’ too, is of the same cheery and encouraging spirit, and
philosophically looks on the misfortunes of our friends pretty much as
friends’ misfortunes are usually regarded in life—occasions for a
tender pity, and a hopeful trust in Providence. Let them—the writer
speaks of the Allied armies—let them go on in the career of rapine
and cruelty; let them ravage the Duchies and dismember Denmark; but a time
will come when the terrible example of unlawful aggression shall be
retorted upon themselves, and the sorrows of Schleswig be expiated on the
soil of the Fatherland.
“They are going to hang Larry,” cried the wife of a condemned felon to the
lawyer, who had hurried into court, having totally forgotten he had ever
engaged to defend the prisoner.
“Let them hang him, and I’ll make it the dearest hanging ever they
hanged.”
These may be words of comfort in Downing Street. I wonder what the Danes
think of them?
A NEW HANSARD.
There is an annual publication called the ‘Wreck Register,’ which probably
few of us have ever seen, if even heard of. Its object is to record all
the wrecks which have occurred during the preceding year, accompanying the
narrative by such remarks or observations as may contribute to explain
each catastrophe, or offer likelihood of prevention in future. It is,
though thoroughly divested of any sensational character, one of the
dreariest volumes one can take up. Disaster follows disaster so fast, that
at length the reader begins to imagine that shipwreck is the all but
invariable event of a voyage, and that they who cross the ocean in safety
are the lucky mortals of humanity.
Fortunately, however, long as the catalogue of misfortune is, this is not
the case, and we have the satisfaction of learning that the percentage of
loss is decreasing with every year. The higher knowledge and attainments
of merchant captains, and the increase of refuge harbours, are the chief
sources of this security. The old ignorance, in which a degree or two of
latitude more or less was a light error in a ship’s reckoning, is now
unheard of, and they who command merchant-ships in our day are a very well
informed and superior order of men. With reference to the conduct and
capacity of these captains, this ‘Wreck Register,’ is a very instructive
publication. If, for instance, you find that Captain Brace, who was
wrecked on the Azores in ‘52, was again waterlogged at sea in ‘61, and ran
into an iceberg off Newfoundland in ‘62, you begin, mayhap unfairly, to
couple him too closely with disaster, and you turn to the inquest over his
calamities to see what estimate was formed of his conduct. You learn,
possibly, that in one case he was admonished to more caution; in another,
honourably acquitted; and in the last instance smartly reprimanded, and
his certificate suspended for six months or a year. Now, though you have
never heard of Captain Brace in your life, nor are probably likely to
encounter him on sea or land, you cannot avoid a certain sense of relief
at the thought that so unlucky a commander, to say the least of it, is not
likely for a while to imperil more lives, and that the warning impressed
by his fate will also be a salutary lesson to many others.
It was in reflecting over this system of inquiry and sentence, that it
occurred to me what to admirable thing it would be to introduce the ‘Wreck
Register’ into politics, and to have a yearly record of all parliamentary
shipwrecks; all the bills that foundered, the motions that were stranded,
the amendments lost in a fog!—to be able to look back and reflect
over the causes of these disasters, investigating patiently how and why
and where they happened, and asking ourselves, Have we any better security
for the future? are we better acquainted with the currents, the soundings,
or the headlands? and, above all, what amount of blame, if any, is
attributable to the commander?
If we find, for instance, that the barque Young Reform, no matter how
carefully fitted out for sea—new sheathed and coppered, with
bran-new canvass, and a very likely crew on board—never leaves the
port that she does not come back crippled; and that old and experienced
captains, however confidently they may take the command at first, frankly
own that they’ll never put foot in her again, you very naturally begin to
suspect that there’s something wrong in her build. She is either too
unwieldy, like the Great Eastern, or she is too long to turn well, or she
requires such incessant repair; or, most fatal of all, she is entered for
a trade where nobody wants her; and therefore you resolve that, come what
will, you’ll avoid her.
What an inestimable benefit to the student of politics would a few such
brief notices be, instead of sending him, as we send him now, to the
dreary pages of Hansard! Imagine what a neat system of mnemonics would
grow out of the plan, when, instead of poring over interminable columns of
tiresome repetition, you had the whole narrative in few words—thus:
“Barque Reform, John Russell, commander, lost A.D. 1854 The Commissioners
seeing that this vessel was built for the most part of old materials,
totally unseaworthy, are of opinion that she ought not to have sailed at
all; and severely censure the commander, J. R, for foolhardiness and
obstinacy, he having, as it has been proved, acted in entire opposition to
‘his owners.’ On the pressing recommendation, however, of the owners, and
at the representation that E. has been long in the service, and is,
although too self-confident, a very respectable man, his certificate has
been restored to him.”
Lower down comes the entry:—
“The Young Reform.—This was a full-rigged ship, in great part
constructed on the lines of the barque lost in 1854. She sailed on the
28th February 1859, commanded by Captain Dizzy. No insurance could be
effected upon her on any terms, as the crew were chiefly apprentices, and
a very mutinous spirit aboard. She put back, completely crippled, after
three days’ stormy weather; and though the commander averred that some
enemies of his owners had laid down false buoys in the channel, he was not
listened to by the Commissioners, who withheld his certificate. Has never
been employed since, and his case by many considered a very hard one.”
Of course, all the small class of coasting vessels—railroad bills
and suchlike—suffer great losses. They are usually ill-found and
badly manned; but now and then we come upon curious escapes, where a
measure slips through unobserved, like a blockade-runner; and it is ten to
one in such cases they have that crafty old pilot Pam on board, who has
been more than fifty years at sea, and is as wide awake now as on his
first day.
What analogies press in on every hand! Look at the way each party bids for
and buys up the old materials of the other, fancying they have some
“lines” of their own that will turn out a clipper to beat everything. And
think of those “Sailors’ Homes,” where old salts chew their quids at ease—those
snug permanent Under-Secretaryships, those pleasant asylums in the
Treasury or the Mint! Picture to your mind the dark den in Downing Street,
where the Whipper-in confers in secret, and have you not at once before
you the shipping-office, and the crimp, and the “ordinary seaman” higgling
for an extra ten shillings of wages, or begging that his grog may not be
watered? And, last of all, see the old lighthouse-keepers, the veteran
First Clerks who serve every Administration, and keep their lamps bright
for all parties—a fine set of fellows in their way, though some
people will tell you that they have their favourites too, and are not so
brisk about the fog-signals if they don’t like the skipper.
I think I have done enough to show that such a work as I speak of would
redound to public benefit; and I only ask, if my suggestion be approved
of, that I may be remembered as the inventor, and not treated as Admiralty
Lords do the constructors of new targets, testing the metal and torturing
the man. Bear in mind, therefore, if the political ‘Wreck Register’ be
ever carried into execution, its device must be “O’Dowdius fecit.”
It might not be amiss, in the spirit that has suggested this improvement,
to organise in connection with the proceedings of the House a code of
signals on the plan of Admiral Fitzroy’s storm-signals, and which, from
the great tower, or some similar eminence, might acquaint members what
necessity for their presence existed. Fancy, for instance, the relief an
honourable gentleman would experience on seeing the fine-weather flag up,
and knowing thereby that something of no moment was being discussed—a
local railroad, a bill to enable some one to marry his grandmother, or a
measure for Ireland! Imagine the fog-signal flying, and see how
instantaneously it would he apprehended that D. G. was asking the noble
Lord at the head of the Government a question so intensely absurd as to
show a state of obscurity in his own faculties, in comparison to which fog
is a thin atmosphere! Or mark what excitement would be felt as the
storm-drum was hoisted, telling how the Government craft was being
buffeted and knocked about, and the lifeboat of the Opposition manned to
take charge of the ship if abandoned! What a mercy to those poor,
hard-worked, harassed, and wearied “whips”! what a saving there would be
in club-frequenting and in cab-hire! Now would the lounger, as he strolled
along Pall-Mall, say, “No need to hurry.” “light airs of wind from the
east” means a member for Galway and some balderdash about the Greeks.
“Thick weather in the Channel” implies troubles in Ireland—nothing
very new or interesting. “Dirty weather to the east’ard” would show
mischief in the Danubian provinces, and a general sense of unquiet in the
regions of the Sultan Redcliffe. These are hints which I have not
patented, and the chances are that “My Lords” will speedily adopt them,
and call them their own.
FOREIGN CLUBS.
How is it, will any one tell me, that all foreign Clubs are so ineffably
stupid? I do not suspect that we English are pre-eminent for social gifts;
and yet we are the only nation that furnishes clubable men. Frenchmen are
wittier, Germans profounder, Russians—externally at least—more
courteous and accommodating; and yet their Clubs are mere tripots—gambling
establishments; and, except play, no other feature of Club-life is to be
found in them.
To give a Club its peculiar “cachet”—its, so to say, trade-mark—you
require a class of men who make the Club their home, and whose interest it
is that all the internal arrangements should be as perfect, as well
ordered, and frictionless as may be. Good furniture, good servants, good
lighting, good cookery, well-adjusted temperature, and a well-chosen
cellar, are all essentials. In a word, the Club is to be the realisation
of what we all think so much of—comfort. Now, how very few
foreigners either understand or care for this! Every one who has travelled
abroad has seen the “Cercle,” or “L’Union,” or whatever its name be, where
men of the highest station—ministers, ambassadors, generals, and
suchlike—met to smoke and play whist, with a sanded floor, a dirty
attendance, and yet no one ever complained. They drank detestable beer,
and inhaled a pestilent atmosphere, and sat in draughts, without a thought
that there was anything to be remedied, or that human skill could or need
contrive anything better for their accommodation.
When these establishments were succeeded by the modern Club, with its
carpeted floor, silk hangings, ormolu lamps, and velvet couches, the
change was made in a pure spirit of Anglomanie; somebody had been over to
London, and come back full of the splendours of Pall-Mall. The work of
imitation, so far as decoration went, was not difficult. Indeed, in some
respects, in this they went beyond us, but there ended the success. The
Club abroad is a room where men gamble and talk of gambling, but no more;
it is not a Club.
For the working of the Club, as for that of constitutional government, a
special class are required. It, is the great masses of the middle ranks in
England, varied enough in fortune, education, habits, and tastes, but
still one in some great condition of a status, that supply the materials
for the work of a parliamentary government; and it is through the supply
of a large community of similar people that Clubs are maintained in their
excellence with us.
For the success of a Club you need a number of men perfectly incapable of
all life save such as the Club supplies; who repair to the Club, not alone
to dine and smoke and sup, and read their paper, but to interchange
thought in that blended half-confidence that the Club imparts; to hear the
gossip of the day told in the spirit of men of their own leanings; to
ascertain what judgments are passed on public events and public characters
by the people they like to agree with;—in fact, to give a sort of
familiar domestic tone to intercourse, suggesting the notion that the Club
is a species of sanctuary where men can talk at their ease. The men who
furnish this category with us are neither young nor old, they are the
middle-aged, retaining some of the spring and elasticity of youth, but far
more inclining to the solidity of riper years. If they frequent the Opera,
it is to a stall, not to the coulisses, they go. They are more
critical than they used to be about their dinners, and they have a
tendency to mix seltzer with their champagne. They have reached that
bourne in which egotism has become an institution; and by the transference
of its working to the Club, they accomplish that marvellous creation by
which each man sees himself and his ways and his wants and his instincts
reflected in a thousand varied shapes.
Now, there are two things no nation of the Continent possesses—Spring,
and middle-aged people. You may be young for a good long spell—some
have been known, by the judicious appliances of art, to keep on for sixty
years or so; but when you do pass the limit, there is no neutral territory—no
mezzo termine. Fall out of the Young Guard, and you must serve as a
Veteran. The levity and frivolity, the absence of all serious interest in
life, which mark the leisure classes abroad, follow men sometimes even to
extreme old age. The successive changes of temperament and taste which we
mark at home have no correlatives abroad. The foreigner inhabits at sixty
the same sort of world he did at six-and-twenty: he does not dance so
much, but he lingers in the ballroom, and he is just as keenly alive to
all the little naughty talk that amused him forty years ago, and folly as
much interested to hear that the world is just as false and as wicked as
it used to be when he was better able to contribute to its frailty and
wickedness.
Not one of these men, with their padded pectorals and dyed whiskers, will
admit that they are of an age to require comfort. They are ardent youths
all of them, turning night into day as of old, and no more sensible of
fatigue from late hours, hot rooms, and dissipation, than they were a
quarter of a century back.
Can you fancy anything less clubable than a set of men like this? You
might as well set before me the stale bon-bons and sugar-plums of a
dessert for a dinner, as ask me to take such people for associates and
companions. The tone of everlasting trifling disgraces even idleness; and
these men contrive in their lives to reverse the laws of physics, since it
is by their very levity that they fall.
The humoristic temperament is the soul of Club-life. It is the keen
appreciation of others in all their varied moods and shades of feeling
that imparts the highest enjoyment to that strange democracy, the Club;
and foreigners are immensely deficient in this element. They are
infinitely readier, smarter, and wittier than Englishmen. They will hit in
an epigram what we would take an hour to embrace in an argument; but for
the racy pleasure of seeing how such a man will listen to this, what such
another will say to that, how far individuality, in fact, will mould and
fashion the news of the day, and assimilate its mental food to its own
digestive powers, there is nothing like the Englishman—and
especially the Englishman of the Club.
There is nothing like Major Pendennis to be found from Trolhatten to
Messina, and yet Pendennis is a class with us; and it is in the
nicely-blended selfishness and complaisance, the egotism and obligingness,
that we find the purest element of Club-life.
The Parisian are the best—far and away the best—of all foreign
Clubs; best in their style of “get-up,” decoration, and arrangement, and
best also in tone and social manner. The St Petersburg Club is the most
gorgeous, the habits the most costly, the play the highest. It is not very
long since that a young Russian noble lost in one evening a sum equal to a
hundred thousand pounds. The Vienna Club is good in its own stiff German
way; but, generally speaking, German Clubs are very ill arranged, dirty,
and comfortless. The Italian are better. Turin, Naples, and Florence have
reasonably good Clubs. Home has nothing but the thing called the English
Club, a poorly-got-up establishment of small whist-players and low
“points.”
It is a very common remark, that costume has a great influence over
people’s conduct, and that the man in his shooting-jacket will
occasionally give way to impulsive outbursts that he had never thought of
yielding to in his white-cravat moments. Whether this be strictly true or
not, there is little doubt that the style and character of the room a man
sits in insensibly affects his manner and his bearing, and that the habits
which would not be deemed strange in the low-ceilinged chamber, with the
sanded floor and the “mutton lights,” would be totally indecorous in the
richly-carpeted room, a blaze of wax-light, and glittering with
decoration. Now this alternating between Club and Café spoils men
utterly. It engenders the worst possible style—a double manner. The
over-stiffness here and the over-ease there are alike faulty.
The great, the fatal defect of all foreign Clubs is, the existence of some
one, perhaps two tyrants, who, by loud talk, swagger, an air of presumed
superiority and affectation of “knowing the whole thing,” browbeat and
ride rough-shod over all their fellows. It is in the want of that
wholesome corrective, public opinion, that this pestilence is possible. Of
public opinion the Continent knows next to nothing in any shape; and yet
it is by the unwritten judgments of such a tribunal that society is guided
in England, and the same law that discourages the bully supports and
encourages the timid, without either the one or the other having the
slightest power to corrupt the court, or coerce its decrees. Club-life is,
in a way, the normal school for parliamentary demeanour; and until
foreigners understand the Club, they will never comprehend the etiquette
of the “Chamber.”
A HINT FOR C. S. EXAMINERS.
I have frequently heard medical men declare that no test of a candidate’s
fitness to be admitted as a physician was equal to a brief examination at
the bedside of a sick man. To be able to say, “There is a patient; tell us
his malady, and what you will do for it,” was infinitely better than long
hours spent in exploring questions of minute anatomy and theoretical
physic. In fact, for all practical purposes, it was more than likely he
would be the best who would make the least brilliant figure in an
examination; and the man whose studies had familiarised him with
everything from Galen to John Hunter, would cut just as sorry a figure if
called on to treat a case of actual malady.
It cannot possibly be otherwise. All that mere examination can effect, is
to investigate whether an individual has duly prepared himself for the
discharge of certain functions; but it never can presume to ascertain
whether the person is one fitted by nature, by habit, by taste, or
inclination, for the duties before him. Why, the student who may answer
the most abstruse questions in anatomy, may himself have nerves so weak as
to faint at the sight of blood. The physician who has Paracelsus by heart,
may be so deficient in that tact of eye, or ear, or touch, as to render
his learning good for nothing. Half an hour in an hospital would, however,
test these qualities. You would at once see whether the candidate was a
mere mass of book-learning, or whether he was one skilled in the aspect of
disease, trained to observe and note all the indications of malady, and
able even instantaneously to pronounce upon the gravity of a case before
him. This is exactly what you want. No examination of a man’s biceps and
deltoid, the breadth of his chest or the strength of his legs, would tell
you whether he was a good swimmer—five minutes in deep water would,
however, decide the matter.
Now, I shall not multiply arguments to prove my position. I desire to be
practical in these “O’Dowdiana,” and I strive not to be prosy. What I
would like, then, is to introduce this system of—let us call it—Test-examination,
into the Civil Service.
I have the highest respect for the pedagogues of Burlington House. I think
highly of Ollendorff and I believe Colenso’s Arithmetic a great
institution. I venerate the men who invent the impossible questions; but I
own I have the humblest opinion of those who answer them. I’d as soon take
a circus-horse, trained to fire a pistol and sit down like a dog, to carry
me across a stiff country, as I’d select one of these fellows for an
employ which required energy, activity, or ready-wittedness. There is no
such inefficiency as self-sufficiency; and this is the very quality
instilled by the whole system. Ask the veterans of the Admiralty, the War
Office, the Board of Trade, and the Customs, and you will get but the same
report, that for thorough incompetency and inordinate conceit there is
nothing like the prize candidate of a Civil Service examination. Take my
word for it, you could not find a worse pointer than the poodle which
would pick you out all the letters of the alphabet.
What I should therefore suggest is, to introduce into the Civil Service
something analogous to this clinical examination; something that might
test the practical fitness of the candidate, and show, not whether the man
has been well prepared by a “grinder,” but whether he be a heaven-born
tide-waiter, one of Nature’s own gaugers or vice-consuls.
I know it is not easy to do this in all cases. There are employments, too,
wherein it is not called for. Mere clerkship, for instance, is an
occupation of such uniformity that a man is just like a sewing-machine,
and where, the work being adjusted to him, he performs it as a matter of
routine. There are, however, stations which are more or less provocative
of tact and ready-wittedness, and which require those qualities which
schoolmasters cannot give nor Civil Service examiners take away; such as
tact, promptitude, quickness in emergency, good-natured ease, patience,
and pluck above all. These, I say, are great gifts, and it would be well
if we knew how to find them. Let us take, by way of illustration, the
Messenger Service. These Foreign Office Mercuries, who travel the whole
globe at a pace only short of the telegraph, are wonderful fellows, and
must of necessity be very variously endowed. What capital sleepers, and
yet how easily awakened! What a deal of bumping must their heads be equal
to! What an indifference must they be endowed with to bad roads and bad
dinners, bad servants and bad smells! How patient they must be here—how
peremptory there! How they must train their stomach to long fastings, and
their skins to little soap! What can Civil Service examination discover of
all or any of these aptitudes? Is it written in Ollendorf, think you, how
many hours a man can sit in a caleche? Will decimal fractions support his
back or strengthen his lumbar vertebrae? What system of inquiry will
declare whether the weary traveller will not oversleep himself, or smash
the head of his postilion for not awaking him at a frontier? How will you
test readiness, endurance, politeness, familiarity with ‘Bradshaw’ and
Continental moneys?
I think I have hit on a plan for this, suggested to me, I frankly own, by
analogy with the clinical system. I would lay out the Green Park—it
is convenient to Downing Street, and well suited to the purpose—as a
map of Europe, marking out the boundaries of each country, and stationing
posts to represent capital cities. At certain frontiers I would station
representatives of the different nations as distinctly marked as I could
procure them: that is to say, I’d have a very polite Frenchman, a very
rude and insolent Prussian, a sulky Belgian, a roguish Italian, and an
extremely dirty Russian. Leicester Square could supply all. It being all
duly prepared, I’d start my candidate, with a heavy bag filled with its
usual contents of, let us say, a large box of cigars, a set of fire-irons,
twenty pots of preserved meats, a case of stuffed birds, four
cricket-balls, and a photograph machine, some blue-books, and a dozen of
blacking. I’d start him with this, saying simply, “Vienna, calling at
Stuttgart and Turin;” not a word more; and then I’d watch my man—how
he’d cross the Channel—how he’d cajole Moossoo—and whether
he’d make straight for the Rhine or get entangled in Belgian railroads.
I’d soon see how he dealt with the embarrassments of the roads and
relished the bad diet; and not alone would I test him by hardships and
hunger, fatigue and occasional upsets; but I’d try his powers of
self-resistance by surrounding him with dissolute young attachés
given to blind hookey and lansquenet. I’d have him invited to ravishing
orgies, and tempted in as many ways as St Anthony; and all these after
long privations. Then, I’d have him kept waiting either under a blazing
sun or a deep snow, or both alternately, to test his cerebral
organisation; and I’d try him with impure drinking water and damp sheets;
and, last of all, on his return, I’d make him pass his accounts before
some old monster of official savagery, who would repeatedly impugn his
honesty, call out for vouchers, and d—n his eyes. The man “who came
out strong” after all these difficulties I would accept as fully equal to
his responsibilities, for it would not be alone in intellectuals he had
been tested: the man’s temper, his patience, his powers of endurance, his
physical strength, his resources in emergency, his readiness to meet
difficulty, and, last of all, his self-devotion in matters of official
discipline, enabling him to combine with all the noble qualities of a man
the submissive attractions of a spaniel.
“Are you sure,” asks some one, “that all these graces and accomplishments
can be had for £500 per annum?” Not a doubt of it. It is a cheap age we
live in; and if you wanted a shipload of clever fellows for a new colony,
I’d engage to supply you on easier terms than with the same number of
gardeners or strong-boned housemaids.
Last of all, this scheme might be made no small attraction in this
economical era—what is called self-supporting; for the public might
be admitted to paid seats, whence they could learn European geography by a
new and easy method. “Families admitted at a reduced rate—Schools
and Seminaries half-price.”
OF SOME OLD DOGS IN OFFICE.
Whenever the Budget comes on for discussion there are some three or four
speakers, of whom Mr Williams of Lambeth is sure to be one, ready to
suggest certain obvious economies by the suppression of some foreign
missions, such as Dresden, Hanover, Stuttgart, &c. They have not, it
is true, anything forcible or pungent to say on the subject; but as they
say the same thing every year, the chances are that, on the drip-drip
principle, they will at last succeed either in abolishing these
appointments, or reducing the salaries of those who hold them.
Ministers of course defend them, and Opposition leaders, who hope one day
to be Ministers, will also blandly say a word or two in their favour. For
my own part, I don’t think the country cares much about the matter, or
interests itself more deeply who drones away life at Hanover than who
occupies an apartment at Hampton Court. In each case it is a sort of
dowager asylum, where antiquated respectability may rest and be thankful.
The occupants of these snug berths, however far from England—at
least in so far as regards any knowledge of public opinion—are sure
to be greatly alarmed at these suggestions for their suppression. Poor
pigeons! if you only knew what a sorry sportsman it is who fires at you,
you’d never flutter a wing. Be of good heart, I say. Even if Williams’s
gun go off at all, the recoil may hurt himself, but it will never damage
you. Take my word for it, “the smooth-Bore of Lambeth never hit anything
yet.” This assurance of mine—I have given it scores of times
personally—never gives the comfort that it ought; for these timid
souls, bullied by long dealings with the Office—tormented, as Mr
Carlyle would say, with much First Clerk—grow to be easily
panic-stricken, and have gloomy nightmares of a time when there shall be
no more life-certificates nor any quarter-days.
I cannot enter into their feelings, but I suppose they are reasonable. I
conclude that one would like to have a salary, and to be paid it
punctually. Self-preservation is a law that we all recognise; and some of
these officials may possibly feel that there is no other line of life open
to them, and that, if you take away from them their mission, they will be
poor indeed. You will think me perhaps as absurd as Mrs Nickleby, who
connected roast-pork and canaries, if I confess to you that it is an old
mastiff that my father had when I was a boy that brought these people very
forcibly to my mind. Poor old Turco!—I can’t know how old he was,
but he was nearly blind, exceedingly feeble, intensely stupid, and much
given to sleep. Still, whenever any one of the family—he didn’t mind
the servants—would go out to the stableyard, he’d rouse himself up,
and, affecting to believe it was an intruder, he’d give a fierce bark or
two, when, discovering his error, he’d wag his tail and go back to his den—all
this being evidently done to show that he was as vigilant as ever—a
sort of protest, that said, “Don’t believe one word about my being blind
and toothless, still less flatter yourself that the place is secure. It
requires all my activity and watchfulness to protect; but go back in
peace, I’m ready for them.”
Now, this is exactly what Turco is doing at Munich and Dresden. Whenever
Williams comes out with a hint that he is not wanted, Turco makes a
furious noise, rushes here and there after a turkey-cock if he can find
one, and thoroughly satisfies the family that he is an invaluable beast,
and could not be dispensed with.
Like Turco, too, who always barked, or tried to bark, whenever he heard
any noise or commotion going on outside, these people are sure to make an
uproar if there be any excitement in their neighbourhood. No sooner did
Schleswig-Holstein begin to trouble the world, than despatches began to
pour in from places that a few weeks before even the messengers scarcely
knew on the map. They related interviews with unknown princes and
unheard-of ministers, and spoke of hopes, fears, wishes, and anxieties of
people who had not, to our appreciation, a more palpable existence than
the creatures of the heathen mythology! Much grumbling, and sore of ear,
Williams goes back to his kennel.
“What! suppress the mission at Hohen-Schwein-stadt, when I hold here,”
exclaims the Minister, “the admirable report of our diplomatic agent on
the state of public feeling in that important capital? Will the honourable
gentleman, to whose long experience of foreign politics I am ready to bow,
inform me how the relations of England with the Continent are to be
carried on unless through the intervention of such appointments? Can the
honourable member for ———” (a shipowner, perhaps) “carry
on his great and important business without agencies? Can the honourable
gentleman himself” (a brewer) “be certain that the invigorating and
admirable produce of his manufacture will attain the celebrity that it
merits, or become the daily beverage of countless thousands in the
tropics, unassisted by those aids which to commerce or diplomacy are alike
indispensable?” This is very like the Premier’s eloquence. I almost think
I am listening to him, and even see the smile of triumph with which he
appeals at the peroration to his friends to cheer him. Turco is safe this
time; and, better still, he need never bark again till next Easter and
another Budget.
It is a very curious thing—it opens a whole realm of speculation—how
small and few are the devices of humanity. We fancy we are progressing
simply because we change. We give up alchemy, and we believe in medicine;
we scout witchcraft, and we take to spirit-rapping; and instead of
monasteries and monks, we have missions and plenipotentiaries. If it be a
fine thing to die for one’s country, it’s a pleasant one to live for it;
to know that you inhabit an impenetrable retreat, which no “Own
Correspondents” ever invade, and where, if it was not for Williams, no
sense of fear or alarm could come to disturb the tranquil surface of a
stagnant existence.
It is astonishing, too, what a wholesome dread and apprehension of England
and English power is maintained through the means of these small legations
in secluded spots of the Continent, in remote little duchies, without
trade or commerce, far away from the sea, where no one ever heard of
imports or exports, and the name of Gladstone had never been spoken. In
such places as these, a meddlesome old envoy, with plenty of spare time on
hand, often gets us thoroughly hated, always referring to England as a
sort of court of last appeal on every question, social, moral, religious,
or political, and dimly alluding to Lord Palmerston as a kind of
Rhadamanthus, whose judgments fall heavily on ill-doers.
The helpless hopeless condition of small states in all such conflicts was
actually pitiable. The poor little trembling King Charles dog in the cage
of the lion, and who felt that he only lived on sufferance, was the type
of them. I remember an incident which occurred some years ago at the Bagni
di Lucca, which will illustrate what I mean. An English stranger at one of
the hotels, after washing his hands, threw his basinful of soap-and-water
out of the window just as the Grand-duke was passing, deluging his
imperial highness from head to foot. The stranger hurried at once to the
street, and, throwing himself before the dripping sovereign, made the most
humble and apologetic excuses for his act; but the Grand-duke stopped him
short at once, saying, “There, there! say no more of it: don’t mention the
matter to any one, or I shall get into a correspondence with Palmerston,
and be compelled to pay a round sum to you for damages!”
After all, one could say for these small posts in diplomacy what, I think
it was Croker said for certain rotten boroughs in former days, “If you had
not had such posts, you would have lost the services of a number of able
and instructive men, who, entering public life by the small door, are sure
to leave it by the grand entrance.”
These small missions are very often charming centres of society in places
one would scarcely hope for it; and from these little-known legations,
every now and then, issue men whom it would not be safe for Williams to
bark at, and whom, even if he were rabid, he would not bite.
DECLINE OF THE DRAMA.
What a number of ingenious reasons have been latterly given for the
decline of the Drama, and the decrease of interest now felt for the stage.
Some aver that people are nowadays too cultivated, too highly educated, to
take pleasure in a play; others opine that the novel has supplanted the
drama; others again declare that it is the prevalence of a religious
sentiment on the subject that has damaged theatrical representation. For
my own part, I take a totally different view of the subject. My notion is
this: the world will never pay a high price for an inferior article, if it
can obtain a first-rate one for nothing; in other words, people are come
to the conclusion that the best actors are not to be found on the boards
of the Haymarket or the Adelphi, but in the world at large—at the
Exchange, in the parks, on railroads or river-steamers, at the soirées of
learned societies, in Parliament, at Civic dinners or Episcopal
visitations.
Why has the masquerade ceased to interest and amuse? Simply because no
travestie of costume, no change of condition, is so strikingly ludicrous
as what we see on every side of us. The illiterate man with the revenue of
a prince; the millionaire who cannot write his name, and whom yesterday we
saw as a navvy; the Emperor who, a few years back, lodged over the
bootmaker’s; the out-at-elbow followers of imperial fortune, now raised to
the highest splendour, and dispensing hospitalities more than regal in
magnificence;—these are the spectacles which make the masquerade a
tiresome mockery; and it is exactly because we get the veritable article
for nothing that we neither seek playhouse nor ballroom, but go out into
the streets and highways for our drama, and take our Kembles and Macreadys
as we find them at taverns, at railway-stations, on the grassy slopes of
Malvern, or the breezy cliffs of Brighton. Once admit that the wild-flower
plucked at random has more true delicacy of tint and elegance of form, and
there is no going back to the tasteless mockery of artificial wax and
wire. The broad boards of real life are the true stage; and he who cannot
find matter of interest or amusement in the piece performed, may rely upon
it that the cause is in himself, and not in the drama. Some will say, The
world is just what it always was. People are no more fictitious now than
at any other time. There was always, and there will be always, a certain
amount of false pretension in life which you may, if you like, call
acting. And to this I demur in toto, and assert that as every age
has its peculiar stamp of military glory, or money-seeking, or religious
fervour, or dissipation, or scientific discovery, or unprofitable
trifling, so the mark of our own time will be found to be its thorough
unreality. Every one is in travestie. Selfishness is got up to play
philanthropy, apathy to perform zeal, intense self-seeking goes in for
love of country; and, to crown all, one of the most ordinary and vulgar
minds of all Europe now directs and disposes of the fate and fortunes of
all Christendom.
Daily habit familiarises us with the acting of the barrister. His generous
trustfulness, his love of all that is good, his scorn for Vice, his noble
pity, and the withering sarcasm with which he scathes the ill-doer, we
know, can be had, in common cases, for ten pounds ten shillings; and five
times as much will enlist in our service the same qualities in a less
diluted form; while, by quadrupling the latter sum, we arrive at a
self-devotion before which brotherly love pales, and old friendships seem
a cold and selfish indifferentism. We had contracted for this man’s
acuteness, his subtlety, his quick perception, and his ready-wittedness;
but he gives, besides these, his hearty trustfulness, his faith in our
honour, his conviction in our integrity: he knows our motives; he has been
inside our bosom, and comes out to declare that all is pure and spotless
there; and he does this with a trembling lip and a swelling throat, the
sweat on his brow and the tear in his eye, it being all the while a matter
of mere accident that he had not been engaged on the opposite side, and
all the love he bears us been “briefed” for the defendant.
Look at the physician, too. Who is it, then, enters the sick-room with the
footfall of a cat, and draws our curtain as gently as a zephyr might stir
a rose-leaf, whose tender accents fall softly on our ear, and who asks
with the fondest anxiety how we have passed the night? Who is it that
cheers, consoles, encourages, and supports us? Who associates himself with
our sufferings, and winces under our pain, and as suddenly rallies as we
grow better, and joins in our little sickbed drolleries? Who does all
these?—a consummate actor, who takes from thirty to forty daily
“benefits,” and whose performances are paid at a guinea a scene!
The candidate on the hustings, the Government commissioner on his tour of
inspection, the vicar-general of my lord bishop, the admiral on his
station, the minister at the grand-ducal Court, are all good specimens of
common acting—parts which can be filled with very ordinary
capacities, and not above the powers of everyday artists. They conjugate
but one verb, and on its moods and tenses they trade to the end of the
chapter. These men never soar into the heroic regions of the drama; they
infuse no imagination into their parts. They are as unpoetical as a
lord-in-waiting. There are but two stops on their organ. They are bland,
or they are overbearing; they are either beautifully gentle, or they are
terrible in their wrath.
It is a strange feature of our age that the highest walk of the real-life
drama should be given up to the men of money, and that Finance should be
the most suggestive of all that is creative, fanciful, and imaginative.
What a commentary on our era! It is no paradox I pronounce here. The
greatest actor I ever saw, the most consummate artist, was a railroad
contractor; that is, he had more persuasiveness, more of that magnetic
captivation which subordinates reason to mere hope, than any one I ever
listened to. He scorned the pictorial, he despised all landscape effects,
he summoned to his aid no assistance from gorge or mountain, no
deep-bosomed wood or bright eddying river; he was a man of culverts and
cuttings, of quartz and limestone and flint; with a glance he could
estimate traffic, and with the speed of the lightning-flash tell you what
dividend could come of the shares.
It was, however, in results that he was grandiose. Hear him on the theme
of a completed line, a newly-opened tunnel, or a finished viaduct—it
was a Poem! Such a picture of gushing beatitude as he could paint! It was
the golden age—prosperity, happiness, and peace on every side; the
song of the husbandman at his plough mingling with the hum of the village
school; the thousand forms of civilisation, from cheap sugar to penny
serials, that would permeate the land; the peasant studying social science
over his tea, and the railway-guard supping his “cheap Gladstone” as he
speculated on the Antiquity of Man. Never was such an Eden on earth, and
all to be accomplished at the cost of a mere million or two, with a
“limited liability.”
With what a grand contempt this great man talked of the people who busied
themselves in the visionary pursuits of politics or literature, or who
devoted themselves to the Arts or Field-sports! With him earthworks were
the grandest achievements of humanity, and there was no such civiliser as
a parliamentary train. Had he been simply an enthusiast, that fatal false
logic that will track enthusiasm—however it be guided—would
have betrayed him: but the man was not an enthusiast—he was a great
actor; and while to capitalists and speculators he appealed by all the
seductive inducements of profits, premiums, and preference shares, to the
outer and unmoneyed world he made his approaches by a beautiful and
touching philanthropy.
Did he believe in all this? Heaven knows. He talked and acted as if he
did; and though, when I last saw him, he had smashed his banker, ruined
his company, and beggared the shareholders, he was high-hearted, hopeful,
and buoyant as ever. It was a general who had lost a battle, but he meant
to recruit another army. It was some accidental rumour of a war—some
stupid disturbance on the Danube or the Black Sea—that had
frightened capital and made “money tight.” The scheme itself was a
glorious project—an unrivalled investment. Never was there such a
paying line—innumerable towns, filled with a most migratory
population, ever on the move, and only needing to learn the use of certain
luxuries to be constantly in demand of them.
With a good harvest, however, and money easy, if Lord Russell could only
be commonly civil to the Continental Cabinets, all would go well yet. The
bounties of Providence would be diffused over the earth—food would
be cheap, taxation reduced, labour plenty, and “then, sir, these worthy
people shall have their line, if I die for it.”
I find it very hard to believe in Borneo’s love or Othello’s jealousy. I
cannot, let me do all that I will, accept them as real, even in their most
impassioned moments, and yet this other man holds me captive. If I had a
hundred pounds in the world, I’d put it into his scheme, and I really feel
that, in not borrowing the money to make a venture, I am a poor-spirited
creature that has not the courage to win his way to fortune.
And yet these fellows have no aid from dress or make-up. They are not
surrounded with all the appliances that aid a deception. They come to us
in their everyday apparel, and, mayhap, at inopportune moments, when we
are weary, or busy, or out of sorts, to talk of what we are not interested
in, and have no relish for. With their marvellous tact they conquer apathy
and overcome repugnance; they gain a hearing, and they obtain at least
time for more. There is much in what they say that we feel no interest in;
but now and then they do touch a chord that vibrates within us; and
when they do so, it is like magic the instinct with which they know it. It
was that Roman camp, that lead-mine, that trout-stream, or that
paper-mill, did the thing; and the rogue saw it as plainly as if he had a
peep into our brain, and could read our thoughts like a printed book.
These then, I say, are the truly great actors, who walk the boards of life
with unwritten parts, who are the masters of our emotions, even to the
extent of taking away our money, and who demand our trustfulness as a
right not to be denied them.
Now, what a poor piece of mockery, of false tinsel and fringe and folly
and pretence, is your stage-player beside one of these fellows! Who is
going to sit three weary hours at the Haymarket, bored by the assumed
plausibility of the actor, when the real, the actual, the positive thing
that he so poorly simulates is to be met on the railroad, at the station,
in the club, on the chain-pier, or the penny steamer? Is there any one, I
ask, who will pay to see the plaster-cast when he can behold the marble
original for nothing? You say, “Are you going to the masquerade?” and I
answer, “I am at it.” Circumspice! Look at the mock royalties
hunting (Louis XIV. fashion) in the deep woods of Fontainebleau. Look at
haughty lords and ladies—the haughtiest the earth has ever seen—vying
in public testimonies of homage—as we saw a few days ago—to
the very qualities that, if they mean anything, mean the subversion of
their order. Look at the wasteful abundance of a prison dietary, and the
laudable economy which half-starves the workhouse. Look at the famished
curate, with little beyond Greek roots to support him, and see the
millionaire, who can but write his name, with a princely fortune; and do
you want Webster or Buckstone to give these “characters” more point?
Will you take a box for the ‘Comedy of Errors,’ when you can walk into the
Chancery Court for nothing? Will you pay for ‘Much Ado about Nothing,’
when a friendly order can admit you to the House? And as for a ‘New Way to
Pay Old Debts,’ commend me to Commissioner Goulburn in Bankruptcy; while
‘Love’s Last Shift’ is daily performed at the Court of Probate, under the
distinguished patronage of Judge Wills. Is there any need to puzzle one’s
head over the decline of the drama, then? You might as well ask if a
moderate smoker will pay exorbitantly for dried cabbage-leaves, when he
can have prime Cubans for the trouble of taking them!
PENSIONS FOR GOVERNORS.
I do not remember ever to have read more pompons nonsense than was talked
a few days ago in Parliament on the subject of pensions for retired
colonial governors.
On all ordinary occasions the strongest case a man can have with the
British public is to be an ill-used man—that is to say, if you be a
man of mark, or note, or station. To be ill-used, as one poor, friendless,
and ignoble, is no more than the complement of your condition. It is in
the fitness of things that pauperism, which we English have declared to be
illegal, should neither be fondled nor caressed. To be ill-used profitably
there must be something pictorial in your case; it must have its reliefs
of light as well as shade. There must be little touches, a bright “has
been,” sunny spots of a happy past Without the force of these contrasts,
there is no possibility of establishing the grand grievance which is
embodied in ill-usage.
Now, Mr B. C. who brought on this motion was a sorry artist, and the whole
sum and substance of his case was, that as we secured the services of
eminent and able men, we ought to pay them “properly.” Why, in that one
word “properly” lay the whole question. What constitutes proper payment?
Every career in life carries with it some circumstance either of advantage
or the reverse, which either compensates for the loss of a material
benefit, or is requited by some addition of a tangible profit. The
educated man who accepts three hundred a-year in the Church is not
recompensed, or considered to be recompensed, by this miserable pittance.
It is in the respect, the influence, the power, and the reverence that
attach to his calling he is rewarded. Place a layman in the parish beside
him with that income, and mark the difference of their stations! The same
of the soldier. Why or how does seven-and-sixpence diurnally represent one
the equal of the best in any society of the land? Simply by a conventional
treaty, by which we admit that a man, at the loss of so much hard cash,
may enjoy a station which bears no imaginable proportion to his means.
On the other hand, there are large communities who, addressing themselves
to acquire wealth and riches, care very little for the adventitious
advantages of social state. As it is told of Theodore Hook, at a Lord
Mayor’s feast, that he laid down his knife and fork at the fifth course,
and declared “he would take the rest out in money;” so there are scores of
people who “go in” for the actual and the real. They have no sympathy with
those who “take out” their social status partly in condition partly in
cash, as is the case with the curate and the captain.
Almost every man, at his outset in life, makes some computation of how
much his career can pay him in money, how much in the advantages of rank
and station. The bailiff on the estate makes very often a far better
income than the village doctor; but do you believe that Æsculapius would
change places with him for all that? Is not the unbought deference to his
opinion, the respect to his acquirements, the obedience to his counsel,
something in the contract he makes with the world? Does he not recognise,
every day of his life, that he is not measured by the dimensions of the
small house he resides in, or the humble qualities of the hack he rides,
but that he has an acceptance in society totally removed from every
question of his fortune?
In the great lottery we call life, the prizes differ in many things
besides degree. If the man of high ambition determine to strain every
nerve to attain a station of eminence and power, it may be that his
intellectual equal, fonder of ease, more disposed to tranquillity, will
settle down with a career that at the very best will only remove him a
step above poverty; and shall we dare to say that either is wrong? My
brother the Lord Chancellor is a great man, no doubt. The mace is a
splendid club, and the woolsack a most luxurious sofa; but as I walk my
village rounds of a summer’s morning, inhaling perfume of earth and plant,
following with my eye the ever-mounting lark, have I not a lighter heart,
a freer step, a less wearied head? Have I not risen refreshed from sleep?
not nightmared by the cutting sarcasms of some noble earl on my fresh-gilt
coronet, some slighting allusion to my “newness in that place”? Depend
upon it, the grand law of compensation which we recognise throughout
universal nature extends to the artificial conditions of daily life, and
regulates the action and adjusts the inequalities of our social state.
What is a viceroy or a colonial governor? A man of eminence and ability,
doubtless, but who is satisfied to estrange himself from home and country,
and occupy himself with cares and interests totally new and strange to
him, for some five or fifteen thousand pounds a-year, plus a great variety
of other things, which to certain minds unquestionably represent high
value—the—station, the power, the prestige of a great
position, with all its surroundings of deference and homage. Large as his
salary is, it is the least distinctive feature of his high office. In
every attribute of rank the man is a king. In his presence the wisest and
the most gifted do no more than insinuate the words of their wisdom, and
beauty retires curtsying, after a few commonplaces from his lips. Why,
through all the employments of life, who ever attains to the like of this?
His presence is an honour, his notice is fame. To be his guest is a
distinction for a day; to be his host is to be illustrious for a lifetime.
Are these things nothing? Ask the noble earl as he sits in his howdah; ask
my lord marquis as he rides forth with a glittering staff.
Did any one, even Mr B. C. himself, ever imagine that Mr Macready ought to
be pensioned after he had played Cardinal Wolsey? Was it ever proposed,
even in Parliament, that Mr Kean should have a retiring allowance when he
had taken off his robes as Henry IV.? These eminent men were, however,
just as real, just as actual, during their brief hour on the stage, as His
Excellency the Viceroy or the “Lord High.” They were there under a
precisely similar compact. They had to represent a state which had no
permanence, and a power that had no stability. They were to utter words
which would be ridiculous from their lips to-morrow, and to assume a port
and bearing that must be abandoned when they retired to change their
clothes.
It is one of my very oldest memories as a boy that I dined in company with
Charles Kemble. There was a good deal of talking, and a fair share of
wine-drinking. In the course of the former came the question of the French
Revolution of ‘30, and the conduct of the French King on that occasion.
Kemble took no part in the discussion; he listened, or seemed to listen,
filled his glass and emptied it, but never spoke. At last, when each
speaker appeared to have said his say, and the subject approached
exhaustion, the great actor, with the solemnity of a judge in a charge,
and with a grand resonance of voice, said: “I’ll tell you how it is, sirs;
Charles X. has forfeited a—a—a right good engagement!” And
that was exactly the measure that he and all his tribe took, and are now
taking, of kings and rulers—and let us profit by it. The colonial
king has his “engagement;” it is defined exactly like the actor’s. He is
to play certain parts, and for so many nights; he is to strut his hour in
the very finest of properties, and is sure, which the actor is not always,
of a certain amount of applause. No living creature believes seriously in
him, far less he himself, except, perhaps, in some impassioned moment or
other like that in which I once knew Othello so far carried away that he
flung Iago into the orchestra.
Pension Carlisle, pension Storks, if you will; but be just as well as
generous, and take care that you provide for Paul Bedford and Buckstone.
In Archbishop Whately’s ‘Historic Doubts,’ we find that the existence of
the first emperor can be disproven by the very train of argument employed
to deny the apostles. Let me suggest the converse of this mode of
reasoning, and ask, Is there a word you can say for the Viceroy you cannot
equally say for the actor? Have you an argument for him who governs St
Helena that will not equally apply to him who struts his hour at the
Haymarket?
I perceive that the writer of a letter to the ‘Times’ advocates the claims
of the ex-Governors, on the plausible plea that it is exactly the very men
who best represent the dignity of the station—best reflect the
splendour of the Sovereign—who come back poor and penniless from the
high office: while the penurious Governor, who has given dissatisfaction
everywhere, made the colony half rebellious by his narrow economies, and
degraded his station by contemptible savings, comes back wealthy and
affluent—self-pensioned, in fact, and independent.
To meet this end, the writer suggests that the Crown, as advised thereon,
should have a discretionary power of rewarding the well-doer and refusing
the claim of the unmeriting, which would distinctly separate the case of
the worthy servant of the Sovereign from that of him who only employed his
office to enrich himself.
There is a certain shallow—it is a very shallow—plausibility
about this that attracts at first sight; and there would unquestionably be
some force in it, if dinner-giving and hospitalities generally were the
first requisites of a colonial ruler; but I cannot admit this. I cannot
believe that the man who administers India or Canada, or even Jamaica or
Barbadoes, is only an expatriated Lord Mayor. I will not willingly consent
to accept it as qualification for a high trust that a man has a good cook
and an admirable cellar, and an ostentatious tendency to display the
merits of both. Mind, I am no ascetic who say this: I like good dinners; I
like occasionally—only occasionally though—very good dinners.
I feel with a clever countryman who said he liked being asked out to dine,
“it was flattering, and it was nourishing;” but with all this I should
never think of “elevating my host” to the dignity of high statesmanship on
the mere plea of his hospitality.
We have had some able men in our dependencies who were not in the least
given to social enjoyments, who neither understood them for themselves nor
thought of them for others—Sir Charles Napier, for instance. And
who, let me ask, would have lost the services of such a man to the State,
because he had not the tastes of a Sir William Curtis, nor could add a
“Cubitt” to his stature?
All discretionary powers are, besides, abuses. They are the snares and
pitfalls of official jobbery; and there would be no end of bickering and
complaining on the merits of this and the shortcomings of that man. Not to
say that such a system as this writer recommends would place a Government
in the false position of rewarding extravagance and offering a premium for
profusion, and holding up for an example to our colonial fellow-subjects
the very habits and tastes which are the bane and destruction of young
communities.
Can any one imagine a Cabinet Council sitting to determine whether the
ex-Governor of St Helena had or had not entertained the officers of the
509th Foot on their return from India, or whether he of Heligoland had
really fed his family on molluscs during all the time of his
administration, and sold the shells as magnesia? There could be but one
undeniable test of an ex-Governor’s due claim to a pension, since on the
question of a man’s hospitalities evidence would vary to eternity. There
are those whose buttermilk is better than their neighbours’ bordeaux. I
repeat, there could be but one test as to the claim; and as we read in a
police sheet, as a sufficient ground for arrest, the two words, “Drunk and
Disorderly,” so should any commission on pensions accept as valid grounds
for a pension, “Insolvent and a Bankrupt.”
To talk of these men as ill-used, or their case as a hard one, is simply
nonsense! You might as well say that the man you asked to dinner to-day
has a legitimate ground of complaint against you because you have not
invited him to breakfast to-morrow.
A GRUMBLE.
I wonder is the world as pleasant as it used to be? Not to myself, of
course—I neither ask nor expect it; but I mean to those who are in
the same position to enjoy it as I was—years ago. I am delicate
about the figures, for Mrs O’D. occasionally reads these sketches, and
might feel a wifelike antipathy to a record of this nature. I repeat—I
wonder is life as good fun as it was when I made my first acquaintance
with it? My impression is that it is not. I do not presume to say that all
the same elements are not as abundant as heretofore. There are young
people, and witty people, and, better, there are beautiful people, in
abundance. There are great houses as of yore, maintained, perhaps, with
even more than bygone splendour: the horses are as good—the dogs as
good—the trout-streams as well stocked—the grouse as abundant—foreign
travel is more easy—all travel is more facile—there are more
books and more illustrated newspapers; and yet, with all these advantages—very
tangible advantages too—I do not think the present occupants make
the house as pleasant as their fathers did, and for the very simple
reason, that they never try.
Indifferentism is the tone of the day. No one must be eager, pleased,
displeased, interested, or anxious about anything. Life is to be treated
as a tiresome sort of thing, but which is far too much beneath one to be
thought of seriously—a wearisome performance, which good manners
require you should sit out, though nothing obliges you to applaud or even
approve of it. This is the theory, and we have been most successful in
reducing it to practice. We are immensely bored, and we take good care so
shall be our neighbour. Just as we have voted that there is nothing new,
nothing strange, nothing amusing, we defy any one to differ with us, on
pain of pronouncing him vulgar. North American Indians are not more
case-hardened against any show of suffering under torture than are our
well-bred people against any manifestation of showing pleasure in
anything. “It wasn’t bad,” is about the highest expression of our praise;
and I doubt if we would accord more to heaven—if we got there. The
grand test of your modern Englishman is, to bear any amount of amusement
without wincing: no pleasure is to wring a smile from him, nor is any
expectancy to interest, or any unlooked-for event to astonish. He would
admit that “the Governor”—meaning his father—was surprised; he
would concede the fact, as recording some prejudice of a bygone age. As
the tone of manners and observance has grown universal, so has the very
expression of the features. They are intensely like each other. We are
told that a shepherd will know the actual faces of all the sheep in his
flock, distinguishing each from each at a glance. I am curious to know if
the Bishop of London knows even the few lost sheep that browse about
Rotten Eow of an afternoon, and who are so familiar to us in Leech’s
sketches. There they are—whiskered, bearded, and bored; fine-looking
animals in their way, but just as much living creatures in ‘Punch’ as they
are yonder. It is said that they only want the stimulus of a necessity,
something of daring to tempt, or something of difficulty to provoke them,
to be just as bold and energetic as ever their fathers were. I don’t deny
it. I am only complaining of the system which makes sheep of them, reduces
life to a dreary table-land, making the stupid fellows the standard, and
coming down to their level for the sake of uniformity. Formerly they who
had more wit, more smartness, more worldly knowledge than their
neighbours, enjoyed a certain pre-eminence; the flash of their
agreeability lighted up the group they talked in, and they were valued and
sought after. Now the very homage rendered, even in this small way, was at
least a testimony that superiority was recognised and its claims admitted.
What is the case now? Apathy is excellence, and the nearest approach to
insensibility is the greatest eminence attainable.
In the Regency, when George IV. was Prince, the clever talkers certainly
abounded; and men talk well or ill exactly as there is a demand for the
article. The wittiest conversationalist that ever existed would be
powerless in a circle of these modern “Unsurprised ones.” Their vacant
self-possession would put down all the Grattans and Currans and Jeffreys
and Sydney Smiths in the world. I defy the most brilliant, the readiest,
the most genial of talkers to vivify the mass of inert dulness he will
find now at every dinner and in every drawing-room.
The code of modern manners is to make ease the first of all objects; and,
in order that the stupidest man may be at his ease, the ablest is to be
sacrificed. He who could bring vast stores of agreeability to the common
stock must not show his wares, because there are a store of incapables who
have nothing for the market.
They have a saying in Donegal, that “the water is so strong it requires
two whiskies;” but I would ask what amount of “spirits” would enliven this
dreariness; what infusion of pleasantry would make Brown and Jones
endurable when multiplied by what algebraists call an x—an
unknown quantity—of other Browns and Joneses?
We are constantly calling attention to the fact of the influence exerted
over morals and manners in France by the prevailing tone of the lighter
literature, and we mark the increasing licentiousness that has followed
such works as those of Eugene Sue and the younger Dumas. Let us not forget
to look at home, and see if, in the days when the Waverleys constituted
almost all our lighter reading, the tone of society was not higher, the
spirit more heroic, the current of thought and expression purer, than in
these realistic days, when we turn for amusement to descriptions of every
quaint vulgarity that makes up the life of the boarding-house or the
strolling theatre.
The glorious heroism of Scott’s novels was a fine stream to turn into the
turbid river of our worldliness and money-seeking. It was of incalculable
benefit to give men even a passing glance of noble devotion, high-hearted
courage, and unsullied purity.
I can remember the time when, as freshmen in our first year, we went about
talking to each other of ‘Ivanhoe’ and ‘Kenilworth;’ and I can remember,
too, when the glorious spirit of those novels had so possessed us, that
our romance elevated and warmed us to an unconscious imitation of the
noble thoughts and deeds we had been reading.
Smile if you like at our boyish enthusiasm, it was better than the mocking
spirit engendered by all this realism, or the insensate craving after
stimulus taught by sensation novels.
Now, I am not old enough to remember the great talkers of the time when
George III. was King, or those who made Carlton House famous; but I
belonged to a generation where these men were remembered, and where it was
common enough to hear stories of their Attic nights, those noctes
cænæque deorum which really in brilliancy must have far transcended
anything that Europe could boast of conversational power. The youth of the
time I speak of were full of these traditions. “If I am not the rose, I
grew near one,” was no foolish boast; and certainly there was both in the
tone of conversation and the temper of society a sentiment that showed how
the great men had influenced their age, and how, even after their sun had
gone down, a warm tint remained to remind the world of the glorious
splendour that had departed.
Being an Irishman, it is to Ireland I must go for my illustration, and it
is my pride to remember that I have seen some of those who were, in an age
of no common convivial excellence, amongst the first and the greatest.
They are gone, and I may speak of them by name—Lord Plunkett, the
Chief-Justice Bushe, Mr Casey, Sir Philip Crampton, Barré Beresford—I
need not go on. I have but to recall the leading men at the bar, to make
up a list of the most brilliant talkers that ever delighted society. Nor
was the soil exhausted with these; there came, so to say, a second crop—a
younger order of men—less versed in affairs, it is true, less imbued
with that vigorous conviviality that prevailed in their fathers’ days—but
of these I must not speak, for they have now grown up to great dignities
and stations, they have risen to eminence and honour and repute, and might
possibly be ashamed if it were known that they were once so agreeable. Let
me, however, record one who is no more, but who possessed the charm of
companionship to a degree I never knew equalled in all my varied
experiences of life,—one who could bring the stores of a
well-stocked mind, rich in scholarship, to bear upon any passing incident,
blended with the fascination of a manner that was irresistible. Highly
imaginative, and with a power of expression that was positively
marvellous, he gave to ordinary conversation an elevation that actually
conferred honour on those who were associated with it; and high above all
these gifts and graces, a noble nature, generous, hopeful, and confiding.
With an intellect that challenged any rivalry, he had, in all that touched
worldly matters, the simplicity of a child. To my countrymen it is
needless I should tell of whom I speak; to others, I say his name was
Mortimer O’Sullivan. The mellow cadence of his winning voice, the beam of
his honest eye, the generous smile that never knew scorn, are all before
me as I write, and I will write no more.
OF OUR BROTHERS BEYOND THE BORDER.
There is a story current of a certain very eminent French naturalist, who
is so profoundly impressed by the truth of the Darwinian theory, that he
never passes the cage where the larger apes are confined in the Jardin des
Plantes without taking off his hat, making a profound obeisance, and
wishing them a bon jour.
This recognition is touching and graceful. The homage of the witches to
him who should be king hereafter, had in it a sort of mockery that made it
horrible; but here we have an act of generous courtesy, based alike on the
highest discoveries of science and the rules of the truest good-breeding.
The learned professor, with all the instincts of great acquirements and
much self-knowledge united, admits them at once to equality and fraternity—the
liberty, perhaps, they will have to wait some time for; but in that they
are no worse off than some millions of their fellow-countrymen.
One might speculate long—I don’t know exactly how profitably—on
the sense of gratitude these creatures must feel for this touching
kindness, how they must long for the good man’s visit, how they must
wonder by what steps he arrived at this astonishing knowledge, how
surprised they must feel that he does not make more converts; and, last of
all, what pains they must take to exhibit in their outward bearing and
behaviour that they are not unworthy of the high consideration he bestows
on them! Before him no monkey-tricks, no apish indecorums—none even
of those passing levities which young gorillas will indulge in just like
other youths. No; all must be staid, orderly, and respectful—heads
held well up—hands at rest—tails nowhere; in fact, a port and
bearing that would defy the most scrutinising observer to say that they
were less eligible company than that he had just quitted at the café.
I own I have not seen them during the moment of the Professor’s passage. I
am unable to state authentically whether all this be as I surmise, but I
have a strong impression it must be. Indeed, reflecting on the habits and
modes of the species, I should be rather disposed to believe them given to
an exuberant show of gratitude than to anything like indifference, and
expect to witness demonstrations of delight more natural possibly than
graceful.
Now, I have not the most remote intention of impugning the Professor’s
honesty. I give him credit—full credit—for high purpose, and
for high courage. “These poor brothers of ours,” says he, “have tails, it
is true, and they have not the hypocampus major; but let me ask you,
Monsieur le Duc, or you, Monseigneur the Archbishop, will you dare to
affirm on oath that you yourself are endowed with a hypocampus major or
minor? Are you prepared to stand forward and declare that the convolutions
of your brain are of the regulation standard—that the medullary part
is not disproportioned to the cineritious—that your falx is not
thicker or thinner than it ought—and that your optic thalami are not
too prominent? And if you are not ready to do this, what avails all your
assumption of superiority? In these—they are not many—lie the
alleged differences between you and your caged cousins yonder.” Thus
speaks, or might speak, the Professor; and, I repeat, I respect his
candour; but still I would venture to submit one small, perhaps ungenerous
doubt, and ask, Would he, acting on the noble instincts that move him,
vote these creatures an immediate and entire emancipation, or would he not
rather wait a while—a few years, say—till the habit of sitting
on chairs had worn off some of the tail, and a greater familiarity with
society suggested not to store up their dinner in their jaws? Would he
like to see them at once take their places in public life, become public
functionaries, and ministers, and grand cordons?
Would he not rather, with that philosophy his country eminently teaches,
say, “I will do the pity and the compassion. To me be the sympathetic part
of a graceful sorrow. To posterity I bequeath the recognition of these
poor captives. Let them be liberated, by all means; but let it be when I
shall be no longer here to witness it. Let others face that glorious
millennium of gorilla greatness.”
I am afraid he would reason in this fashion; it is one thing to have an
opinion, and to have what Frenchmen call the “courage of your opinion.” He
would say, “If Nature work surely, she works slowly; her changes are
measured, regular, and progressive. With her there are no paroxysms; all
is orderly—all is gradual It took centuries of centuries to advance
these poor creatures to the point they occupy; their next stage on the
journey is perhaps countless years away. I will not attempt to forestall
what I cannot assist. I will let Time do its work. They are not
ill-treated, besides; that large creature with the yellow eyebrows grinned
at me very pleasantly this morning, and the she-ourang-outang was whipping
her infant most naturally as I came by.”
“What a cold-blooded philanthropy is this!” cries another. “You say these
are our brothers and our kinsmen; you declare that anatomy only can detect
some small and insignificant discrepancies between us, and that even in
these there are some of whose functions we know nothing, and others, such
as the prehensile power, where the ape has the best of it. What do you
mean by keeping them there ‘cribbed, cabined, and confined’? Is a slight
frontal inclination to disqualify a person from being a prefect? Is an
additional joint in the coccyx to prevent a man sitting on the woolsack,
or an extra inch in the astragalus to interfere with his wearing spurs? If
there be minute differences between us, intercourse will abolish them. It
will be of inestimable service to yourselves to come into contact with
these fresh, fine, generous natures, uncontaminated by the vices of an
effete and worn-out civilisation. Great as are the benefits you extend to
them, they will repay you tenfold in the advantages to yourselves. Away
with your unworthy prejudices about a ‘black pigment’ and long heels! Take
them to your hearts and your hearths. You will find them brave—ay,
braver than your own race. Their teeth are whiter and their nails longer;
there is not a relation in life in which you will dare to call yourself
their better.”
I will go no farther, not merely because I have no liking for my theme,
but because I am pilfering. All these arguments—the very words
themselves—I have stolen from an American writer, who, in Horace
Greeley fashion, is addressing his countrymen on the subject of negro
equality. He not alone professes to show the humanity of the project, but
its policy—its even necessity. He declares to the whites, “You want
these people; without them you will sink lower and lower into that effete
degeneracy into which years of licentiousness have sunk you. These
gorillas—black men, I mean—are virtuous; they are abstemious;
they have a little smell, but no sensuality; they will make admirable
wives for your warriors; and who knows but one may be the mother of a
President as strikingly handsome as Ape Lincoln himself!” There is no
doubt much to be said for our long-heeled friends, whether with or without
a hypocampus major. I am not very certain that we compliment them in the
best taste when the handsomest thing we can say of them is, that they are
very like ourselves! It is our human mode, however, of expressing
admiration, and resembles the exclamation of the Oberland peasant on
seeing a pretty girl, “How handsome she’d be if she only had a goître!”
THE RULE NISI.
A great many sea-captains discourage the use of life-preservers and
floating-belts on board ships of war, on the simple ground that men should
not be taught to rely for their safety on anything but what conduces to
save the ship. “Let there be but one thought, one effort,” say they, “and
let that be for the common safety.” If they be right—and I suspect
they are—we have made a famous blunder by our late legislation about
divorce. Of all the crafts that ever were launched, marriage is one from
which fewest facilities of desertion should be provided.
Romanism makes very few mistakes in worldly matters. There is no feature
of that Church so remarkable as its deep study and thorough acquaintance
with all the moods and wants and wishes of humanity. Whatever its
demerits, one cannot but admit that no other religion ever approached it
in intimacy with the human heart in all its emotions and in all its
strivings, whether for good or evil.
Rome declares against all breach of the marriage tie. The Church, with a
spirit of concession it knows how to carry through all its dealings,
modifies, softens, assuages, but never severs conjugalism. It makes the
tie occasionally a slip-knot, but it never cuts the string, and I strongly
suspect that it is wise in its legislation.
For a great many years we gave the policy that amount of imitation we are
wont to accord to Romanist practices; that is, we follow them in part—we
adopt the coat, but, to show that we are not mere imitators, we cut off
one of the skirts; and if we do not make the garment more graceful, we at
least consult our dignity, and that is something. We made divorce the
privilege of men rich enough to come to Parliament for relief; we did with
the question what some one proposed we should do with poisons—make
them so costly that only wealthy men should be able to afford the luxury
of suicide. So long as men believed that divorce was immoral, I don’t
think any one complained that it should be limited to persons in
affluence. We are a lord-loving race, we English, and are quite ready to
concede that our superiors should have more vices than ourselves, just as
they have more horses and more pheasants; and we deemed it nothing odd or
strange that he, whose right it was to walk into the House of Peers,
should walk out of matrimony when it suited him.
Who knows?—perhaps we were flattered by the thought that great folk
so far conceded to a vulgar prejudice as to marry at all. Perhaps we
hailed their entrance into conjugalism as we are wont to do their
appearance at a circus or a public garden—a graceful acknowledgment
that they occasionally felt something like ourselves: at all events, we
liked it, and we showed we liked it by the zeal with which we read those
descriptions in newspapers of marriages in high life, and the delight with
which we talked to each other of people we never saw, nor probably ever
should see. It was not too much, therefore, to concede to them this
privilege of escape. It was very condescending of them to come to the play
at all; we had no right to insist that they should sit out the whole
performance.
By degrees, however, what with rich cotton-lords, and cheap cyclopaedias,
and penny trains, and popular lectures, there got up a sort of impression—it
was mere impression for a long time—that great folk had more than
their share of the puddings’ plums; and agitators began to bestir
themselves. What were the privileges of the higher classes which would sit
most gracefully on their inferiors? Naturally we bethought us of their
vices. It was not always so easy to adopt my lord’s urbanity, his
unassuming dignity, his well-bred ease; but one might reasonably aspire to
be as wicked. Sabbath-breaking had long since ceased to be the privilege
of the better classes, and so men’s minds reverted to the question of
divorce. “Let us get rid of our wives!” cried they; “who knows but the day
may come when we shall kill woodcocks?”
Now the law, in making divorce a very costly process, had simply desired
to secure its infrequency. It was not really meant to be a rich man’s
privilege. What was sought for was to oppose as many obstacles as could be
found, to throw in as many rocks as possible into the channel, so that
only he who was intently bent on navigating the stream would ever have the
energy to clear the passage. Nobody ever dreamed of making it an open
roadstead. In point of fact, the oft-boasted equality before the law is a
myth. The penalty which a labourer could endure without hardship might
break my lord’s heart; and in the very case before us of divorce, nothing
can possibly be more variable than the estimate formed of the divorced
individuals, according to the class of society they move in.
What would be a levity here, would be a serious immorality there; and a
little lower down again, a mere domestic arrangement, slightly more
decorous and a shade more legal than the old system of the halter and the
public sale. It was declared, however, that this “relief”—that is
the popular phrase in such matters—should be extended to the poor
man. It was decided that the privilege to get rid of a wife was, as Mr
Gladstone says of the electoral right, the inalienable claim of a freeman,
and the only course was to lower the franchise.
Let us own, too, we were ashamed, as we had good right to be ashamed, of
our old crim. con. law. Foreigners, especially Frenchmen, had rung
the changes on our coarse venality and corruption; and we had come to
perceive—it took some time, though—that moneyed damages were
scarcely the appropriate remedy for injured honour.
Last of all, free-trade notions had turned all our heads: we were for
getting rid of all restrictions on every side; and we went about repeating
to each other those wise saws about buying in the cheapest and selling in
the dearest market, and having whatever we wanted, and doing whatever we
liked with our own. We are, there is no denying it, a nation of
shopkeepers; and the spirit of trade can be tracked through every relation
of our lives. It is commerce gives the tone to all our dealings; and we
have carried its enactments into the most sacred of all our institutions,
and imparted a “limited liability” even to marriage.
Cheapness became the desideratum of our age, We insisted on cheap gloves
and shoes and wine and ribbons, and why not cheap divorces? Philosophers
tell us that the alternate action of the seasons is one of the purest and
most enduring of all sources of enjoyment; that perpetual summer or spring
would weary and depress; but in the ever-changing aspect of nature, and in
the stimulation which diversity excites, we find an unfailing
gratification. If, therefore, it be pleasant to be married, it may also be
agreeable to be unmarried. It takes some time, however, before society
accommodates itself to these new notions. The newly divorced, be it man or
woman, comes into the world like a patient after the smallpox—you
are not quite certain whether the period of contagion is past, or if it be
perfectly safe to go up and talk to him. In fact, you delay doing so till
some strong-minded friend or other goes boldly forward and shakes the
convalescent by the hand. Even still there will be timid people who know
perhaps that their delicacy of constitution renders them peculiarly
sensitive, and who will keep aloof after all. Of course, these and similar
prejudices will give way to time. We have our Probate Court; and the
phrase co-respondent is now familiar as a household word.
Now, however tempting the theme, I am not going to inquire whether we have
done wisely or the reverse by this piece of legislation; whether, by
instilling certain precepts of self-control, a larger spirit of
accommodation, and a more conciliatory disposition generally, we might
have removed some of the difficulties without the heroic remedy of the
decree nisi; whether, in fact, it might not have been better to
teach people to swim, or even float, rather than make this great issue of
cheap life-belts. I am so practical that I rather address myself to profit
by what is, than endeavour by any change to make it better. We live in a
statistical age. We are eternally inquiring who it is wants this, who
consumes that, who goes to such a place, who is liable to this or that
malady. Classification is a passion with us; and we have bulky volumes to
teach us what sorts of people have chest affections, what are most prone
to stomachic diseases, who have ophthalmia, and who the gout. We are also
instructed as to the kind of persons most disposed to insanity, and we
have a copious list of occupations given us which more or less incline
those who profess them to derangement. Even the Civil-Service Examiners
have contributed their share to this mass of entertaining knowledge, and
shown from what parts of the kingdom bad spellers habitually come, what
counties are celebrated for cacography, and in what districts etymology is
an unknown thing. Would it not, then, be a most interesting and
instructive statistic that would give us a tabular view of divorce,
showing in what classes frailty chiefly prevailed, with the relative
sexes, and also a glimpse at the ages? Imagine what a light the statement
would throw on the morality of classes, and what an incalculable benefit
to parents in the choice of a career for their children! For instance, no
sensible father would select a life of out-door exposure for a
weak-chested son, or make a sailor of one with an incurable sea-sickness.
In the same way would he be guided by the character of his children as to
the perils certain careers would expose them to.
A passing glance at the lists of divorce shows us that no “promovent”—it
is a delicate title, and I like it—no promovent figures oftener than
a civil engineer. Now, how instructive to inquire why!
What is there in embankments and earthworks and culverts that should
dispose the wife of him who makes them to infidelity? Why should a tunnel
only lead to domestic treachery? why must a cutting sever the heart that
designs it? I do not know; I cannot even guess. My ingenuity stands
stockstill at the question, and I can only re-echo, Why?
Next amongst the “predisposed” come schoolmasters, plasterers, &c.
What unseen thread runs through the woof of these natures, apparently so
little alike? It is the boast of modern science to settle much that once
was puzzling, and reconcile to a system what formerly appeared discordant.
How I wish some great Babbage-like intellect would bestir itself in this
inquiry.
Surely ethical questions are as well worthy of investigation as purely
physical or mechanical ones, and yet we ignore them most ignominiously. We
think no expense too great to test an Armstrong or a Whitworth gun; we
spend thousands to ascertain how far it will carry, what destructive force
it possesses, and how long it will resist explosion;—why not appoint
a commission of this nature on “conjugate;” why not ascertain, if we can,
what is the weak point in matrimony, and why are explosions so frequent?
Is the “cast” system a bad one, and must we pronounce “welding” a failure?
or, last of all, however wounding to our national vanity, do “they
understand these things better in France”?
ON CLIMBING BOYS.
With the common fate of all things human, it is said that every career and
walk in life has some one peculiar disparagement—something that,
attaching to the duties of the station as a sort of special grievance,
serves to show that none of us, no matter how favoured, are to imagine
there can be any lot exempted from its share of troubles. Ask the soldier,
the sailor, the parson, the doctor, the lawyer, or the actor, and each
will give you a friendly warning to adopt any other career than his own.
In most cases the quid amarum, the one bitter drop, is to be found
in the career itself, something that belongs to that one craft or calling;
just as the white-lead colic, for instance, is the fatal malady of
painters. There are, however, a few rare cases in which the detracting
element attaches itself to the followers and not to the profession, as
though it would seem there was a something in the daily working of that
peculiar craft which warped the minds and coerced the natures of men to be
different from what temperament and character should have made of them.
The two classes which most prominently exhibit what I mean are somewhat
socially separated, but they have a number of small analogies in common.
They are Sweeps and Statesmen! It would be tempting—but I resist the
temptation—to show how many points of resemblance unite them—how
each works in the dark, in a small, narrow, confined sphere, without view
or outlet; how the tendency of each is to scratch his way upwards and gain
the top, caring wonderfully little how black and dirty the process has
made him. One might even go farther, and mark how, when indolence or
weariness suggested sloth, the stimulus of a little fire underneath,
whether a few lighted straws or a Birmingham mass-meeting, was sure to
quicken progress and excite activity.
Again, I make this statement on the faith of Lord Shaftesbury, who
pronounced it before their Lordships in the Upper House:—“It is no
uncommon thing to buy and sell them. There is a regular traffic in them;
and through the agency of certain women, not the models of their sex, you
can get any quantity of them you want.” Last of all, on the same high
authority, we are told of their perfect inutility, “since there is nothing
that they do could not be better done by a machine.”
I resist, as I say, all temptations of this kind, and simply address
myself to the one point of similarity between them which illustrates the
theory with which I have started—and now to state this as formally
as I am able. Let me declare that in all the varied employments of life I
have never met with men who have the same dread of their possible
successors as sweeps and statesmen. The whole aim and object of each is
directed, first of all, to keep those who do their work as little as
possible, well knowing that the time will come when these small creatures
will find the space too confined for them, and set up for themselves.
A volume might be written on the subtle artifices adopted to keep them
“little”—the browbeatings, the insults, the crushing cruelties, the
spare diet intermixed with occasional stimulants, the irregular hours, and
the heat and confinement of the sphere they work in. Still, nature is
stronger than all these crafty contrivances. The little sweep will grow
into the big sweep, and the small under-sec. will scratch his way up to
the Cabinet I will not impose on my reader the burden of carrying along
with him this double load. I will address myself simply to one of these
careers—the Statesman’s. It is a strange but a most unquestionable
fact, that no other class of men are so ill-disposed to those who are the
most likely to succeed them—not of an Opposition, for that would be
natural enough, but of their own party, of their own colour, of their own
rearing. Let us be just: when a man has long enjoyed place, power, and
pre-eminence, dispensed honours and pensions and patronage, it is not a
small trial to discover that one of those little creatures he has made—whose
first scraper and brush he himself paid for—I can’t get rid of the
sweep out of my head—will turn insolently on him and declare that he
will no longer remain a subordinate, but go and set up for himself. This
is excessively hard, and might try the temper of a man even without a fit
of the gout.
It is exactly what has just happened; an apprentice, called Gladstone,
having made a sort of connection in Manchester and Birmingham, a district
abounding in tall chimneys, has given warning to his master Pam that he
will not sweep any longer. He is a bold, aspiring sort of lad, and he is
not satisfied with saying—as many others have done—that he is
getting too broad-shouldered for his work; but he declares that the
chimneys for the future must be all made bigger and the flues wider, just
because he likes climbing, and doesn’t mean to abandon it. There is no
doubt of it. Manchester and Stockport and Birmingham have put this in his
head. Their great smelting-houses and steam-power factories require big
chimneys; and being an overbearing set of self-made vulgar fellows, they
say they ought to be a law to all England. You don’t want to make
cotton-twist, or broad-gauge iron; so much the worse for you. It is the
grandest object of humanity. Providence created men to manufacture printed
cottons and cheap penknives. We of Manchester understand what our American
friends call manifest destiny; we know and feel ours will be—to rule
England. Once let us only introduce big chimneys, and you’ll see if you
won’t take to spinning-jennies and mules and treddles; and there’s that
climbing boy Gladstone declares he’ll not leave the business, but go up,
no matter how dirty the flue, the day we want him.
Some shrewd folk, who see farther into the millstone than their
neighbours, have hinted that this same boy is of a crotchety, intriguing
type, full of his own ingenuity, and enamoured of his own subtlety; so
that make the chimney how great you will, he’ll not go up it, but scratch
out another flue for himself, and come out, heaven knows where or how.
Indeed, they tell that on one occasion of an alarm of fire in the house—caused
by a pantry-boy called Russell burning some wasterpaper instead of going
up the chimney as he was ordered—this same Will began to tell how
the Greeks had no chimneys, and a mass of antiquarian rubbish of the same
kind, so that his master, losing patience, exclaimed, “Of all plagues in
the world he knew of none to compare with these ‘climbing boys!’”
LINGUISTS
There are two classes of people not a little thought of, and even
caressed, in society, and for whom I have ever felt a very humble estimate—the
men who play all manner of games, and the men who speak several languages.
I begin with the latter, and declare that, after a somewhat varied
experience of life, I never met a linguist that was above a third-rate
man; and I go farther, and aver, that I never chanced upon a really able
man who had the talent for languages.
I am well aware that it sounds something little short of a heresy to make
this declaration. It is enough to make the blood of Civil-Service
Commissioners run cold to hear it. It sounds illiberal—and, worse,
it seems illogical. Why should any intellectual development imply
deficiency? Why should an acquirement argue a defect? I answer, I don’t
know—any more than I know why sanguineous people are hot-tempered,
and leuco-phlegmatic ones are more brooding in their wrath. If—for I
do not ask to be anything higher than empirical—if I find that
parsimonious people have generally thin noses, and that the snub is
associated with the spendthrift, I never trouble myself with the
demonstration, but I hug the fact, and endeavour to apply it.
In the same spirit, if I hear a man in a salon change from French to
German and thence diverge into Italian and Spanish, with possibly a brief
excursion into something Scandinavian or Sclav—at home in each and
all—I would no more think of associating him in my mind with
anything responsible in station or commanding in intellect, than I should
think of connecting the servant that announced me with the last brilliant
paper in the ‘Quarterly.’
No man with a strongly-marked identity—and no really able man ever
existed without such—can subordinate that identity so far as to put
on the foreigner; and without this he never can attain that mastery of a
foreign language that makes the linguist. To be able to repeat
conventionalities—bringing them in at the telling moment, adjusting
phrases to emergencies, as a joiner adapts the pieces of wood to his
carpentry—may be, and is, a very neat and a very dexterous
performance, but it is scarcely the exercise to which a large capacity
will address itself. Imitation must be, in one sense or other, the
stronghold of the linguist—imitation of expression, of style, of
accent, of cadence, of tone. The linguist must not merely master grammar,
but he must manage gutturals. The mimicry must go farther: in simulating
expression it must affect the sentiment. You are not merely borrowing the
clothes, but you are pretending to put on the feelings, the thoughts, the
prejudices of the wearer. Now, what man with a strong nature can merge
himself so entirely in his fictitious being as not to burst the seams and
tear the lining of a garment that only impedes the free action of his
limbs, and actually threatens the very extinction of his respiration?
It is not merely by their greater adaptiveness that women are better
linguists than men; it is by their more delicate organisation, their more
subdued identity, and their less obstreperous temperaments, which are
consequently less egotistical, less redolent of the one individual self.
And what is it that makes the men of mark or note, the cognate signs of
human algebra, but these same characteristics; not always good, not always
pleasant, not always genial, but always associated with something that
declares preeminence, and pronounces their owner to be a “representative
man”?
When Lord Ward replied to Prince Schwartzenberg’s flippant remark on the
bad French of English diplomatists by the apology, “that we had not
enjoyed the advantage of having our capital cities so often occupied by
French troops as some of our neighbours,” he uttered not merely a smart
epigram but a great philosophical truth. It was not alone that we had not
possessed the opportunity to pick up an accent, but that we had not
subordinated our minds and habits to French modes and ways of thought, and
that the tone and temper of the French people had not been beaten into us
by the roll of a French drum. One may buy an accomplishment too dearly. It
is possible to pay too much even for a Parisian pronunciation! Not only
have I never found a linguist a man of eminence, but I have never seen a
linguist who talked well. Fluent they are, of course, like the Stecknadel
gun of the Prussians, they can fire without cessation, but, like the same
weapon, they are comparatively aimless. It is a feu roulant, with
plenty of noise and some smoke, but very “few casualties” announce the
success. The greatest linguist of modern Europe, Mezzofanti, was a most
inferior man. Of the countries whose dialect he spoke to perfection, he
knew nothing. An old dictionary would have been to the full as
companionable. I find it very hard not to be personal just now, and give a
list—it would be a long one—of all the tiresome people I know,
who talk four, five, some of them six modern languages perfectly. It is
only with an effort I abstain from mentioning the names of some well-known
men who are the charming people at Borne and Vienna every winter, and each
summer are the delight of Ems, of Berlin, and of Ischl. What tyrants these
fellows are, too, over the men who have not got their gift of tongues! how
they out-talk them and overbear them! with what an insolent confidence
they fall back upon the petty superiority of their fluency, and lord it
over those who are immeasurably their masters! Just as Blondin might run
along the rigging of a three-decker, and pretend that his agility entitled
him to command a squadron!
Nothing, besides, is more imposing than the mock eloquence of good French.
The language in itself is so adaptive, it is so felicitous, it abounds in
such innumerable pleasant little analogies, such nice conceits and
suggestive drolleries, that he who acquires these has at will a whole
armoury of attack and defence. It actually requires years of habit to
accustom us to a display that we come at last to discover implies no
brilliancy whatever in him who exhibits, though it argues immense
resources in the treasury from which he derives this wealth.
I have known scores of delightful talkers—Frenchmen—who had no
other charm than what their language lent them. They were neither
profound, nor cultivated, nor witty—some were not even shrewd or
acute; but all were pleasant—pleasant in the use of a conversational
medium, of which the world has not the equal—a language that has its
set form of expression for every social eventuality, and that hits to a
nicety every contingency of the “salon;” for it is no more the language of
natural people than the essence of the perfumer’s shop is the odour of a
field flower. It is pre-eminently the medium of people who talk with tall
glasses before them, and an incense of truffles around them, and
well-dressed women—clever and witty, and not over-scrupulous in
their opinions—for their company. Then, French is unapproachable;
English would be totally unsuited to the occasion, and German even more
so. There is a flavour of sauer kraut about that unhappy tongue that would
vulgarise a Queen if she talked it.
To attain, therefore, the turns and tricks of this language—for it
is a Chinese puzzle in its involvements—what a life must a man have
led! What “terms” he must have “put in” at cafés and restaurants! What
seasons at small theatres—tripots and worse! What nights at
bals-masqués, Chateaux des Fleurs, and Cadrans rouges et bleus! What
doubtful company he must have often kept! What company a little more than
doubtful occasionally! What iniquities of French romance must he have
read, with all the cardinal virtues arrayed as the evil destinies of
humanity, and every wickedness paraded as that natural expansion of the
heart which alone raises man above the condition of the brute! I ask, if
proficiency must imply profligacy, would you not rather find a man break
down in his verbs than in his virtue? Would you not prefer a little
inaccuracy in his declensions to a total forgetfulness of the decalogue?
And, lastly of all, what man of real eminence could have masqueraded—for
it is masquerading—for years in this motley, and come out, after
all, with even a rag of his identity?
Many people would scruple to play at cards with a stranger whose mode of
dealing and general manipulation of the pack bespoke daily familiarity
with the play-table. They would infer that he was a regular and
professional gambler. In the very same way, and for the selfsame reason,
would I carefully avoid any close intimacy with the Englishman of fluent
French, well knowing he could not have graduated in that perfection save
at a certain price. But it is not at the moral aspect of the question I
desire particularly to look. I assert—and I repeat my assertion—that
these talkers of many tongues are poor creatures. There is no initiative
in them—they suggest nothing—they are vendors of second-hand
wares, and are not always even good selectors of what they sell. It is
only in narrative that they are at all endurable. They can raconter,
certainly; and so long as they go from salon to salon repeating in set
phrase some little misadventure or accident of the day, they are amusing;
but this is not conversation, and they do not converse.
“Every time a man acquires a new language, is he a new man?” is supposed
to have been a saying of Charles V.—a sentiment that, if he uttered
it, means more of sarcasm than of praise; for it is the very putting off a
man’s identity that establishes his weakness. All real force of character
excludes dualism. Every eminent, every able man has a certain integrity in
his nature that rejects this plasticity.
It is a very common habit, particularly with newspaper writers, to ascribe
skill in languages, and occasionally in games, to distinguished people. It
was but the other day we were told that Garibaldi spoke ten languages
fluently. Now Garibaldi is not really master of two. He speaks French
tolerably; and his native language is not Italian, but a patois-Genoese.
Cavour was called a linguist with almost as little truth; but people
repeat the story, just as they repeat that Napoleon I. was a great
chess-player. If his statecraft and his strategy had been on a par with
his chess, we should never have heard of Tilsit or Wagram.
Lord Castlereagh, the Duke of Wellington, and George Canning, each of whom
administered our foreign policy with no small share of success, were not
linguists; and as to Charles Fox, he has left a French sentence on record
that will last even as long as his own great name. I do not want to decry
the study of languages; I simply desire to affirm that linguists—and
through all I have said I mean colloquial linguists—are for the most
part poor creatures, not otherwise distinguished than by the gift of
tongues; and I want to protest against the undue pre-eminence accorded to
the possessors of a small accomplishment, and the readiness with which the
world, especially the world of society, awards homage to an acquirement in
which a boarding-school Miss can surpass Lord Brougham. I mean to say a
word or two about those who have skill in games; but as they are of a
higher order of intelligence, I’ll wait till I have got “fresh wind” ere I
treat of them.
THE OLD CONJURORS AND THE NEW.
As there are few better tests of the general health of an individual than
in the things he imagines to be injurious to him, so there is no surer
evidence of the delicate condition of a State than in the character of
those who are assumed to be dangerous to it. Now, after all that has been
said of Rome and the corruptions of Roman government, I do not know
anything so decidedly damnatory as the fact, to which allusion was lately
made in Parliament, that the Papal Government had ordered Mr Home, the
spiritualist, to quit the city and the States of his Holiness, and not to
return to them.
In what condition, I would ask, must a country be when such a man is
regarded as dangerous? and in what aspect of his character does the danger
consist?
Do we want ghosts or spirits to reveal to us any more of the iniquities of
that State than we already know? Is there a detail of its corrupt
administration that the press of Europe has not spread broadcast over the
world? What could Mr Home and all his spirits tell us of peculation,
theft, subornation, bigotry, and oppression, that the least observant
traveller has not brought home with him?
And then, as to the man himself, how puerile it is to give him this
importance! The solitary bit of cleverness about him is his statement that
he has no control whatever over the spirits that attend him. Asking him
not to summon them, is pretty like asking Mr Windham not to send for his
creditors. They come pretty much as they like, and probably their visits
are about equally profitable.
In this respect Home belongs to a very low order of his art. When Bosco
promises to make a bouquet out of a mouse-trap, or Houdin engages to
concoct a batter-pudding in your hat, each keeps his word. There is no
subterfuge about the temper the spirits may happen to be in, or of their
willingness or unwillingness to present themselves. The thing is done, and
we see it—or we think we see it, which comes much to the same.
With this provision of escape Mr Home secures himself against all failure.
Should, for instance, the audience prove to be of a more discriminating
and observant character than he liked or anticipated, and the exhibition
in consequence be rendered critical, all he had to do was, to aver that
the spirits would not come; it was no breakdown on his part Homer
was sulky, or Dante was hipped, or Lord Bacon was indisposed to meet
company, and there was the end of it. You were invited to meet
celebrities, but it was theirs to say if they would present themselves.
On the other hand, when the proper element of credulity offered—when
the séance was comprised of the select few, emotional, sensitive, and
hysterical as they ought to be—when the nervous lady sat beside the
timid gentleman, and neuralgia confronted confirmed dyspepsia—the
artist could afford to be daring, and might venture on flights that
astounded even himself. What limit is there, besides, to contagional
sympathy? Look at the crowded theatre, with its many-minded spectators,
and see how one impulse, communicated occasionally by a hireling, will set
the whole mass in a ferment of enthusiastic delight. Mark, too, how the
smile, that plays like an eddy on a lake, deepens into a laugh, and is
caught up by another and another, till the whole storm breaks out in a
hearty ocean of merriment. These, if you like, are spirits; but the great
masters of them are not men like Mr Home—they have ever been, and
still are, of a very different order. Shakespeare and Molière and
Cervantes knew something of the mode to summon these imps, and could make
them come at their bidding besides.
Was it—to come back to what I started with—was it in any
spirit of rivalry that the Papal Government drove Mr Home out of Home? Was
it that, assuming to have a monopoly in the wares he dealt in, they would
not stand a contraband trade? If so, their ground is at least defensible;
for what chance of attraction would there be for the winking Virgin in
competition with him who could “make a young lady ascend to the ceiling,
and come slowly down like a parachute!”—a spiritual fact I have
heard from witnesses who really, so far as character went, might challenge
any incredulity.
If the Cardinals were jealous of the Conjuror, the thing is intelligible
enough, and one must feel a certain degree of sympathy with the
old-established firm that had spent such enormous sums, and made such
stupendous preparations, when a pretender like this could come into
competition with them, without any other properties than could be carried
conveniently about him.
But let us be practical The Pope’s Government demanded of Mr Home that he
should have no dealings with the Evil One during his stay at Rome. Now, I
ask, what should we say of the efficacy of our police system if we were to
hear that the Chief Inspector at Scotland Yard lived in nightly terror of
the pickpockets who frequented that quarter, and came to Parliament with a
petition to accord him some greater security against their depredations?
Would not the natural reply be an exclamation of astonishment that he who
could summon to his aid every alphabetical blue-coat that ever handled a
truncheon, should deem any increased security necessary to his peace? And
so, would I ask, of what avail these crowds of cardinals—these
regiments of monsignori—these battalions of bishops, Arch and
simple?—of what use all the incense and these chanted litanies,
these eternal processions, and these saintly shin-bones borne in costly
array—if one poor mortal, supposed to live on visiting terms with
the Evil One, can strike such terror into the whole army led on by
Infallibility?
If I had been possessed of any peculiar dread of coming unexpectedly on
the Devil—as the old ladies of New York used to feel long ago about
suddenly meeting with the British army—I should certainly have
comforted myself by the thought that I could always go and sit down on the
steps of the Vatican. It would immediately have occurred to me, that as
Holyrood offers its sanctuary against the sheriff, the Quirinal would be
the sure retreat against Old Nick; and I have even pictured to myself the
rage of his disappointed malice as he saw me sheltering safely beneath a
protection he dared not invade. And now I am told to relinquish all the
blessed enjoyment of this immunity; that the Pope and the Cardinals and
Antonelli himself are not a whit better off than the rest of us; that if
Mr Home gets into Rome, there is nothing to prevent his having the Devil
at his tea-parties. What an ignoble confession is this! Who will step
forward any longer and contend that this costly system is to be
maintained, and all these saintly intercessors to be kept on the most
expensive of all pension-lists, if a poor creature like Home can overthrow
it all?
Can any one conceive such a spectacle as these gorgeous men of scarlet and
purple cringing before this poor pretender, and openly avowing before
Europe that there is no peace for them till he consents to cross the
Tiber?
Why—I speak, of course, in the ignorance of a laic—but, I ask,
why not fumigate him and cleanse him? When I saw him last, the process
would not have been so supererogatory. Why not exorcise and defy him? Why
not say, Come, and bring your friend if you dare; you shall see how we
will treat you. Only try it It is what we have been asking for nigh two
thousand years. Let the great culprit step forward and plead to his
indictment.
I can fancy the Pope saying this—I can picture to myself the proud
attitude of the Pontiff declaring, “I have had enough of these small
devilries, like Louis Napoleon and Victor Emmanuel—I am sick of
Mazzini and his petty followers. Let us deal with the chief of the gang at
once; if we cannot convict him, he will be at least open to a compromise.”
This, I say, I can comprehend; but it is clear and clean beyond me that he
should shirk the interview, and own he was afraid of it. It would not
surprise me to-morrow to hear that Lord Derby dreaded the Radicals, and
actually feared the debating powers of “Mr Potter of the Strikes.”
GAMBLING FOR THE MILLION.
Nothing shows what a practical people we are more than our establishment
of insurances against railroad accidents. The spirit of commercial
enterprise, by which a man charters himself for a railroad voyage with an
insured cargo of his bones, ligaments, cartilage, and adipose tissue,
abundantly proves that we are nature’s own traders and shopkeepers.
Any ordinary people less imbued with Liverpool and Manchester notions
would have bestirred themselves how to prevent, or at least lessen, the
number of those casualties. They would have set to work to see what
provisions could be adopted to give greater security to travel. We, on the
contrary are too business-like to waste time on this inquiry. We are
convinced that, let us build ships ever so strong, there will still be
shipwrecks. So we feel assured that a certain number of railway accidents,
as they are called, will continue to occur—be as broad gauge as you
will! We accept the situation, therefore, as the French say, and insure;
that is to say, we book a bet at very long odds—say, three to a
thousand—that we shall be rolled up, cut in two, flattened into a
thin sheeting, and ground into an impalpable powder, between Croydon and
Brighton. If we arrive safe, the assurance office pockets a few shillings;
if we win our wager, our executor receives a thousand pounds.
It is about the grimmest kind of gambling ever man heard of; and yet we
see folk of the most unquestionable propriety—dignitaries of the
Church, judges, civil and uncivil servants of the Crown, and scores of
others, whom nothing would tempt into the Cursaal at Ems or Baden, as
coolly as possible playing this terrific game, and backing themselves
heavily for a dorsal paralysis, a depressed fracture of the cranium, or at
least a compound dislocation of the hip-joint.
Now, if the Protestant Church entertained what the Romanists call cases of
conscience, I should like greatly to ask, Is this right? Is it justifiable
to make a contingent profit out of your cerebral vertebrae or your
popliteal space?
We have long been derided and scoffed at for making connubialism
marketable, and putting a price on a wife’s infidelity, but it strikes me
this is something worse; for what, after all, is a rib—a false rib,
too—compared with the whole bony skeleton?
“Allah is Allah,” said the Turkish admiral to Lady Hester Stanhope, “but I
have got two anchors astern,” showing that, with all his fatalism, he did
not despise what are technically called human means. So the reverend
Archdeacon, going down for his sea-baths, might say, “I’m not quite sure
they’ll carry me safely, but it shall not be all misfortune—I’ll
take out some of it in money.”
The system, however, has its difficulties; for though it is a round game,
the stakes are apportioned with reference to the rank and condition of the
winner—as, for instance, the Solicitor-General’s collarbone is worth
a shoemaker’s whole body, and a Judge’s patella is of more value than a
dealer in marine stores and his rising family. This is a tremendous pull
against the company, who not only give long, but actually incalculable
odds; for while Mr Briggs of the second class can be crumpled up for two
hundred pounds, the Hon. Sackville de Cressy in the coupe cannot be even
concussed under a thousand; while if the noble Duke in the express
carriage be only greatly alarmed, the cost may be positively astounding.
This I certainly call hard—very hard. When you book a bet at
Newmarket you never have to consider the rank of your opponent, save as
regards his solvency. He may be a peer—he is very probably a
publican—it is perfectly immaterial to you; but not so here. The
company is positively staking against the incommensurable. They have no
means of knowing whether that large broad-shouldered man yonder is or is
not a royal duke; and when the telegraph announces a collision, it may
chance that the news has declared what will send every shareholder into
bankruptcy, or only graze them without hurting anybody.
We all know how a number of what are technically termed serious people
went to Exeter Hall to listen to the music of the ‘Traviata,’ what no
possible temptation would have induced them to hear within the walls of a
theatre. I will not question the propriety of a matter only to be settled
by a reference to conscience; but as the music and the words—for the
airs were sung—were the same, the hearers were not improbably in the
enjoyment of as emotional an amusement as though they had gone for it to
the Queen’s Theatre. Now, may not these railway insurances be something of
the same kind? May it not be a means by which deans and canons and other
broad-hatted dignitaries may enjoy a little gambling without “going in”
for Blind Hooky or Roulette? Regard for decorum would prevent their
sojourning at Homburg or Wiesbaden. They could not, of course, be seen
“punting” at the play-table at Ems; but here is a legitimate game which
all may join in, and where, certainly, the anxiety that is said to impart
the chief ecstasy to the gamester’s passion rises to the very highest It
is heads and tails for a smashing stake, and ought to interest the most
sluggish of mortals.
What a useful addition, then, would it be for one’s Bradshaw to have a
tabular view of the “odds” on the different lines, so that a speculative
individual, desiring to provide for his family, might know where to
address himself with best chance of an accident! One can imagine an
assurance company puffing its unparalleled advantages and unrivalled
opportunity, when four excursion trains were to start at five minutes’
intervals, and the prospect of a smash was little short of a certainty.
“Great attraction! the late rains have injured the chief portion of the
line, so that a disaster is confidently looked for every hour. Make your
game, gentlemen—make your game; nothing received after the bell
rings.”
THE INTOXICATING LIQUORS BILL.
Anything more absurd than the late debate in the House on the best means
of suppressing intemperance it is very hard to imagine. First of all, in
the van, came the grievance to be redressed; and we had a statistical
statement of all the gallons of strong drink consumed—all the moneys
diverted from the legitimate uses of the family—all the debauchees
who rolled drunk through our streets, and all the offences directly
originating in this degrading vice. Now, what conceivable order of mind
could prompt a man to engage in such a laborious research? Who either
doubts the enormity of drunkenness or its frequency? It is a theme that we
hear of incessantly. The pulpit rings with it, the press proclaims it, the
judges declare it in all their charges, and a special class of lecturers
have converted it into a profession. None denied the existence of the
disease; what we craved was the cure. Some discrepancy of opinion
prevailed as to whether the vice was on the increase or the decrease.
Statistics were given, and, of course, statistics supported each
assertion. This, however, was a mere skirmish—the grand battle was,
How was drunkenness to be put down?
Mr Lawson’s plan was: If four-fifths of the ratepayers of any district
were agreed that no spirituous liquors should be sold there, that such
should become a law, and no licence for their sale should be issued. The
mover of this proposal, curiously enough, called this “bringing public
opinion to bear on the question.” What muddle of intelligence could
imagine this to be an exercise of public opinion I cannot imagine. Such,
however, is the plan. Drunkenness is to be repressed by making it
impossible. Did it never occur to the honourable gentleman, that all
legislative enactments whatever work not by enforcing what is good, but by
punishing what is evil? No law that ever was made would render people
honest and true to their engagements; but we arrive at a result not very
dissimilar by making dishonesty penal.
The Decalogue declares: “Thou shalt not commit a murder.” Human law
pronounces what will come of it if you do. It is, doubtless, very
imperfect legislation, but there is no help for it. We accept such cases,
however, as the best defences we can find for our social condition, never
for a moment presuming to think that we are rendering a vice impossible by
attaching to it a penalty.
Mr Lawson, however, says, There shall be no drunkenness, because there
shall be no liquor. Why not extend the principle—for it is a great
discovery—and declare that, wherever four-fifths of the ratepayers
of a town or borough are of opinion that ingratitude is a great offence to
morals and a stain to human nature, in that district where they reside
there shall be no benefits conferred, nor any act of kindly aid or
assistance rendered by one man to his neighbour? I have no doubt that, by
such legislation, you would put down ingratitude. We use acts in the moral
world pretty much as in the physical; and it is entirely by the
impossibility of committing the offence that this gentleman proposes to
prevent its occurrence. But, in the name of common sense, why do we
inveigh against monasteries and nunneries?—why are we so severe on a
system that substitutes restraint for reason, and instead of correction
supplies coercion? Surely this plan is based on exactly the same
principle. Would it, I ask, cure a man of lying—I mean the vice, not
the practice—to place him in a community where no party was
permitted to talk?
The example of the higher classes was somewhat ostentatiously paraded in
the debate, and members vied with each other in declaring how often they
dined out without meeting a drunkard in the company. This is very
gratifying and reassurring; but I am not aware that anybody ascribed the
happy change to the paucity of the decanters, and the difficulty of
getting the bottle; or whether it was that four-fifths of the party had
declared an embargo on the sherry, and realised the old proverb by
elevating necessity to the rank of virtue.
Let me ask, who ever imagined that the best way to render a soldier brave
in battle was to take care that he never saw an enemy, and only frequented
the society of Quakers? And yet this is precisely what Mr Lawson suggests.
If his system be true, what becomes of all moral discipline and all
self-restraint? It is not through my own convictions that I am sober; it
is through no sense of the degradation that pertains to drunkenness, and
the loss of social estimation that follows it, that I am temperate. It is
because four-fifths of the ratepayers declare that I shall have no drink
nearer than the next parish; and this reminds of another weak point in the
plan.
The Americans, who understand something of the evils of drink, on the
principle that made Doctor Panloss a good man, because he knew what
wickedness was, lately passed a law in Congress forbidding the use of
fermented liquors on board all the ships of war. It was one of those
sweeping pieces of legislation that men enact when driven to do something,
they know not exactly what, by the enormity of some great abuse. Now, I
have taken considerable pains to inquire how the plan operates, and what
success has waited on it. From every officer that I have questioned I have
received the same exact testimony: so long as the ships are at sea the men
only grumble at the privation; but once they touch port, and boats’ crews
are permitted to go ashore, drunkenness breaks out with tenfold violence.
For a while all real discipline is at an end; parties are despatched to
bring back defaulters, who themselves get reeling drunk; petty officers
are insulted, and scenes of violence enacted that give the unhappy
locality where they have landed the aspect of a town taken by assault and
given up to pillage. I am not now describing altogether from hearsay; I
have witnessed something of what I speak.
As drunkenness, when the ship was at sea, was the rarest of all events,
and the good conduct of the men when on shore was the great object to be
obtained, this system may be, so far as the navy is concerned, pronounced
a decided failure. Whatever may be said about the policy of sowing a man’s
wild oats, nobody, so far as I know, ever hinted that the crop should be
perennial.
Legislation can no more make men temperate than it can make them cleanly
or courteous. If Parliament could work miracles of this sort, it would
make one really in love with constitutional government. But what a
crotchety thing all this amateur lawmaking is! Why did it not occur to
this well-intentioned gentleman to inquire how it is that drunkenness is
unknown, or nearly unknown, in what are called the better classes? How is
it that the orgies our grandfathers liked so well, and deemed the great
essence of hospitality, are no longer heard of? The three-bottle man now
could no more be found than the Plesiosaurus. He belongs to a past totally
and essentially irrevocable.
And by what has this happy change been effected? Surely not by withdrawing
temptation. Not only have we an infinitely wider choice in fluids than our
forefathers, but they are served and ministered with appliances far more
tasteful and seductive. It is, however, to the higher tone of society the
revolution is owing. Men saw that drunkenness was disgraceful: it rendered
society disorderly and riotous; it interfered with all real conversational
pleasure; it led to unmannerly excesses, and to quarrels. A higher
cultivation repudiated all these things; and even they who, so to say,
“liked their wine” too well, were slow to disparage themselves by an
indulgence which good taste declared to be ungentlemanlike.
Is it completely impossible to introduce some such sentiment as this into
other orders of society? We see it certainly in some foreign countries—why
not in our own? Radical orators are incessantly telling us of the mental
powers and the intellectual cultivation of the working-classes, and I am
well-disposed to believe there is much truth in what they say. Why not
then adapt, to men so highly civilised, some of those sentiments that sway
the classes more favoured of fortune? The French artisan would deem it a
disgrace to be drunk—so the Italian; even the German would only go
as far as a sort of beery bemuddlement that made him a more ideal
representative of the Vaterland: why must the Englishman, of necessity, be
the inferior in civilisation to these? I am not willing to believe the
task of such a reformation hopeless, though I am perfectly convinced that
no greater folly could be committed than to attempt it by an Act of
Parliament.
When legislation has led men to be agreeable in society, unassuming in
manners, and gentle in deportment, it may make them temperate in their
liquor, but not before. The thing cannot be done in committee, nor by a
vote of the House. It is only to be accomplished by the filtering process,
by which the good habits of a nation drop down and permeate the strata
beneath; so that, in course of time, the whole mass, leavened by the same
ingredients, becomes one as completely in sentiment as in interest.
“Four-fifths of the ratepayers” will not effect this. After all, Mr Lawson
is only a second-hand discoverer. His bill was a mere plagiarism from
beginning to end. The whole text of his argument was said and sung by poor
Curran, full fifty odd years ago:—
THE END.