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Title: Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 79, No. 484, February, 1856
Author: Various
Language: English
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*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 79, No. 484, February, 1856" ***
BLACKWOOD’S
EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.
NO. CCCCLXXXIV. FEBRUARY 1856. VOL. LXXIX.
CONTENTS.
MODERN LIGHT LITERATURE—POETRY, 125
A MILITARY ADVENTURE IN THE PYRENEES—_concluded_, 138
THE WONDROUS AGE, 154
PUBLIC LECTURES—MR WARREN ON LABOUR, 170
TOUCHING OXFORD, 179
THE ANCIENT COINS OF GREECE, 193
TICKLER AMONG THE THIEVES! 200
THE DRAMA, 209
LESSONS FROM THE WAR, 232
RELIGION IN COMMON LIFE, 243
EDINBURGH:
WILLIAM BLACKWOOD & SONS, 45 GEORGE STREET,
AND 37 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON;
_To whom all communications (post paid) must be addressed_.
SOLD BY ALL THE BOOKSELLERS IN THE UNITED KINGDOM.
PRINTED BY WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS, EDINBURGH.
BLACKWOOD’S
EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.
NO. CCCCLXXXIV. FEBRUARY, 1856. VOL. LXXIX.
MODERN LIGHT LITERATURE—POETRY.
“Poets,” said the ancient wisdom, “are not made, but born.” We have made
miraculous progress in all the arts of manufacture since the time of
this saying, but we have not been able to controvert the judgment of our
forefathers. Education, refinement, taste, and talent, are great things
in their way, and men do wonders with them; but we have not fallen yet
upon a successful method of bringing down the divine spark into the
marble, let us work it ever so curiously. The celestial gift in these
new times, as in the old, comes down with divine impartiality, yet
seldom into the tenement most specially built and garnished for its
reception. We can make critics, connoisseurs, “an enlightened audience,”
but, let us labour at it as we will, we cannot make a poet.
And indeed, to tell the truth, it is but small help we can give, with
all our arts and ingenuities, even to the perfecting of the poet born.
Science discusses the subject gravely—at one time troubled with
apprehensions lest her severe shadow should kill the singer outright, as
Reason killed Love—at another, elate with the happier thought of
increasing all his conquests, and sending forth as her own esquire,
bearing her ponderous lance and helmet, the glorious boy in his
perennial youth. It is a vain speculation. The poet glances past this
important figure with a calm eye and a far-shining smile. His vocation
is beyond and beyond the range of all the sciences. The heart and soul
that were in the first home, ere ever even spade and distaff were
invented, when two forlorn hopeful creatures, wistfully looking back to
the sunset of Eden, wistfully looking forward to the solemn nightfall of
the drear world without, with all its starry promises of another morning
and a higher heaven, were all the human race—are world and scope enough
for the humanest and most divine of arts. That God has made of one blood
all the nations and all the generations of this many-peopled earth, is
the argument on which he speaks; that heart answers unto heart all the
world over, is the secret of his power. The petulant passion of a child,
the heroisms and exultations and agonies of that fantastical sweet
youth, over whose unconscious mockery of our real conflict we graver
people smile and weep, are of more import to the poet than all the
secrets of the earth, and all the wonders of the sky; and he turns—it is
his vocation—from the discovery of a planet, forgetting all about it, to
make the whole world ring with joy over a cottage cradle, or weigh down
the very wings of the winds with wailing over some uncommemorated grave.
Yes, it is a humiliating confession—but in reality we are quite as like
to injure as to elevate our poet by all our educations. Perhaps the
heavenly glamour in his eyne had best be left entirely unobscured by any
laws save those of nature; but at all events it seems tolerably sure,
that the more we labour at his training, the less satisfactory is the
result of it. A school of poets is the most hopeless affair in
existence; and whether it dwindle into those smallest of small
rhymsters, leaden echoes of the silver chimes of Pope, in whom the
eighteenth century delighted, or to the present makers of dislocated
verses, whose glory it is to break stones upon the road where the
Laureate’s gilded coach flashes by, we wait with equal weariness and
equal impatience for the Coming Man, who knows neither school nor
education—whose business it is to rout the superannuated spinsters, and
make the world ring once more with the involuntary outburst of song and
youth.
But we who are but the unhappy victims of the mania, why do we blame
ourselves? Alas! it is not we, but our poets, foolish fraternity, who
have set about this fatal task of making a school and perfecting
themselves in their art. How do you suppose they are to do it, kindest
reader? In other arts and professions the self-love of the student in
most instances suffers a woeful downfall at his very outset. Tutors and
books, dire conspirators against his innocence, startle the hapless
neophyte out of all his young complacency; professors set him down
calmly as a know-nothing; chums, with storms of laughter, drive him out
of his last stronghold. He has to shut himself out from his college
doors; seal himself up, poor boy, in his home letters, and so sit down
and study other people’s wisdom, till he comes by that far away and
roundabout process to some true estimate of his own.
But the poet, say the poets, needs other training. For him it is safest
that we shut him up with himself. Himself, a separated creature,
garlanded and crowned for the sacrifice, is, in one noble concentration,
all the ethics, the humanity, and the religion with which he has to do;
significances, occult and mysterious, are in every breath of wind that
whispers about his dedicated head; his smallest actions are note-worthy,
his sport is a mystery, his very bread and cheese symbolical. He is a
poet—everywhere, and in all places, it is the destiny of this
unfortunate to reverence himself, to contemplate himself, to expound and
study the growth of a poet’s mind, the impulses of a poet’s affections;
he is not to be permitted to be unconscious of the sweet stirrings
within him of the unspoken song; he is not to be allowed to believe with
that sweetest simplicity of genius that every other youthful eye beholds
“the light that never was on sea or land,” as well as his own. Unhappy
genius! ill-fated poet! for him alone of all men must the heavens and
the earth be blurred over with a miserable I,—and so he wanders, a
woeful Narcissus, seeing his own image only, and nothing better, in all
the lakes and fountains; and, bound by all the canons of his art, falls
at last desperately either in love or in hate with the persistent
double, which, go where he will, still looks him in the face.
But we bethink us of the greater poets, sons of the elder time. There
was David, prince of lyric-singers; there was Shakespeare, greatest
maker among men. The lyricist was a king, a statesman, a warrior, and a
prophet; the leisure of his very youth was the leisure of occupation,
when the flocks were feeding safe in the green pastures, and by the
quiet waters; and even then the dreaming poet-eye had need to be wary,
and sometimes flashed into sudden lightning at sight of the lion which
the stripling slew. _He_ sung out of the tumult and fulness of his
heart—out of the labours, wars, and tempests of his most human and most
troubled life: his business in this world was to live, and not to make
poems. Yet what songs he made! They are Holy Writ, inspired and sacred;
yet they are human songs, the lyrics of a struggling and kingly
existence—the overflow of the grand primal human emotions to which every
living heart resounds. His “heart moved him,” his “soul was stirred
within him”—true poet-heart—true soul of inspiration! and not what other
men might endure, glassed in the mirror of his own profound poetic
spirit, a study of mankind; but of what himself was bearing there and at
that moment, the royal singer made his outcry, suddenly, and “in his
haste,” to God. What cries of distress and agony are these! what bursts
of hope amid the heartbreak! what shouts and triumphs of great joy! For
David did not live to sing, but sang because he strove and fought,
rejoiced and suffered, in the very heart and heat of life.
Let us say a word of King David ere we go further. Never crowned head
had so many critics as this man has had in these two thousand years; and
many a scorner takes occasion by his failings, and religious lips have
often faltered to call him “the man after God’s own heart;” yet if we
would but think of it, how touching is this name! Not the lofty and
philosophic Paul, though his tranced eyes beheld the very heaven of
heavens; not John, although the human love of the Lord yearned towards
that vehement angel-enthusiast, whose very passion was for God’s honour;
but on this sinning, struggling, repenting David, who fights and falls,
and rises only to fall and fight again—who only never will be content to
lie still in his overthrow, and acknowledge himself vanquished—who bears
about with him every day the traces of some downfall, yet every day is
up again, struggling on as he can, now discouraged, now desperate, now
exultant; who has a sore fighting life of it all his days, with enemies
within and without, his hands full of wars, his soul of ardours, his
life of temptations. Upon this man fell the election of Heaven. And
small must his knowledge be, of himself or of his race, who is not moved
to the very soul to think upon God’s choice of this David, as the _man_
after His own heart. Heaven send us all as little content with our sins
as had the King of Israel! Amen.
And then there is Shakespeare: never man among men, before or after him,
has made so many memorable people; yet amid all the crowding faces on
his canvass, we cannot point to one as “the portrait of the painter.” He
had leisure to make lives and histories for all these men and women, but
not to leave a single personal token to us of himself. The chances seem
to be, that this multitudinous man, having so many other things to think
of, thought marvellously little of William Shakespeare; and that all
that grave, noble face would have brightened into mirthfullest laughter
had he ever heard, in his own manful days, of the Swan of Avon. His very
magnitude, so to speak, lessens him in our eyes; we are all inclined to
be apologetic when we find him going home in comfort and good estate,
and ending his days neither tragically nor romantically, but in ease and
honour. He is the greatest of poets, but he is not what you call a
poetical personage. He writes his plays for the _Globe_, but, once begun
upon them, thinks only of his Hamlet or his Lear, and not a whit of his
audience; nor, in the flush and fulness of his genius, does a single
shadow of himself cross the brilliant stage, where, truth to speak,
there is no need of him. The common conception of a poet, the lofty,
narrow, dreamy soul, made higher and more abstract still by the
glittering crown of light upon his crested forehead, is entirely
extinguished in the broad flood of sunshine wherein stands this
Shakespeare, a common man, sublimed and radiant in a very deluge and
overflow of genial power. Whether it be true or not that these same
marvellous gifts of his would have made as great a statesman or as great
a philosopher as they made a poet, it does not lie in our way to
discover; but to know that the prince of English poets did his work,
which no man has equalled, with as much simplicity and as little egotism
as any labouring peasant of his time—to see him setting out upon it day
by day, rejoicing like a strong man to run a race, but never once
revealing to us those laborious tokens of difficulties overcome, which
of themselves, as Mr Ruskin says, are among the admirable excellences of
Art—to perceive his ease and speed of progress, and how his occupation
constantly is with his story and never with himself,—what a lesson it
is! But alas, and alas! we are none of us Shakespeares. Far above _his_
motives, we would scorn to spend our genius on a Globe Theatre, or on
any other vulgar manner of earning daily bread. The poet is a greater
thing than his poem; let us take _it_ solely as an evidence of his
progress; and in the mean time, however he may tantalise the world with
his gamut and his exercises, let all the world look on with patience,
with awe, and with admiration. True, he is not making an Othello or a
Hamlet; but never mind, he is making Himself.
Yet the thought will glide in upon us woefully unawares,—What the better
are we? We are ever so many millions of people, and only a hundred or
two of us at the utmost can be made happy in the personal
acquaintanceship of Mr Tennyson or (we humbly crave the Laureate’s
pardon for the conjunction) Mr Dobell. In this view of the question, it
is not near so important to us that these gentlemen should perfect the
poet, as that they should make the poem. We ask the Laureate for a
battle-song, and he gives us a skilful fantasia upon the harp; we hush
our breath and open our ears, and, listening devoutly to the “Eureka!”
of here and there a sanguine critic, who has found a poet, wait, longing
for the lay that is to follow. Woe is upon us!—all that we can hear in
the universal twitter is, that every man is trying his notes. We are
patient, but we are not a stoic; and in the wrath of our disappointment
are we not tempted a hundred times to plunge these melodious pipes into
the abyss of our waste-paper basket, and call aloud for _Punch_, and the
_Times_?
Yes, that great poetic rebel, Wordsworth, has heavier sins upon his head
than Betty Foy and Alice Fell; it is to him we owe it, that the poet in
these days is to be regarded as a delicate monster, a creature who lives
not life but poetry, a being withdrawn out of the common existence, and
seeing its events only in the magic mirror of his own consciousness, as
the Lady of Shallott saw the boats upon the river, and the city towers
burning in the sun. The Poet of the Lakes had no imaginary crimes to
tell the world of, nor does it seem that he regarded insanity as one of
the highest and most poetic states of man; but we venture to believe
there never would have been a _Balder_, and _Maud_ should have had no
crazy lover, had there been no Recluse, solemnly living a long life for
Self and Poetry in the retired and sacred seclusion of Rydal Mount.
It is in this way that the manner which is natural and a necessity to
some one great spirit, becomes an intolerable bondage and oppression to
a crowd of smaller ones. The solemn egotism, self-reserved and abstract,
which belonged to Wordsworth, is more easily copied than the broad,
bright, manful nature of our greatest English poet, who was too mighty
to be peculiar; and the delusion has still a deeper root. It is in our
nature, as it seems, to scorn what is familiar and common to all the
world; priesthoods, find them where you will, are bound to profess a
more ethereal organisation, and seek a separated atmosphere. Wordsworth
is a very good leader; but for a thorough out-and-out practical man,
admitting no compromise with his theory, commend us to Anthony the
Eremite, the first of all monkish deserters from this poor sinking
vessel, the world. The poet is the priest of Nature; out with him from
this Noah’s ark of clean and unclean,—this field of wheat and tares,
growing together till the harvest,—this ignoble region of common life.
Let the interpreter betake him to his monastery, his cloister, his
anchorite’s cell—and when he is there? Yes, when he is there—he will
sing to us poor thralls whom he has left behind, but not of our ignoble
passions and rejoicings, or the sorrows that rend our hearts. Very
different from our heavy-handed troubles, rough troopers in God’s army
of afflictions, are the spectre shapes of this poetic world. True, their
happiness is rapture, their misery of the wildest, their remorse the
most refined; but the daylight shines through and through these ghostly
people, and leaves nothing of them but bits of cloud. Alas, the
preaching is vain and without profit! What can the poet do—when he is
tired of his _Mystic_, sick of his _Balder_, weary of Assyrian bulls and
lords with rabbit-mouths? Indeed, there seems little better left for him
than what his predecessors did before. The monk spent his soul upon some
bright-leaved missal, and left the record of his life in the
illumination of an initial letter, or the border of foliage on a vellum
page; the poet throws away his in some elaborate chime of words, some
new inverted measure, or trick of jingling syllables. Which is the
quaintest? for it is easy to say which is the saddest waste of the good
gifts of God.
Also it is but an indifferent sign of us, being, as we undoubtedly are,
so far as poetry is concerned, a secondary age, that there can be no
dispute about the first poet of our day. There is no elder brotherhood
to compete for the laurel; no trio like Wordsworth, Coleridge, and
Southey; no guerilla like Byron to seize upon the contested honour, nor
Irish minstrel to strike a sugared note of emulation. Should a chance
arrow at this moment strike down our poetic champion, so far from
comforting ourselves, like King Henry, that we have “five hundred as
good as he,” we could not find for our consolation one substitute for
Tennyson. Echoes of him we could indeed find by the score; but no one
his entire equal in all the field. Let no one say we do not appreciate
poetry; in these mechanical days there are still a goodly number of
singers who could echo that unfortunate admission which cost Haverillo
his life, and was the last stroke of exasperation to the redoubtable
Firmilian, “I have a third edition in the press.” But in spite of Smith
and Dobell, the Brownings and the Mystics, our Laureate holds his place;
holding his laurel with justice and right less disputable than most of
his predecessors. Yet our admiration of Tennyson is perplexed and
unsatisfactory. He is the first in his generation, but out of his
generation he does not bear comparison with any person of note and fame
equal to his own. He is small in the presence of Wordsworth, a very
inferior magician indeed by the side of Coleridge; his very music—pardon
us, all poets and all critics!—does not _flow_. It may be melodious, but
it is not winged; one stanza will not float into another. It is a rosary
of golden beads, some of them gemmed and radiant, fit to be set in a
king’s crown; but you must tell them one by one, and take leisure for
your comment while they drop from your fingers. They are beautiful, but
they leave you perfectly cool and self-possessed in the midst of your
admiration. To linger over them is a necessity; it becomes them to be
read with criticism; you go over the costly beadroll and choose your
single favourites here and there, as you might do in a gallery of
sculpture. And thus the poet chooses to make you master of his
song,—_it_ does not seize upon _you_.
This is a kind and manner of influence which poets have not often aimed
at. Hitherto it has been the object of this fraternity to arrest and
overpower their audience as the Ancient Mariner fascinated the wedding
guest; and we all know how helplessly, and with what complete
submission, we have followed in the train of these enchanters,
wheresoever it pleased them to turn their wayward footsteps. But Mr
Tennyson aims at a more refined and subtle influence than this downright
enslaving. A poet who writes, or seems to write, because he cannot help
it,—and a poet who writes, or seems to write, of set purpose and _malice
prepense_, are two very different persons. A man of the first class
could not have written _In Memoriam_. Had _he_ been mourning, he must
have mourned a closer grief, and broken his heart over it, ere he had
wept the half of those melodious tears; but for the poet quietly
selecting a subject for his poem, the wisest philosopher could not have
suggested a better choice. A great deal has been said and written on
this subject, and we are fully aware that grief does not make books, or
even poems, except in very rare and brief instances, and that the voice
of a great sorrow is a sharp and bitter outcry, and not a long and
eloquent monologue. But Mr Tennyson does not present himself to us under
the strong and violent compulsion of a great sorrow. It is not grief at
his heart which makes him speak, using his gifts to give ease and
utterance to its burden of weeping; but it is himself who uses his
grief, fully perceiving its capabilities, and the entrance it will give
him into the sacred and universal sympathy of his fellows. For, like all
great works of art, this poem appeals to one of the primitive and
universal emotions of human nature. The dead—the early dead, the
beloved, the gifted, the young: we may discuss the appropriateness of
the tribute, but we cannot refuse to be moved by its occasion. No man
can look on these pages without finding here and there a verse which
strikes home; for few of us are happy enough to live so much as twenty
years in this weary world of ours without some _In Memoriam_ of our own.
Yet we cannot complain of Mr Tennyson that he makes merchandise of any
of the nearest and closest bereavements, the afflictions which shake the
very balance of the world to those who suffer them. His sorrow is as
much of the mind as of the heart; he weeps a companion beloved, yet
almost more honoured and esteemed than beloved—a friend, not even a
brother, still less a child or a wife;—enough of the primitive passion
to claim sympathy from all of us, but not so much that our sympathy
loses itself in a woe beyond consolation. Pure friendship is seldom so
impassioned; but had it been a commoner tie—a relationship more
usual—these gradual revelations of grief in all its successive phases
must have been too much at once for the poet and his audience. This nice
discrimination secures for us that we are able to read and follow him
into all those solemn regions of thought and fancy which open at the
touch of death; _he_ does not fall down upon the grave, the threshold,
as we are but too like to do, and we wander after him wistfully,
beguiled with the echo of this thoughtful weeping, which must have
overpowered us had it been as close or as personal as our own. We feel
that over our own minds these same thoughts have flashed now and then—a
momentary gleam—while we were wading in the bitter waters, and woefully
making up our minds, a hundred times in an hour, to the will of God; but
who could follow them out? The poet, more composed, does what we could
not do; he makes those flashes of hope or of agony into pictures visible
and true. Those glimpses of the face of the dead, of the moonlight
marking out upon the marble the letters of his name, those visions of
his progress now from height to height in the pure heavens, all the
inconsistent lights and shadows—mingled thoughts of the silence in the
grave, and of the sound and sunshine of heaven—not one of them is passed
over. People say it is not one poem, but a succession of poems. It must
have been so, or it would not have been true. One after another they
come gleaming through the long reverie of grief—one after another,
noting well their inconsistencies, their leaps from day to night, from
earth to heaven, the poet has set them down. He knows that we think of
the lost, in the same instant, as slumbering under the sod and as
awaking above the sky; he knows that we realise them _here_ and _there_,
as living and yet as dead; he knows that our
“fancy fuses old and new,
And flashes into false and true,
And mingles all without a plan.”
It is the excellence of _In Memoriam_ that it is a succession of
poems—that the thread of connection runs loosely—now and then drops, and
as unexpectedly comes to light again—that the sequence of these fancies
knows no logic, and that they come in the strain as they come to the
heart.
At the same time it is equally true that all this is done of set purpose
and intention—that the act with which, glimpse by glimpse, the whole
tearful chronicle is made visible, is a calm deliberate act, and not a
voice out of the present passion of a heartbreaking grief. The poet has
chosen the theme—it is not the theme which urges with an overpowering
impulse the utterance of the poet.
And so it is with all Mr Tennyson’s verses, for—no disparagement to his
poetic power—verses we must call them. It is true he is now and then
moved by some sudden exclamation, and shouts it out with an unexpected
force which startles his readers, for the moment, into a more eager
sympathy—but for the most part this poet holds his verse in perfect
subordination, and is never overcome or led away by it. His poetry is
_made_, it is not born. When he can round a sentence into a stanza, the
effect, of its kind, is perfect; but the very form of his favourite
measure, the rhythm of _In Memoriam_, is against any real outburst of
involuntary song; for the verse which falls so sweetly when it contains
all that belongs to it within its perfect crystal round, like a dewdrop,
makes only a most blurred and unshapely strain when it has to eke out
its sense with another and another stanza. When the necessities of his
subject force him to this, the poet labours like a man threading
together a succession of fish-ponds in hopes of making a river. Of
themselves these silvery globes are perfect, but there is no current in
them, and, work as you will, they can never flow and glow into a living
stream. Yes, our Laureate unhappily is always far too much “master of
his subject;” would that his subject now and then could but master him!
If it should happen, by any chance, that Mr Tennyson shared in
Wordsworth’s solemn conceit, and designed to make a Gothic cathedral out
of his works and life, we marvel much what place in it could be given to
_The Princess_, that prettiest of poetic extravagances. Not a
Lady-chapel, though it is of a college of ladies that the story
treats—not a delicate shrine, all wrought in lilies and graces of
foliage, like the shrine of some sweet maiden-saint. No; the Marys, the
Catherines, and the Margarets, symbolised an entirely different fashion
of womankind; yet have we the greatest kindness for Ida in her girlish
heroics, sincerest of all fictions—in her grand words, and her pride,
her inconstant subjects, and her own self-betraying heart. For our own
part, we are so entirely weary of symbols, that we do not pause to
inquire whether _The Princess_ means anything more than it professes to
mean. To us it is only a pleasant picture of the phantasies of youth.
The sweet and daring folly of girlish heroics and extravagance has not
done half so much service to the poet and story-teller as has the
corresponding stage in the development of man. Yet there is more
innocence in it, and perhaps in its full bloom its pretensions are even
more sublime. The delicate temerity which dares everything, yet at its
very climax starts away in a little sudden access of fear—the glorious
young stoic, who could endure a martyrdom, yet has very hard ado to keep
from crying when you lose her favourite book or break her favourite
flower—the wild enthusiast dreamer, scorning all authorities, who yet
could not sleep o’ nights if she had transgressed by ever so little the
sweet obedience of home,—there is a charm about this folly almost more
delightful than the magic of the bolder youth, with all its bright
vagaries; and it is this which makes our tenderness for the Princess Ida
and all her “girl graduates in their golden hair.”
Strange enough, however, this phase of youthfulness does not seem to
have struck any woman-poet. We have heroines pensive and heroines
sublime, heroines serious and heroines merry, but very few specimens of
that high fantastical which embraces all these, and into which most men,
and doubtless most women, on their way to soberer life, have the luck to
fall. Mrs Browning is too sad, too serious, too conscious of the special
pangs and calamities which press heaviest on her sisterhood, to take
note of any happier peculiarity. Nor is this special eye to feminine
troubles confined to Mrs Browning: a weeping and a melancholy band are
the poetesses of all generations. “Woman is the lesser man,” says the
Laureate; but only woman is the sadder man—the victim set apart on a
platform of injury—the wronged and slighted being whose lot it is to
waste her sweetness on hearts unkind and ungrateful, say all the ladies.
“_Her_ lot is on you.” The mature woman has no better thought, when she
looks over the bright girl-heads, bent in their morning prayer; and
wherever we have a female singer, there stands woman, deject and
pensive, betrayed, forsaken, unbeloved, weeping immeasurable tears. Is a
woman, then, the only creature in God’s universe whom He leaves without
compensation? Out upon the thought! but there ought to be some Ida bold
enough to proclaim the woman’s special happinesses—the exuberant
girl-delights—the maiden meditation, fancy free—the glory of
motherhood—the blessings as entirely her own as are the griefs. _Bertha
in the Lane_ is a most moving story, sweetly told; but ye are not always
weeping, O gentlest sisterhood! and where are your songs of joy?
If Mr Tennyson intends the hysterical folly of _Maud_ for a companion
picture to this one, he is indeed elevating the woman to a higher
pedestal than even Ida dreamed of; for the youth is a miserable
conception in comparison with this sunbright girl. In the beginning of
the last reign of poets—when men, disturbed by the great rustle of the
coming wings, endeavoured to find out wherein the magic consisted, to
which they could not choose but yield—we remember to have seen many
clever speculations on the nature of poetry “One said it was the
moon—another said nay”; and it was very hard to understand the
unreasonable potency of this enchantment—which, indeed, clever people,
unwilling to yield to an influence which they cannot measure, are
perpetually accounting for by rules and principles of art. “It has
always been our opinion,” says Lord Jeffrey, “that the very essence of
poetry, apart from the pathos, the wit, or the brilliant description
which may be embodied in it, but may exist equally in prose, consists in
the fine perception and vivid expression of that subtle and mysterious
analogy which exists between the physical and the moral world—which
makes outward things and qualities the natural types and emblems of
inward gifts and emotions, and leads us to ascribe life and sentiment to
everything that interests us in the aspects of external nature.” Lord
Jeffrey is a good authority, though sometimes this troublesome poetry
put even the accomplished critic out of his reckoning; but we are sadly
afraid that this deliverance of his, or at least the idea it contains,
has had some share in the present insanity of all our poets in regard to
Nature. Mr Tennyson may have a private reason of his own for making such
a miserable grumbler as his last hero. Mr Dobell may hold himself
justified, in the heights of self-complacence, and for the benefit of
art, for his atrocious _Balder_, a criminal, by all poetic laws, for
prosiness interminable, worse than murder; but we would crave to know
what right these gentlemen may have to seize upon our genial nature, and
craze her healthful looks and voices to their hysterical and ghastly
fancy? We are content, if he uses his own materials, that the Laureate
should dabble his hollow with blood to his heart’s content; but we will
not consent, for a hundred laureates, to make the free heather of our
hills, the kindly blossom sacred to home and to liberty, an image of
disgust and horror. After all, this is a very poor trick and a
contemptible—at its best much like that which Mr Ruskin denounces as the
most ignoble thing in painting, the excitement of mind which comes from
a successful deception, the consciousness that the thing we look at is
not what it appears to be. When we feel Nature sympathising with us, it
is well; but it is not well when we force her to echo our own mad
fancies, of themselves forced and unreal enough. The “frantic rain,” the
“shuddering dark,” the “maddened beach”—alas, poor poets! is force of
expression not to be found by better means than by this juggle of
misplaced adjectives? How widely different was the “sea change into
something rich and strange” of the sweeter imagination and the greater
heart!
But it is doubtless a very perturbed atmosphere in which we find
ourselves when we come face to face with the last new arrival in the
land of poesy, the unfortunate young gentleman whose hard fate it is to
love Maud, and to shoot her brother. He has no name, this ill-fated
youth; but doubtless Balder is reckoned in his roll of cousinships, and
so is Mr Alexander Smith. There are three of them, ladies and gentlemen,
and they are an amiable trio. Strangely as their garb and intentions are
altered, there is a lingering reminiscence about them of a certain
_Childe Harold_ who once set the world aflame. Like him they are
troubled with a weight of woe and misfortune mysteriously beyond the
conception of common men; but unlike him—and the difference is
characteristic—these unhappy lads are solemnly bent on “improving their
minds,” in spite of their misery. For our own part, we are much
disposed, in the first instance, to set down _Maud_ as one of the
greatest impertinences ever perpetrated by a poet; but we confess, after
an hour’s trial of _Balder_, and the ceaseless singing of that wife of
his, which of itself certainly was almost enough to drive a sober man
crazy, and ought to be received as an extenuating circumstance, we
return in a kinder spirit to the nameless young gentleman who wrote the
Laureate’s poem. After all, he is only an idle boy, scorning other
people, as idle boys are not unwont to scorn their neighbours in the
world; he does not think himself a divinity; he has not a manuscript at
hand to draw forth and gaze upon with delighted eyes; he is not—let us
be grateful—a poet. His history is all pure playing with the reader, a
wanton waste of our attention and the singer’s powers; but, after all,
there is something of the breath of life in it, when we compare it with
the solemn foolery of its much-pretending contemporaries, the lauds of
the self-worshipping man, or the rhapsodies of the self-admiring youth.
We remember to have heard a very skilful painter of still life describe
how the composition, the light and shade, and arrangement of one of his
pictures, was taken from a great old picture of a scriptural scene.
Instead of men and women, the story and the action of the original, our
friend had only things inanimate to group upon his canvass, but he kept
the arrangement, the sunshine and the shadow, the same. One can suppose
that some such artistic whim had seized upon Mr Tennyson. In the
wantonness of conscious power, he has been looking about him for some
feat to do—when, lo! the crash of a travelling orchestra smote upon the
ears of the poet. Are there German bands in the Isle of Wight? or was it
the sublimer music of some provincial opera which woke the Laureate’s
soul to this deed of high emprise? Yes, _Maud_ is an overture done into
words; beginning with a jar and thunder—all the breath of all the
players drawn out in lengthened suspiration upon the noisy notes; then
bits of humaner interlude—soft flute-voices—here and there a momentary
silvery trumpet-note, or the tinkle of a harp, and then a concluding
crash of all the instruments, a tumult of noises fast and furious, an
assault upon our ears and our patience, only endurable because we see
the end. Such is this poem—which indeed it is sad to call a poem,
especially in those hard days. We mean no disparagement to Mr Tennyson’s
powers. It is perhaps only when we compare this with other poems of the
day that we see how prettily managed is the thread of the story, and how
these morsels of verse carry us through every scene as clear as if every
scene was a picture; but a man who knows only too consciously that a
whole nation of people acknowledge him as their best singer—a man who
also doubtless must have noted how the good public, those common people
who take their ill names so tenderly, hurry his books into sixth and
tenth editions, a fact which ought somewhat to counterbalance the
cheating yard-wand—and one, moreover, so thoroughly acquainted with the
gravity and passion of this time, and how it has been startled into a
humbler estimate of itself by the fiery touch of war,—that such a man,
at such an hour, should send forth this piece of trifling as his
contribution to the courage and heartening of his country, is as near an
insult to the audience he addresses as anything which is not personal
can be.
Mr Tennyson, however, has insight and perception to keep him from the
strand on which his imitators—the smaller people who endeavour to
compete with him in poetry, and triumphantly excel him in
extravagance—go ashore. _He_ knows that a poet’s hero ought not to be a
poet—that a man’s genius was given him, if not for the glory of God, its
best aim, yet, at worst, for the glory of some other man, and not for
the pitiful delight of self-laudation, meanest of human follies. A great
book is a great thing, and a great poem is the most immortal of great
books; yet, notwithstanding, one cannot help a smile at the “Have you
read my book?” of Mr Smith’s _Life Drama_, or the
“O thou first last work! my early planned,
Long meditate, and slowly-written epic,”
of Mr Dobell! The poet’s glory is to celebrate other achievements than
his own. His inspiration is the generous flush of sympathy which
triumphs in another’s triumph: “Arms and the man I sing;” and so it
becomes him to throw his heart into his subject, and leave his own
reputation with a noble indifference to the coming ages, who will take
care of that. But it is a perilous day for poetry when poets magnify
their office through page after page of lengthy argument—not to say,
besides, that it is very unjust to us, who are not poets but common
people, and cannot be expected to follow into these recondite regions
the soaring wing of genius. The greater can comprehend the less, but not
the less the greater. _He_ can descend to us in our working-day cares,
but it is not to be expected that many of us can ascend to him in that
sublime retirement of his among the visions and the shadows. To take
_Balder_, for instance: marvellously few of us, even at our vainest,
think either kings or gods of ourselves; ordinary human nature, spite of
its prides and pretensions, is seldom without a consciousness at its
heart of its own littleness and poverty; and when we hear a man
declaring his sublime superiority, we are puzzled, and pause, and smile,
and try to make it out a burlesque or an irony. If he says it in sport,
we can understand him, for Firmilian is out of sight a more
comprehensible person than his prototype; but if our hero is in earnest,
we shake our perplexed heads and let him go by—we know him not. There
may be such a person—far be it from us to limit the creative faculty;
but how does anybody suppose that we—
“Creatures not too wise nor good
For human nature’s daily food,”
can be able to comprehend a being who makes no secret of his own intense
superiority, his elevation over our heads? Again, we say, the greater
comprehends the less, and not the less the greater. We can enter into
the trials and the delights of ordinary men like ourselves; but, alas!
we are not able to enter into those pleasures and poetic pains “which
only poets know.” And the poet knows we cannot appreciate him—nay,
glories in our wonder as we gape after him in his erratic
progress—showers upon us assurances that we cannot understand, and
laughs at our vain fancy if we venture humbly to suppose that we might;
but in the name of everything reasonable, we crave to know, this being
the case, why this infatuated singer publishes his poem? “Have you read
my book?” says Walter, in the _Life Drama_; and being answered, “I
have:” “It is enough,” says the satisfied poet,—
“The Book was only written for two souls,
And they are thine and mine.”
Very well! So be it! We did not ask Mr Smith for a poem, neither did our
importunity besiege the tower of _Balder_; but if they were not written
for us, why tantalise us with these mysterious revelations? For two
souls the _Life Drama_ might have answered exceeding well in manuscript,
and within the bounds of a private circulation the exceptional men who
possibly could comprehend him might have studied _Balder_. How does it
happen that Shakespeare’s wonderful people, with all their great
individualities, are never exceptional men? It is a singular evidence of
the vast and wide difference between great genius and “poetic talent.”
For Shakespeare, you perceive, can afford to let us all understand;
thanks to his commentators, there are a great many obscure _phrases_ in
the Prince of Poets—but all the commentators in the world cannot make
one character unintelligible, or throw confusion into a single scene.
_Balder_, we presume, has not yet been hanged, indisputable as are his
claims to that apotheosis; for this is only part the first, and our
dangerous hero has yet to progress through sundry other “experiences,”
and to come at last “from a doubtful mind to a faithful mind,”—how about
his conscience and the law, meanwhile, Mr Dobell does not say. But we
have no objections to make to the story of _Balder_. That such a being
should exist at all, or, existing, should, of all places in the world,
manage to thrust himself into a poem, is the head and front of the
offending, to our thought. The author of this poetic Frankenstein
mentions Haydon, Keats, and David Scott as instances of the
“much-observed and well-recorded characters of men,” in which “the
elements of his hero exist uncombined and undeveloped.” Poor Keats’s
passionate poet-vanity seems out of place beside the marvellous and
unexampled egotism of the two painters; but we do not see how the poet
improves his position by this reference; nay, had we demonstration that
Balder himself was a living man, we do not see what better it would be.
He is a monster, were he twenty people; and, worse than a monster, he is
a bore; and, worse than a bore, he is an unbearable prig! One longs to
thrust the man out of the window, as he sits mouthing over his
long-meditated epic, and anticipating his empire of the world. Yet it
really is a satisfaction to be told that this incarnate vanity
represents “the predominant intellectual misfortune of the day.” Is this
then the Doubt of which Mr Maurice is respectful, which Mr Kingsley
admires, and Isaac Taylor lifts his lance to demolish? Alas, poor
gentlemen, how they are all deceived! It is like the story we all
believed till truth-telling war found out the difference for us, of the
painted ramparts and wooden bullets of the Russian fortresses. If Mr
Dobell is right, we want no artillery against the doubter—he will make
few proselytes, and we may safely leave him to any elaborate processes
he chooses for the killing of himself.
“Many things go to the making of all things,” says a quaint proverb—and
we require more than a shower of similes, pelting upon us like the
_bonbons_ of a carnival—more than a peculiar measure, a characteristic
cadence, to make poetry. There is our Transatlantic cousin rhyming forth
his chant to all the winds. Well!—we thought we knew poetry once upon a
time—once in the former days our heart leaped at sight of a poetry-book,
and the flutter of the new white pages was a delight to our soul. But
alas, and alas! our interest fails us as much for the _Song of Hiawatha_
as for the musings of _Balder_; there is no getting through the confused
crowd of Mr Browning’s _Men and Women_, and with reverential awe we
withdraw us from _The Mystic_, not even daring a venturesome glance upon
that globe of darkness. What are _we_ to do with these books? They
suppose a state of leisure, of ease, of quietness, unknown to us for
many a day. It pleases the poet to sing of a distempered vanity brooding
by itself over fictitious misfortunes, and what is it to us whether a
_Maud_ or a _Balder_ be the issue?—or he treats of manners and customs,
names and civilisations, and what care we whether it be an Indian
village or a May fair? We have strayed by mistake into a delicate
manufactory—an _atelier_ of the _beaux arts_—and even while we look at
the workmen and admire the exquisite manipulation of the precious toys
before us, our minds stray away out of doors with a sigh of weariness to
the labours of this fighting world of ours and the storms of our own
life. There is no charm here to hold us, none to cheat us into a
momentary forgetfulness of either our languors or our labours. If it is
all poetry, it has lost the first heritage and birthright of the Muse:
it speaks to the ear—it does not speak to the heart.
Yet in this contention of cadences, where every man’s ambition is for a
new rhythm, _Hiawatha_ has a strong claim upon the popular fancy.
Possibly it is not new; but if Mr Longfellow is the first to make it
popular, it matters very little who invented it; and to talk of
plagiarism is absurd. But, unhappily for the poet, this is the very
measure to attract the parodist. _Punch_ has opened the assault, and we
will not attempt to predict how many gleeful voices may echo his
good-humoured mockery before the year is out. The jingle of this measure
is irresistible, and with a good vocabulary of any savage language at
one’s elbow, one feels a pleasing confidence that the strain might spin
on for ever, and almost make itself. But for all that, though the trick
of the weaving is admirable—though we are roused into pleasant
excitement now and then by a hairbreadth escape from a rhyme, and
applaud the dexterity with which this one peril is evaded, we are sadly
at a loss to find any marks of a great or note-worthy poem in this
chant, which is fatally “illustrative of” a certain kind of life, but
contains very little in itself of any life at all. The greatest works of
art,—and we say it at risk of repeating ourselves—are those which appeal
to the primitive emotions of nature; and in gradual descent, as you
address the secondary and less universal emotions, you fail in interest,
in influence, and in greatness. _Hiawatha_ contains a morsel of a
love-story, and a glimpse of a grief; but these do not occupy more than
a few pages, and are by no means important in the song. The consequence
is, of course, that we listen to it entirely unmoved. It was not meant
to move us. The poet intends only that we should admire him, and be
attracted by the novelty of his subject; and so we _do_ admire him—and
so we _are_ amused by the novel syllables—attracted by the chime of the
rhythm, and the quaint conventionalities of the savage life. But we
cannot conceal from ourselves that it _is_ conventional, though it is
savage; and that in reality we see rather less of the actual human life
and nature under the war-paint of the Indian than is to be beheld every
day under the English broadcloth. The Muse is absolute in her
conditions; we cannot restrain her actual footsteps; from the highest
ideal to the plainest matter of fact there is no forbidden ground to the
wandering minstrel; but it is the very secret of her individuality, that
wherever she goes she sounds upon the chords of her especial harp, the
heart;—vibrations of human feeling ring about her in her wayfaring—the
appeal of the broken heart and the shout of the glad one thrust in to
the very pathway where her loftiest abstraction walks in profounder
calm; and though it may please her to amuse herself among social
vanities now and then, we are always reminded of her identity by a
deeper touch, a sudden glance aside into the soul of things—a glimpse of
that nature which makes the whole world kin. It is this perpetual
returning, suddenly, involuntarily, and almost unawares, to the closest
emotions of the human life, which distinguishes among his fellows the
true poet. It is the charm of his art that he startles us in an instant,
and when we least expected it, out of mere admiration into tears; but
such an effect unfortunately can never be produced by customs, or
improvements, or social reforms. The greatest powers of the external
world are as inadequate to this as are the vanities of a village; and
even a combination of both is a fruitless expedient. No, Mr Longfellow
has not shot his arrow this time into the heart of the oak—the dart has
glanced aside, and fallen idly among the brushwood. His _Song_ is a
quaint chant, a happy illustration of manners, but it lacks all the
important elements which go to the making of a poem. We are interested,
pleased, attracted, yet perfectly indifferent; the measure haunts our
ear, but not the matter—and we care no more for _Hiawatha_, and are
still as little concerned for the land of the Objibbeways, as if
America’s best minstrel had never made a song. The poet was more
successful in the wistfulness of his _Evangeline_, to which even these
lengthened, desolate, inquiring hexameters lent a charm of appropriate
symphony; but it is a peculiarity of this sweet singer that his best
strains are always _wistful_, longing, true voices of the night.
It is odd to remark the entire family aspect and resemblance which our
English poets bear to one another. Mr Tennyson is the eldest of the
group, and they all take after him; but they are true brothers, and have
quite a family standard of merit by which to judge themselves. Mr Dobell
is the sulky boy—Mr Browning the boisterous one—Mr Smith the younger
brother, desperately bent on being even with the firstborn, and owning
no claim of birthright. There is but one sister in the melodious
household, and she is quite what the one sister generally is in such a
family—not untouched by even the schoolboy pranks of the surrounding
brothers—falling into their ways of speaking—moved by their
commotions—very feminine, yet more acquainted with masculine fancies
than with the common ways of women. Another sister or two to share her
womanly moderatorship in this noisy household might have made a
considerable difference in Mrs Browning: but her position has a charm of
its own;—she never lags behind the fraternal band, nay, sometimes
stimulated by a sudden impulse, glides on first, and calls “the boys” to
follow her: nor does she quite refuse now and then to join a wild
expedition to the woods or the sea-shore. If she has sometimes a
feminine perception that the language of the brothers is somewhat too
rugged or too obscure for common comprehension, she partly adopts the
same, with a graceful feminine artifice, to show how, blended with her
sweeter words, this careless diction can be musical after all; and you
feel quite confident that she will stand up stoutly for all the
brotherhood, even when she does not quite approve of their vagaries. She
has songs of her own, sweet and characteristic, such as “Little Ellie,”
and leaps into the heart of a great subject once in that _Lay of the
Children_, which everybody knows and quotes, and which has just poetic
exaggeration sufficient to express the vehement indignation with which
the song compelled the singer’s utterance. Altogether, Mrs Browning’s
poems, rank them how you will in intellectual power, have more of the
native mettle of poetry than most modern verses. She is less artificial
than her brotherhood—and there is something of the spring and freedom of
things _born_ in her two earlier volumes; she is not so assiduously busy
over the things which have to be made.
And Robert Browning is the wild boy of the household—the boisterous
noisy shouting voice which the elder people shake their heads to hear.
It is very hard to make out what he would be at with those marvellous
convolutions of words; but, after all, he really seems to mean
something, which is a comfort in its way. Then there is an unmistakable
enjoyment in this wild sport of his—_he_ likes it, though we are
puzzled; and sometimes he works like the old primitive painters, with
little command of his tools, but something genuine in his mind, which
comes out in spite of the stubborn brushes and pigments, marvellous
ugly, yet somehow true. Only very few of his _Men and Women_ is it
possible to make out: indeed, we fear that the Andrea and the Bishop
Blougram are about the only intelligible sketches, to our poor
apprehension, in the volumes; but there is a pleasant glimmer of the
author himself through the rent and tortured fabric of his poetry, which
commends him to a kindly judgment; and, unlike those brothers of his who
use the dramatic form with an entire contravention of its principles,
this writer of rugged verses has a dramatic gift, the power of
contrasting character, and expressing its distinctions.
But altogether, not to go further into these characteristic differences,
they are a united and affectionate family this band of poets, and chorus
each other with admirable amiability; yet we confess, for poetry’s sake,
we are jealous of the Laureate’s indisputable pre-eminence. It is not
well for any man—unless he chance to be a man like Shakespeare, a happy
chance, which has never happened but once in our race or country—to have
so great a monopoly; and it is a sad misfortune for Tennyson himself,
that he has no one to try his mettle, but is troubled with a shadowy
crowd of competitors eagerly contending which shall reflect his
peculiarities best.
For the manfuller voices are all busy with serious prose or that craft
of novel-writing which is more manageable for common uses than the
loftier vehicle of verse. True, there are such names as Aytoun and
Macaulay, and we all know the ringing martial ballad-notes which belong
to these distinguished writers; but Macaulay and Aytoun have taken to
other courses, and strike the harp no more. And while the higher places
stand vacant, the lower ones fill with a crowd of choral people, who
only serve to show us the superiority of the reigning family, such as it
is. It is a sad fact, yet we cannot dispute it—poetry is fast becoming
an accomplishment, and the number of people in “polite society” who
write verses is appalling. Only the other day, two happy samples of
Young England came by chance across our path—one a young clergyman,
high, high, unspeakably high, riding upon the very rigging of the
highest roof of Anglican churchmanship, bland, smooth, and gracious, a
bishop in the bud; the other, his antipodes and perfect opposite, gone
far astray after the Warringtons and Pendennises—a man of mirth and
daring, ready for everything. They had but one feature of resemblance—an
odd illustration of what we have just been saying. Both of them had
modestly ventured into print; both of them were poets.
And yet that stream of smooth and facile verse which surrounded us in
former days has suffered visible diminution. It is a different kind of
fare which our minor minstrels shower down upon that wonderful appetite
of youth, which doubtless cracks those rough-husked nuts of words with
delighted eagerness, as we once drank in the sugared milk-and-water of a
less pretending Helicon. After all, we suspect it is the youthful people
who are the poets’ best audience. These heirs of Time, coming leisurely
to their inheritance, have space for song by the way; but in the din and
contest of life we want a more potent influence. If the poet has
anything to say to us, he must even seize us by the strong hand, and
compel our listening; for we are very unlike to pause of our own will,
or take time to hear his music on any weaker argument than this.
And _he_ too at last has gone away to join his old long-departed
contemporaries, that old old man, with his classic rose-garland, from
the classic table, where generations of men and poets have come and
gone, a world of changing guests. He was not a great poet certainly, and
his festive, and prosperous, and lengthened life called for no
particular exercise of our sympathies; yet honour and gentle
recollection be with the last survivor of the last race of Anakim,
though he himself was not among the giants. The day has changed since
that meridian flush which left a certain splendour of reflection upon
Samuel Rogers, the last of that great family of song. Ours is only a
twilight kind of radiance, however much we may make of it. It differs
sadly from the full unclouded shining of that Day of the Poets which is
past.
A MILITARY ADVENTURE IN THE PYRENEES.
BY A PENINSULAR MEDALLIST.
CONCLUSION.
CHAPTER XIII.
On arriving at our billet, we there found the Padre, who expressed his
profound regrets at the insult offered by the villagers to my companion,
and repeated his assurance that nothing of the kind should happen again.
“Señor Padre,” said I, “that is hardly sufficient. I think that people
who misconduct themselves as the villagers have done, should be made
sensible of their error by stringent measures.”
“This time let it pass,” said M. le Tisanier. “Should the same thing
happen again, I shall hold the alcalde responsible, and shall invite
him” (M. le T. twists his mustache) “to a promenade outside the
village.”
The Padre was in a little bit of a fidget. We had come upon him in the
kitchen, with a ladle on the stove, and sleeves turned up. He was
casting bullets.
“No news of this French column,” said he; “I have been waiting about
here, expecting intelligence all the morning.”
“Why not send out some of the villagers?” I asked. “They might pick up
information.”
“Señor Capitan,” he replied, “I have thought of a better plan than that.
You and I were to have gone out shooting to-day. Suppose we go to-morrow
morning.”
“With much pleasure,” said I, “but what are we to effect by that?”
“We will take a new direction,” he replied. “We will not go northwards,
as hitherto; we will go southwards. This will bring us towards the point
from which the enemy are approaching. We may obtain tidings; perhaps we
may get a sight of them.”
“You must be guide, then,” I answered. “Of course, you know the ground.”
“Trust me for that,” said he. “I will not take you by the direct route
across the open plain. We will strike off to the right, and skirt the
foot of the hills.”
“Why go over rough ground, in preference to level?” I asked.
“Ah,” said he, “you are, I perceive, a novice in guerilla warfare.
Regular tactics are your line. If they caught sight of us on the open
plain, don’t you see they would be sure to overtake and capture us? If
we have the hills on our flank, cannot we at any time escape up the
rocks and gullies? They are not likely to follow us there. If they do,
at any rate, I promise you some beautiful shooting.”
“Let alone a little bloodletting among the thorn-bushes,” said I;
“trousers in tatters, and our beasts rolling heels over head down all
sorts of places.”
“We must go on foot,” he replied.
“Very good,” said I; “you know best. Only recollect my left leg is in
far better walking order for half-a-league than for half-a-dozen.
Suppose I knock up?”
“Chito! then I will carry you on my back.”
“Be it so,” said I, inwardly determining to drop dead tired for the fun
of the thing, and take a spell out of the Padre as long as I found it
pleasant. “Then, to-morrow after breakfast——”
“We must start before breakfast,” said the Padre.
Supposing the enemy at hand, it really was desirable to know what they
were about. So I ended by assenting, with one proviso, to all the
Padre’s propositions. The proviso was, that in the interval we received
no intelligence sufficiently conclusive of itself, and rendering our
reconnaissance superfluous.
CHAPTER XIV.
No intelligence arrived, and early next morning we set out to seek the
foe. M. le Tisanier was up betimes to see us off. “Expect to see me
return,” said I, “in a state of absolute exhaustion and immense
inanition, with heels hanging down over the Padre’s shoulders. In pity
have a good dinner ready.”
“I shall be prepared for you,” said M. le Tisanier.
“Of course you feel easy,” said I to the Padre as we went along,
“respecting the four Frenchmen.”
“No fear about them,” replied the Padre. “They know it is their safety
to keep quiet; and if they come to any harm, it will be their own act.
If they attempt to move, or even show themselves abroad, they will be
shot down _luego, luego_.”
Our ramble proved well worth taking for its own sake; but we saw no
Frenchmen, and very little game. The Padre was fortunate, and bagged a
fox. My success was but scanty in respect to hares and partridges. After
a long detour through a wild and very thinly inhabited district, and a
few calls at scattered cottages or rather hovels, the abode of a rough
and noble peasantry, all of whom received the Padre with profound
veneration, and me as his companion with high Spanish courtesy, we
reached at length a village which we had agreed to make the extreme
limit of our excursion. Still obtaining no intelligence, we set out,
after resting, on our return. We now, however, took the direct route
over the plain, and found our journey homeward far more agreeable than
our journey out. There was a point on which I deemed it requisite to
obtain information, and the Padre being in a remarkably conversable
vein, the present seemed a good opportunity.
“You mentioned,” said I, “that the proprietors of your abode were worthy
people. I should be sorry, for their sakes, if the house received damage
from the enemy.”
_He._ “It is not altogether for their sakes that I wish to preserve the
house.”
_I._ “Of course, not altogether. Your own property—your own effects——”
_He._ “I have no property; I have no effects; I have nothing. It is a
rule of my order. I am under a vow of poverty. No, no; my wish springs
from a principle of honour.”
_I._ “Just what I should feel towards my own landlord. But you say it is
not on your landlord’s account.”
_He._ “It is on account of the fraternity of which I am an unworthy
member.”
_I._ “Oh, oh! then your fraternity have an interest in the premises?”
_He._ “Not exactly in the building itself, but in its contents. The fact
is, our convent——but I forget. You, as a heret——pardon me; you, as an
Englishman, can have no acquaintance with our regulations. I will just
explain. Our poor indigent community has some trifling property in
lands, principally vineyards. I am their factor. That house is one of
our depôts.”
_I._ “Very good wine, too, the growth of your estates. Little did I
imagine, while seated with you at table, or puffing a cigar, that we
were sipping the property of the Church.”
_He._ “You may say smoking as well as sipping. The cigars also are the
property of our humble fraternity.”
_I._ “Well, I like that idea of a vow of poverty amazingly. You don’t
intend to convert me?”
_He_ (benignantly). “One thing at a time. As to the wine we drink, you
mistake, however, if you suppose that is the wine we grow. The wine
grown on our lands is the _ordinario_ sort—abundant, indeed, as to
quantity, and in that respect valuable; but not of a sort fit to be
drunk by my order. No, no; we exchange it for better. For example, what
you have been drinking I trust you will admit is a good sound wine.”
_I._ “As good a Spanish red wine as I ever tasted;”—and it was no
compliment.
_He._ “Yes, yes; and we sometimes exchange for foreign wines. Would that
you had been here before the branch convent, which is now your hospital,
was ransacked by the French. Have I not good reason for shooting a
Frenchman whenever I can? Ah, I would have given you such a bottle of
bordeaux! And port! As good port as you can drink in the Peninsula, and
far better than you ever are likely to drink in your own country.”
_I._ “And so it is you who have the management of all this. Surely it
must give you no end of trouble.”
_He._ “Trouble? It is my business. Besides that, it is a duty I owe my
fraternity, consequently a duty of my profession. As to trouble, my only
real trouble is in running foreign goods from the coast, or across the
frontiers. I certainly do sometimes find a little trouble in that. But
why should I complain? After all, it is exciting, and so far a pleasure.
A man of my cloth ought always to be contented.”
_I._ “French goods?”
_He._ “French goods and English. French, across the Pyrenees; English,
from the shores of the Mediterranean and Bay of Biscay. We sell again at
a very fair profit—moderate as becomes our order, but fair
nevertheless.”
_I._ “A heavy deduction, though, the fiscal exactions of your
government, no doubt.”
“Fiscal?” he exclaimed, frowning horribly. “Fiscal? Do you think me, in
managing the concerns of my venerable brotherhood, capable of such a
dereliction of principle—do you consider me such an ass as to permit any
deduction like that? Why, if we conducted our little business subject to
fiscal obstructions, we might as well have no management at all. Señor
Capitan, although this conversation was brought on by a remark on your
part, the subject is one on which I have long wished to confer with you
confidentially, and I thank you for the opportunity. And now let me
bespeak your kind, benevolent offices on behalf of my self-denying
humble brethren. As I said before, we profess poverty, we have nothing.
Charitable laics, touched by our dependent and destitute condition, have
from time to time bequeathed us trifles of landed property, which we
frugally farm to the best advantage, taking the chance—you know it is a
toss-up—of profit or loss. The produce, when realised, we turn to
account as well as our poor opportunities permit; and my object is to
supplicate your best offices in behalf of our little store in the
village, which, as well as one or two others in different localities, is
under my charge and responsibility. Some damage our store has suffered
already. After the plunder of the convent by the French, your own
troops, on their arrival in the village, found their way into the cellar
of the house, and were beginning to make free with the wine, when you
happily arrived, and order was soon restored. All I ask is, that as long
as you remain here, or have influence in this neighbourhood, you will
kindly give our depôt the benefit of your protection, so far as you may
be able. I ask it, not only on my own account, but for the sake of my
venerable brethren. Our wants are few. The French silks and English
prints we sell for what we can get. We also drive a trifling business in
English cutlery, and French _quincaillerie_. The poor must do something
to live. As to the convent in Vittoria, I forward to it from time to
time, as best I can, and when I have got them, only little supplies of
such common necessaries as bordeaux, port, champagne, sherry, French
brandy when I can get it good, sardines, gruyère cheese, caviar,
vermicelli, macaroni, spicery, Dutch herrings, maraschino, Hamburg
sausages, and a few other little knicknackeries not worth enumerating.
Our wants are few.”
Had liberal Spain, when she laid hands on the property of the religious
orders, gone through as she began, made a clean work of it, and reformed
ALL that we consider the errors and abuses of Romanism, I, as an ardent
Protestant, should have cordially rejoiced. But merely to confiscate
endowments, and to leave other things as they are, is a different thing.
There can be no doubt of it, that at the beginning of this century, when
Napoleon I. attempted to make Spain a province of France, the Spanish
clergy, by their influence with the nation, and by their success in
maintaining the spirit of national resistance, were the saviours of
their country. That these have been made the victims, and the only
victims of reform, is hard indeed.
I walked on, listening to the Padre’s discourse with so much interest,
that we arrived close upon our village before I recollected his promise
of a lift, and my own fixed purpose of taking it out of him. We were now
not a quarter of a mile from our journey’s end; and I was beginning to
muse, with complacent anticipation, on the capital dinner which M. le
Tisanier was to have ready on our arrival, when we noticed Francisco
coming down the lane to meet us.
As he approached with hasty strides, his visage was clouded. He made an
angry gesture, as if signalling us to halt.
“That endiablado doctor,” said he, “(may his soul never see the inside
of purgatory!) has armed the four Frenchmen, seized all the ammunition
in the village, and barricaded the house!”
CHAPTER XV.
We halted. As the tidings brought by Francisco deprived the Padre of
utterance, I demanded particulars.
It appeared from Francisco’s indignant statement that, subsequently to
our departure, when M. le Tisanier, having made his preliminary
arrangements for our dinner, had visited the hospitals, and was
returning through the village, he was again set upon by the inhabitants.
The villagers, taking advantage of the Padre’s absence, surrounded and
insulted him, menaced both him and the four prisoners with death, and
pelted him with stones, one of which had taken effect, very much to the
detriment of his physiognomy. On reaching home, however, he occupied
himself as usual, without doing anything to excite suspicion; but, after
a while, he sent off Francisco with a message to the “two wounded
Spaniards” at the convent, and with directions to await their further
instructions. After being detained a couple of hours, which he spent in
the study of English, under the tuition of the convalescent soldiers,
with whom Francisco was popular, the two Spaniards merely gave him
directions to go home again, and he returned to the house.
On entering the kitchen, he was surprised to see what to all appearance
was a dinner ready-cooked, arranged on a tray, and under covers. M. le
Tisanier, pointing to the tray, bade him carry it to the Alcalde’s, with
a message that he himself would be there immediately. The Alcalde was
from home; and Francisco, on coming out after leaving the tray, beheld
in the street a spectacle which, as he elegantly expressed himself,
“revolved his interior” (_revolvió-me las tripas_). Close at hand
appeared, all bearing their muskets and fully accoutred, the four French
soldiers, headed by M. le Tisanier, who marched _en militaire_, with his
drawn sword sloped on his shoulder. This armed party, compelling him to
return with them, entered the Alcalde’s house, demanded all the arms on
the premises, obtained a gun, a blunderbuss, a pair of Spanish rapiers,
and a quantity of ammunition. They then, leaving behind them a basket
which contained several bottles of the Padre’s wine, went back to the
house, which immediately on their entering they barricaded, leaving the
astonished Francisco in the street.
The villagers noticed these proceedings with consternation, but had been
taken by surprise, and were overawed by the military display. After the
closing of the house, they assembled tumultuously in the street, and
meditated all sorts of things. But M. le Tisanier, appearing at the
window of an _entresuelo_ (a closet or small chamber half-way
up-stairs), warned them to disperse if they did not wish to be fired
upon; an admonition which they were the more readily induced to follow
by a bullet that whistled over their heads. They then withdrew to their
huts, anxiously watching the closed house, in which no movement was
discernible, and expecting with much palpitation the Padre’s return.
Francisco, recovering from his first surprise, had started off, he told
us, in search of the Padre and me; but not knowing which way we had
taken, assuming that we had followed our usual direction towards the
shooting-ground, and being too much confused to make inquiries, he had
covered a great deal of ground to no purpose, and had not got back to
the village till a short time before our return.
“Santiago de Compostella!” gasped the Padre, at length recovering
partially his senses and his breath, and dashing his bonnet on the
ground. “For which of my many sins was I withheld from cutting that
hangdog’s throat the first moment that I set eyes on him! Santiago!
_Trecientos mil diablos!_”
“Compose yourself, Señor Padre,” said I. “At least wait till we see how
things look, and till we can judge for ourselves. If the Doctor has been
menaced and assaulted, what wonder that he should place himself in
security till our return? The business, according to my view of it, is
not so serious as you appear to think.”
“Ah!” said the Padre, wiping the cold sweat from his forehead, “you are
very kind. I totally forgot what I had just told you—that, with the
exception of the wine, I had sent off all our stores to Vittoria.—Oh no!
I mistake! Three dozen Lamego hams! Beautiful!—delicate! The choicest
rarity in these parts! Oh, my Lamego hams! To think that the poor
provision for my self-denying, self-mortifying, exemplary brethren
should go to feed those hounds of Frenchmen!”
“Never mind,” I replied, still striving to tranquillise his agitated
feelings; “should the worst come to the worst, we’ll have them out of
that long before they finish your hams. But not to lose time, suppose I
just step forward, and try the effects of a parley.”
CHAPTER XVI.
On approaching the house, which had now become a _place d’armes_, I saw
no one stirring. Every shutter was closed. It was a square low building,
as old as the Moors, flat-roofed, solidly built of stone. Its little
windows were high above the level of the ground. As I drew nigh, I
remarked that the large massive door, which usually stood open all day,
was, as well as the shutters, closed. Spanish-fashion, I took the
liberty of kicking at the said door, in the absence of any such
superfluities as bell or knocker. A voice responded over my head,
“_Quien es?_” (Who is it?)
I looked up. At the window above, already indicated by Francisco’s
narrative, with an awfully damaged peeper, stood M. le Tisanier. He
bowed politely.
“Ah!” said he. “So you have returned from your reconnaissance. Any
intelligence of the French column? What sport to-day?”
Not choosing to answer the former of these inquiries, I addressed myself
to the latter. “Very poor indeed. Only a brace and a half of birds, and
a couple of hares. The Padre, though, has brought home a fox. Dinner
ready?”
_He._ “Your dinner? Oh, yes, that was ready some hours ago. It awaits
you at the Alcalde’s—hope you’ll enjoy it. It will merely require
warming.”
_I._ “Shall we not, then, have the pleasure of your company?”
_He._ “To tell you the truth, I have made up my mind to remain where I
am. The villagers, as you perceive, have maltreated me; so the idea
occurred to me, my best plan would be to fortify the house.”
_I._ “In our absence, quite right. But now that the Padre has returned,
as well as myself, no further precaution is requisite.”
_He._ “Pardon me. I take quite a different view of the subject.”
_I_ (a little annoyed). “Explain yourself.”
_He._ “In case you should receive satisfactory intelligence that my
countrymen are approaching in force, and supposing you should in
consequence deem it requisite to evacuate this hamlet and fall back on
Vittoria, permit me to inquire, would you not feel it your duty to
invite me to accompany you as a prisoner?”
_I._ “Probably.”
_He._ “Of course you would. Now, that being your duty, I have been led
to consider what, under the circumstances, is my duty. And it strikes
me, I confess, that in the prospect of a speedy reunion with my
countrymen, the most proper thing I can do is—to remain where I am.”
_I._ “Permit me, however, to suggest, that if you persist in this view,
and if we should be induced in consequence to adopt vigorous measures,
you may find yourself, on their proving successful, very awkwardly
situated among the people of this place. You know their feeling, and I
might no longer be able to restrain them.”
_He._ “Permit me, on the other hand, to suggest, that should I maintain
myself in this house till my countrymen arrive, the exploit will cover
me with glory, my comrades will rush to congratulate me, and I shall be
appreciated throughout the French army. In short, M. le Capitaine, I
consider my actual position impregnable; and never in my life did I feel
more completely at my ease than I do at this moment. Benevolently
anxious to prevent the needless effusion of blood, I tender you my
disinterested advice to abstain from any rash attempt; and, by no means
unwilling to impart useful information, I beg to state that, while your
sick men in the hospital have next to no ammunition, I, on my part, have
secured all the powder and shot in the village. The Padre’s store, the
Alcalde’s, and—pardon me—your own, are all in my safe keeping.”
Beginning to feel out of temper, I made an appeal. “I thought, Monsieur,
in dealing with an officer and a gentleman, I should, at any rate, find
security in his plighted word. Remember, you are on your parole.”
“Ah!” he replied with much gravity, “you touch my honour. I cannot
permit that. But, Monsieur, I think you scarcely recollect. My parole?
Let me see. What was my parole? That I would not escape from this place.
Very good. Here I am. If my own countrymen come and fetch me away, that,
of course, is quite another affair.”
I was sick of this long conversation, and a little sulky. “Monsieur,”
said I, “you seem to reckon on the arrival of your countrymen. Doubtless
the movement on their part will bring some of mine. Should you hold out
till they arrive, which, however, is far from certain, depend upon it
you will not again obtain your parole; you will be treated as a common
prisoner.”
“Never mind,” said he; “I must take the rough with the smooth. As far as
my own military experience goes, the French are quite as quick in their
movements as the English; and you yourself have taught me to believe”
(he bows very low indeed) “that the conduct of British officers to a
French officer who happens to find himself in their power, will never be
other than that of a gentleman. By the by, I have a little request to
make. Should you send for assistance to Vittoria, pray let it be such a
force that I may capitulate without disgrace,—not less than a _corps
d’armée_, I beg. As to artillery, a siege-train, if you please. I could
not possibly surrender to field guns.”
I felt excessively disgusted, and was about to withdraw. Yet,
recollecting that, with all his gasconade, M. le Tisanier had certainly
manifested a sort of good feeling, by preparing our dinner in the midst
of his arrangements for defence, I paused.
“I am sorry our stock of game is so small to-day,” said I. “Will you do
me the favour to accept of it?”
“No,” said he, with an air of decision; “I could not. Excuse me. A
thousand thanks.”
“Come, come,” said I; “bent as you are on resistance, at least let us
carry on this war without mutual animosity. Oblige me by accepting of
the hares and partridges for your private use.”
“It is out of the question,” he answered firmly. “Honour forbids my
compliance. Nevertheless,” he added, after a pause, as if struck by some
new idea, “to prove that I am not above receiving an obligation, I will
accept—the fox.”
Accept the fox? Though not exactly understanding this, I returned to
where I had left the produce of the day’s sport in the keeping of the
Padre and Francisco. The Padre was gone; so, making free to lift the fox
from Francisco’s shoulders, I went back to the place of conference, and
handed it up to M. le Tisanier, who reappeared at his window. He
received the gift without explanation, but with a profusion of bows as
well as many polite acknowledgments. Fortunate for him were his limber
indications of gratitude; for, just as he made his first bow on
receiving the slaughtered fox, the crack of a musket from an opposite
hovel was accompanied by the whiz of a bullet, which passed just over
his head, and, had he remained upright, would have doubtless passed
through it.
“Good,” said he; “another bullet added to our store of ammunition, and
one charge less in the Padre’s pouch. That was his musket.”
“Now,” said I, “be persuaded. Go in at once. The Padre will not make a
second miss.”
“It will take at least two minutes,” he replied, “ere the Padre can fire
again. Monsieur,” he continued, with earnestness and emotion, “I have
yet a request. Having resolved to assume my present attitude of
defensive hostilities, not so much for my own sake, as to save my
captive countrymen, to whom even your influence might not always prove
an adequate protection in this execrable village, I think you can guess
the parties who are now the chief objects of my solicitude. On the
whole, I judged it their safest course that they should continue in the
hospital rather than join me here. As Spaniards, should they find their
present position untenable, they can at any rate escape. But, as you
know my secret, may I still depend on your good offices? May I venture
to hope that, in any case of exigency, you will render all the
assistance in your power to one whose life I prize, as much as—as much
as I disregard my own?” There spoke the Gascon.
“Depend upon me,” I replied. “Now withdraw from the window without
further parley.”
He backed into the house with another bow, and reclosed the shutter. As
he disappeared he smiled; nor could I altogether preserve my gravity.
Certainly the Padre’s ideas touching the laws of war were a little
primitive. In fact, his firing while the conference was in progress,
looked almost like violating a flag of truce.
“Well, Señor Padre,” said I, on entering the cottage whence the shot had
proceeded, “how do you intend to regain possession of your house?”
The Padre looked dumfounded. “I rather depended on your experience,” he
replied. “Were I in the house, I would undertake to hold it against
fifty Frenchmen. But, as we must now be the assailants, and as that is a
line of warfare less in my way, I look chiefly to your own more
extensive acquaintance with sap, mining, intrenchments, and approaches.”
“No, no,” I answered. “You have thought fit to commence operations, so
you must go through with them.”
“Señor Capitan,” said the Padre, “I am already sufficiently punished by
having missed that shot. Do not aggravate my penalty by——.” Enter a
messenger in haste.
It was Francisco, not only in haste, but in a high state of
exasperation. His look I will not attempt to delineate. The face of a
well-conducted, taciturn, sober-minded Spaniard, when distorted by
passion, must be seen, not described; and, if seen, will not soon be
forgotten.
“The enemy,” he cried, “defies us! He has hoisted his standard!”
We looked towards the house. An ensign of some sort he had raised, sure
enough; of what kind we could not immediately distinguish, but the fact
was palpable. From the flat roof there rose a slender pole, and at its
summit hung suspended and swinging in the wind a something—what?—the
fox’s brush.
CHAPTER XVII.
Francisco spoke truly. It was defiance, and no mistake. To hang out a
fox’s tail! Not only defiance, but mockery—rank insult! I had suggested
to M. le Tisanier, in our recent parley, the possible arrival of an
English force. But this was a contingency to be now as much deprecated
on my part as on his. To be caught by my countrymen laying siege to my
own prisoner ensconced in my own billet, the housetop surmounted by a
banner which whimsically spoke the language of challenge and derision
combined,—why, on returning to headquarters, I should never hear the end
of it. M. le Tisanier might think it a very good joke; but I very soon
settled it in my own mind that either by storm or by regular approach I
must reduce him and his garrison in the least possible time. So nothing
remained but to let slip the dogs of war—_i. e._, to open the campaign.
From inquiries instituted on my suggestion by the Padre, it was at once
ascertained that the village possessed next to nothing in the shape of
ammunition and _matériel_ for carrying on the siege. M. le Tisanier had
indeed very correctly stated that the bulk was in his own safe keeping.
Burning the house would not exactly have suited the Padre, even had it
been built of combustible materials, or had I myself entertained any
such truculent designs.
Without interruption on the part of the enemy, I reconnoitred the
building on all sides. It stood in its strength, completely detached
from all other tenements, without garden, trees, fences, or anything
else affording cover for our approaches. Close by, indeed, there stood a
small shed which served as a wood-house, solidly built of stone. But
this also was entirely detached from the main building; and its door,
opening sideways, was completely commanded from the roof and windows of
the house itself.
Having posted some of the villagers to watch in the surrounding
cottages, with directions to report if they noticed any movement in the
house, but not to show themselves, the Padre and I, not in the best of
humours, were about to withdraw to our dinner at the Alcalde’s. At that
moment, with some surprise, I noticed Sergeant Pegden coming down the
village from the hospital.
Sergeant Pegden was a Dover man. On my visit to the hospital the day
before, I had left him, tardily convalescent, in bed. His conduct in the
regiment had been always good, and had gained his actual rank as a
noncommissioned officer. Like many other fine fellows, he had knocked up
in the Vittoria campaign; and, after going into hospital, he had
appeared to be labouring under a total prostration of physical powers,
almost amounting to atrophy. He there was kept as comfortable as
circumstances permitted, and had perfect rest. But even with all the
benefit of M. le Tisanier’s culinary skill, he had made but poor
progress; in fact, his frame appeared too far exhausted to recruit,
except very gradually indeed, by either rest or nourishment.
The Sergeant’s step, as he now approached, was shaky, almost tottering.
His countenance, emaciated while he remained in bed, now looked
deathlike. He had turned out neat and tidy after a fashion, though his
clothing was worn and faded. He reached us, and we exchanged salutes.
“Why, Pegden,” said I, “what brings you down here?”
“Please—sir,” he feebly replied, “I hope you’ll excuse me; but we heard
what has happened, so I thought I had better come down. Would have been
here a good bit sooner, sir, only if I hadn’t not had some stitching to
do first.”
“What other men,” I asked, “are able to turn out?”
“Please, sir,” replied he, “that’s what they wished me to speak to you
about. There’s five of them as says they can come down whenever you
please, sir, only if they had a few buttons, and some needles and
thread.”
“Which five are they?” said I.
“There’s the Lancashire man, sir,” he answered, “and there’s Sandwich
Sam, and Cockney, and the Parson, them four. And there’s Teakettle Tom,
he says he thinks he could come, only he hasn’t not got no breeches.”
“Very good,” said I; “go into the house, and take some refreshment,
while we see what the village can supply. To-morrow morning you can
bring the men down.”
The Padre having instituted an inquiry in the village to meet the
requisition for military stores, we sat down to dinner. All the articles
required were soon forthcoming; so, having allowed the Sergeant a little
time for rest and refreshment, I directed Francisco to take the things,
and to go back with the Sergeant to the convent.
Dinner concluded, we were leaving the house, when I was surprised to
find Sergeant Pegden seated in the porch.
“Why, Sergeant,” said I, “will you take anything more to eat or to
drink? I fear you have overtaxed your strength.”
“Nothing more, thank’e, sir,” said the Sergeant. “Much obliged to you
for all favours. Only please, sir, I’m waiting for that Sandwich Sam. I
brought him down with me from the hospital; only when we got into the
village he hung behind, because he said he wasn’t regimental.”
“Well,” said I, “bring him down in the morning with the rest, as tidy as
you can turn them out. When you get back to the hospital, you will
probably find he is there before you. By the by, Pegden, I suppose you
know all about those two Spaniards up there.”
The Sergeant sniggered. “Yes, sir,” said he; “we all knows pretty well
about them.” The smirk on the Sergeant’s cadaverous visage reminded one
of a death’s-head illumined by a flash of lightning. In fact, it might
be truly said that the Sergeant “grinned horribly a ghastly smile.”
“Well then,” I added, “tell the men I depend on their good behaviour.
There must be no annoyance, no interference of any kind.”
I had by this time mentally arranged my plan of operations for the next
day. So, after posting a relief of sentinels, I lay down in my clothes,
occasionally going my rounds till daybreak, to keep the watchmen wide
awake, and secure a good look-out. What I chiefly apprehended was an
attempt of the garrison to escape in the night.
CHAPTER XVIII.
Early in the morning, Sergeant Pegden brought down his party; one short,
however, of the number announced by him the evening before. The absent
man was Sam, the same who had been already reported missing. In fact, I
learnt from the Sergeant that Sam had been out all night, and had not
returned to the convent at all. This was a serious reduction of our
available force.
Sandwich Sam, _alias_ “Shrimps,” had, previous to his enlistment,
enjoyed the benefit of a somewhat amphibious education. By profession a
hoyman, but also smart as a smuggler, he had occasionally condescended
to fill up a leisure hour with the lively amusement of shrimping. Though
certainly not the steadiest man in the regiment, Sam, who was a very
handy fellow, and an old campaigner, when sober knew his duty, and
maintained, on the whole, the character of a smart soldier.
Under other circumstances, I should have given directions for looking
him up. But the sick Sergeant, and his party of convalescents, had, in
their zeal for his majesty’s service, come down without their breakfast.
I therefore felt it my more immediate duty, as the best preparation for
the exploits of the day, to supply them with that needful meal. My brave
army had turned out anything but stout in health and smart in equipment;
but they all showed full of pluck, well under command, and ready for
anything.
Having extemporised a breakfast for the men, the Padre and I sat down to
our own. Touching the important operations of the day, we were
proceeding with our arrangements when an interruption took place, in the
shape of a little disturbance outside. Sergeant Pegden was speaking to
some one in the street, and speaking loud, in a voice of authority and
angry expostulation.
“Come now, you; be quiet. Fall in, and behave like a man.”
A voice responded: “File up your rusty old keys! Lock up your chastises!
and go to dinner with the poor!”
“Better take care, Sam,” growled Teakettle Tom in a low voice. “The
Captain’s in there, a-having his breakfast.”
“Oh, is he?” replied Sam, “then I’ll give him a song:—
‘My fairther, he’s a preacher,
A wherry honest man;
My mother, she’s a washy-wom’;
And I’m a true Brit-tan,
With my whack fol lol,’” &c.
I send Francisco to call in Sergeant Pegden. Enter the Sergeant.
“Why, Pegden,” said I, “what’s all this about?”
“Very sorry, sir,” replied the Sergeant; “but I’m afraid Sandwich Sam is
a little overtaken.”
“How can that be?” I asked. “Where could he get it?”
“Please, sir, I don’t know,” said the Sergeant. “But he seems to have
got too much of it, and he has some with him now.”
“Bring him in,” said I.
Glorious, but a little stupid, Sam was brought in. His hand grasped the
neck of a half-emptied bottle. Under his arm was another bottle, corked
and full.
“I see what’s the matter,” said the Padre. “The man has found his way
into the store-closet, and got at the wine which was brought here
yesterday. Francisco, how could you be so negligent? Step into the
back-room, and see whether he has left us any.”
Francisco went as directed, and promptly returned. “Not a bottle is
missing,” said he.
“Señor Capitan,” said the Padre, “this is an enigma. With the exception
of my stock, there is no bottled wine in the village.”
“To make sure, suppose we try it,” said I.
“No need of that,” answered the Padre. “The villagers keep their wine in
skins. The Alcalde keeps his in a barrel. Within a circuit of three or
four leagues, my cellar, since our convent here was plundered, is the
only depôt of bottled wine. My reason for keeping a stock you will
readily understand. My poor self-denying fraternity, when they _do_
drink wine, prefer it from the bottle, not from the wood.”
“Why then, according to that,” said I, “this drunken fellow must, since
last night, have found his way into the cellar of the house which we are
presently to attack and carry by storm.”
“I can only repeat what I have said already,” replied the Padre. “It is
an enigma.”
“Where have you been, Sam?” I asked. “What have you been about?”
“About?” hiccupped Sam. “What have you been about? I am the lad as can
(_hiccup_) show the British (_hiccup_) army how to walk into (_hiccup_)
the hinnimy’s persition, and (_hiccup_)—Oh, my dear Sergeant Pegden, I
vos so wherry dry (_hiccup_)—knocked off the heads of half-a-dozen
(_hiccup_)—and didn’t not drink owny hate on ’em (_hiccup_.) Hooray!
Death or glo——(_hiccup, hiccup_).” Here Sam became so much worse, that I
felt it advisable to order his immediate removal from the apartment.
It was no bad way of assailing the hostile fortress, if we could effect
a lodgment in its lowest storeys. Assuming that Sam had been there
before us, the first question was how he entered; but this he was too
far gone to tell us.
CHAPTER XIX.
It was imperative, however, to determine the question without loss of
time, and to determine it without revealing the fact to the garrison, to
whom, it was to be presumed, their weak point remained as yet a secret.
Under these circumstances, having first directed Francisco to ascertain
as far as possible, in the village, what Sam had been about the night
before, I promptly commenced a general reconnaissance of the enemy’s
position. The affair, which had hitherto been stupid enough, now became
a little exciting. I made the circuit of the beleaguered house without
interruption from the foe, but also without discovering an entrance.
My attention, however, was at length attracted by the wood-house, which
stood by the side of the premises, contiguous, but wholly detached from
them. At that end of the shed which was farthest removed from the main
building, I noticed, close to the gable-wall, what appeared to be a
small heap of rubbish. To this, without betraying my object, I could not
make a direct approach; yet it seemed to invite further investigation.
It soon became apparent, on more particularly noting the character of
the locality, that, by availing himself of the shelter afforded by one
or two neighbouring cottages, a person might approach obliquely, without
being noticed from the dwelling itself, right up to the end wall of the
wood-house, where the rubbish was lying on the ground. Immediately
availing myself of this important discovery, I made my approaches
accordingly, and reached the spot.
The heap of rubbish was at once accounted for. A hole had been broken in
the wall. The opening was sufficiently large, so I took the liberty of
entering, and now found myself in the wood-house, which was decidedly an
outwork of the enemy’s position.
Sam had been there before me, and had left his marks in the shape of
empty bottles. But, what was still more important to the progress of the
siege, I noticed, at the other end of the shed, which was furthest from
the perforated wall, and nearest to the house, an excavation in the
earthen floor. I looked down, but could not discover its depth. Nothing
could be discovered, save darkness visible.
Here then was the shaft by which Sam had walked into the Padre’s best
bin; and here too, in all probability, was a ready-made entrance into
the enemy’s stronghold. Determining to muster my forces and head an
assault without further loss of time, I quitted the outhouse, as I had
entered it, without being observed, and returned to the Alcalde’s. The
Padre, at my request, followed me into a private room.
“Señor Padre,” said I, “oblige me by describing in general terms the
topography of your cellar.”
“Ah, _hijo mio_,” said the Padre with deep emotion, “I trust you have no
idea of carrying on the war in that quarter. Believe me, except the
Lamego hams, the cellar contains nothing but wine.”
“Tell me,” I asked, “does your cellar extend under ground in a lateral
direction? Has it any subterranean recesses?”
“Nothing, believe me,” replied the Padre in a panic, “with the sole
exception of the wine and the hams, and a few trifling articles in
silver which I succeeded in rescuing from our plundered convent.”
“If you wish,” I replied, “to be reinstated forthwith in the possession
of your cellar, and of your house besides, only have the goodness to
explain to me——”
“Oh, spare the cellar!” cried the Padre, frightened out of his wits,
“even if a dozen houses—all the houses in the village—are assaulted,
sacked, gutted, levelled with the ground, blown up sky-high!”
“What’s the use of talking in that way?” I replied. “Come, Señor Padre,
just give me the information I want, and it shall go hard with us but
you and I will dine in the house this afternoon. We must take it
offhand, and I already discern the road to victory. Only tell me, does
the cellar extend, underground, outside the walls of the house? In
particular, does it extend in the direction of the adjoining shed?”
The Padre subsided into a brown study. “Why, now you ask the question,”
said he, “I think it does. The house is old, built after the fashion of
the Moors. There certainly is an underground recess or passage, of some
length, going off from the cellar; and, on consideration, I think it
must run in the direction of the wood-house—nay, perhaps extend under
it. Probably it served originally as a subterranean communication
between the outhouse and the house itself.”
The “enigma” was now well-nigh solved. I summoned Francisco, and
inquired whether he had succeeded in obtaining from the villagers any
intelligence of Sam’s proceedings. All that could be learnt amounted to
this, which, however, was quite decisive: that Sam, the night before,
when he stole away from Sergeant Pegden, went begging from cottage to
cottage, till he had procured the loan of an implement called a “pico,”
which, though not identical with an English pickaxe, in some measure
resembles it, and is available for the same purposes. Sam, having made
this acquisition, was seen no more, till he reappeared in the village
next morning, “mucho embriagado” (very drunk).
I also recollected that when, on our first occupation of the village,
some little plundering took place, Sam, though he had pleaded exemption
from duty as an invalid, and had been brought along on a bullock-car,
then also contrived to become considerably elevated; and I now felt
convinced that he had made his first acquaintance with the Padre’s
cellar on that occasion. The rest was easily explained. An old smuggler,
accustomed, in the locality of his former exploits, Kingsdown, Walmer,
Richborough, &c., to underground deposits of goods, he had, in his
previous visit to the Padre’s bins, at once made himself acquainted with
the peculiarities of the position; and now, on his return to the village
with the Sergeant, he had promptly embraced this first opportunity of
renewing his acquaintance with such an agreeable locality. Hence the
requisition for the pickaxe, the hole in the wall, the excavation in the
floor. Sam, it was clear, had tapped the Padre’s cellar before he tapped
his wine.
Taking a circuitous route in order that the enemy might not discover our
movements, I brought round the Sergeant and three of the men to the
perforated wall. We then passed through the opening, one by one, and got
into the wood-house unseen by the garrison. Hurra! we have effected a
lodgment in the enemy’s counterscarp—only don’t make a noise.
CHAPTER XX.
The shaft by which Sandwich Sam had dropped into the Padre’s cellar
could not be very deep, but we saw no bottom. It struck me that
something might be gained by excluding the daylight, which principally
entered by the newly-made hole in the gable-end of the shed. Against
this hole, therefore, I placed the three soldiers, to keep out as much
light as possible; and now the Sergeant and I, on looking down into the
shaft, were able to discern a glimmer which, feeble as it was, sufficed
to show us that, assisted by others, a person might descend with no
great difficulty. I, therefore, descended first; the Sergeant followed;
then came the men.
We found ourselves in an arched tunnel constructed of stone, and leading
from under the outhouse, with which in former days it had doubtless
communicated, right into the cellar, which we entered—cautiously, you
may suppose, but without difficulty. Now, M. le Tisanier! Once in the
cellar, we no longer had need to grope our way. There was no window, but
light came in from various crannies. I listened. There were footsteps
above. So! we were under the kitchen. How effect an entrance?
Close to the wall of the cellar, and immediately to the left of the
opening by which we had entered from the recess, stood a dilapidated
flight of steps, say an old ladder. Doubtless there was a trap-door at
its summit. I mounted, and gently pressed against the ceiling above. It
gave signs of yielding. The way into the fortress, then, lay open before
us. Turning to Sergeant Pegden, I desired him in a whisper to remain
with the three soldiers where he was, but to hold them in readiness to
come forth on my first summons.
Then, using a little more force, I gradually raised the trap-door, which
was kind enough not to creak, and emerged into the kitchen. There stood
M. le Tisanier, _solus_. Profoundly intent on some culinary operation,
which with his accustomed sedulity he was conducting at the stove, he
awhile remained utterly unconscious of my presence. I let down the
trap-door into its frame, and so concealed the manner of my entrance.
From scanty materials he was preparing dinner for the garrison. On a
dresser I noticed—1, A very moderate supply of bread for a party of
five; 2, Some lard; 3, Certain wild herbs, roots, and champignons, such
as he had been accustomed to cull in his rambles; 4, The bones remaining
from former meals, specially those of a hare, a goose, and a hind
quarter of mutton; 5, The giblets of the said goose, set apart with the
head and pluck of the said hare, as if designed for some signal triumph
of a scanty cuisine. I coughed. He turned.
Startled at first, he recovered in an instant his usual self-possession
and urbanity.
“Ah,” said he, “good morning, M. le Capitaine. I am not at present
exactly aware how you found your way in, but I am not the less happy to
see you. In entering without noise you have acted wisely. Considering
the state of things outside, you could not have adopted a more discreet
or a safer mode of presenting yourself before me, with the view of
surrendering yourself a prisoner. Good. You will do me the honour of
dining with me. Thus will you escape the inconvenience of losing, even
for a single day, the benefit of my matchless skill as a culinary
amateur.”
“I see you are preparing dinner,” said I, “without having availed
yourself of the Padre’s stores.”
“Bah!” he exclaimed; “cookery, in its higher operations, is independent
of materials. When there is nothing for dinner, then it is that the true
artist develops his professional resources. To tell you the truth,
Monsieur, the Padre’s chief store is his cellar, into which he never
permitted me to enter. I therefore, with that delicacy which always
distinguishes men of elevated sentiments like myself, felt it right, now
that I am in military possession, to abstain from purveying in that
direction.”
This was all the better for the Padre’s Lamego hams, and also the
enterprise by which we had effected a lodgment. For, had M. le Tisanier
once made acquaintance with the cellar, he was not the man to have left
that way of approach unguarded.
“How is it,” I asked, “that your garrison keeps so bad a look-out? Here
am I, come to beat up your quarters, without having received a single
challenge.”
“Pooh, pooh,” he replied; “no doubt they let you in on purpose. As you
have presented yourself here without showing a flag of truce, of course
I must regard you as my prisoner.”
“Excuse me,” said I, “if I take the opposite view. Monsieur, you are my
prisoner. Probably you are not aware that my forces have effected a
lodgment, and at this moment occupy your position.”
“Is it possible?” he exclaimed seriously, setting down a saucepan.
“Monsieur,” I replied, “I give you my word that the soldiers under my
command now occupy these premises in force. And by the same entrance
through which they came in, I could, if I pleased, bring in not only my
reserve, but all the Spaniards in the village. You know what would be
the consequences. Yesterday you expressed a benevolent wish to prevent
the needless effusion of blood. Now, therefore, give me credit for being
actuated on my part by a similar motive of humanity, in politely
soliciting your instant surrender. In case of further resistance on your
part, although I can control my own men, I could not answer for the
Padre and his people, who are very much exasperated. Therefore determine
what you will do; but, remember, your own life, and the lives of your
unfortunate and gallant countrymen, depend on your decision.”
_He._ “Have the kindness to put it on their lives only, not on mine.
Then I can treat without compromising my sense of honour. By further
resistance, you say, their lives would be imperilled. In case of my
condescending to accept terms of capitulation, would their lives be
safe?”
_I._ “That I have already arranged with the Padre. He promises, in case
of your coming to terms without delay, to be answerable for the personal
security of your whole party till you are safe in the hands of the
English at Vittoria. He also promises that he will remain in the village
as a check on his own countrymen till the transfer takes place.”
_He._ “It appears then that, by accepting terms, I may now secure that
safety for my comrades which I sought by resistance. Very well, M. le
Capitaine. In occupying and holding this position, I discharged a duty.
In surrendering it, I discharge another.”
_I._ “Very good. Then all is settled.”
“Excuse me,” said M. le Tisanier, assuming an air of considerable
gravity. “There is one little matter which we have not settled yet.”
CHAPTER XXI.
“It will gratify me to meet your wishes,” said I, “in any further
arrangement which you may propose.”
_He._ “M. le Capitaine, you particularly oblige me by saying so; for the
business to which I now refer is one which personally affects you and
me. In the conference which I had the pleasure of holding with you
yesterday afternoon, you alluded to my parole in terms which affected my
honour. As I said then, so I say now: I cannot permit that.”
_I._ “Nothing could be further from my intention. Surely, in merely
reminding you of your parole, not saying you had broken it, and in
viewing it according to my own interpretation rather than yours, I did
nothing at which you can reasonably feel hurt.”
_He._ “Ha! you explain, but you do not apologise. M. le Capitaine,
though punctilious—nay, more than punctilious, chivalrous—I am not
implacable. One word of apology would——”
_I._ “Apology? What do you mean by apology? I tell you I intended no
offence; and I have nothing to retract. If I unintentionally wounded
your feelings, of course I regret it; but apology is out of the
question.”
_He._ “Precisely. That is just what I expected you to say. Then, M. le
Capitaine, there remains but one alternative. We had better decide this
little affair at once. (_Brings from a corner of the kitchen two
swords._) You really must oblige me.” (_Crosses the swords in his right
hand, bows, and presents the hilts._)
_I._ “If you insist upon it, of course I must. I never heard of anything
so absurd in my life!”
_He._ “Hold! Let me fasten the kitchen-door. That will prevent
interruption on the part of my countrymen, and also of yours.” (_He
fastens the door._)
_I._ “The door may serve to exclude your men, but it will not keep out
mine. No matter. They have already received orders to keep where they
are, till summoned by me.” We crossed our swords.
_He._ “Hold! Excuse me one moment, just while I take off that boiler.”
Again our swords crossed.
_He._ “Monsieur, the attack is with you.” (_Stamps._) “_Commencez
donc._” (_Stamps twice._) “Not bad, that lunge. Hold! your left shoulder
is a little too forward. Withdraw it _un petit peu_, if you please.
Capital, that thrust in quarte! You lunge better in quarte than in
tierce. I hope you enjoyed your dinner yesterday? Ah, you threw away
that _coup_. By keeping your point a trifle lower, you might have had me
just under the arm. I suppose the Padre was not in the best of humours?
You fence a little too wide. Better! Capital! Capital!”
Though acknowledged the best fencer in my regiment, I could make no
impression on M. le Tisanier. I therefore bowed, and stood on my guard.
“Ah,” said he, “now the attack is with me.”
The attack of M. le Tisanier was not only brilliant and energetic, but
in every respect formidable. With the arm of a Hercules, the eye of a
lynx, and the skip of a chimpanzee, he advanced, he retreated, he sidled
right and left, he got round me, till we had more than once perambulated
the whole circuit of the kitchen, and till I, in meeting him front to
front, had repeatedly faced the opposite points of the compass. Any one
practised in fence will understand, when I say that, even while I
succeeded in parrying every thrust, his attack was evidently _gaining_
upon me; that is, his movements in assault had become a little in
advance of mine in guard; and this advantage (most important, though in
point of time scarcely appreciable) he gradually went on improving as
the attack proceeded. In fact, nothing could be cleaner than his style
of operating. Even his wrist, though always in position, moved in a
larger area than his point, which played about my sword in a small
semicircle, like summer lightning.
At length, seeing an opportunity for which I had long watched, I raised
my blade by the same movement with which I parried a thrust in quarte,
and, ere he could recover himself, dropped it again so as just to touch
his hand. My object was to inflict a slight wound, and disarm him. I was
so far successful, that my point reached him, but with no visible
consequences. I had made the first hit, but without putting my opponent
_hors de combat_.
He sprang backwards with an angry growl, and for a few moments seemed to
be collecting his forces. Foreseeing the impetuosity of his renewed
assault, I prepared to give him a suitable reception; but, at the
instant when about to commence a repetition of his favours, he moved a
little to the right. This movement compelled on my part a corresponding
change of position, to effect which I slightly shifted my left foot. My
foot struck against something on the floor. I stumbled. Though just on
the point of springing forward, M. le Tisanier, who through this mishap
had me completely at his mercy, with a most winning bow immediately
dropped his point.
The cause of my tripping is easily explained. Sergeant Pegden, either
from having discovered, down in the cellar, that war had commenced over
his head, or from some other motive, was beginning to raise the
trap-door. I tripped against the edge. Stamping it down with my left
heel, as a sign for the sergeant to keep quiet, but not so as to attract
the notice of M. le Tisanier, who remained unconscious that my forces
were in such immediate proximity, I again put myself on guard, saying,
“My best acknowledgments are due for your forbearance. Whenever you wish
to proceed, I am ready.”
“A thousand thanks,” said M. le Tisanier, with a renewal of supple and
profound inflections. “I am satisfied.”
“Very well,” said I, extending my hand. “All things besides, then, can
be easily arranged.”
We tackled after the English fashion, and shook hands—an operation the
more sedulously sought on my part, from visible symptoms of preparation,
on the part of M. le Tisanier, for what in those days so frequently
terminated French duels—a hug.
The shake accomplished, I noticed something on my hand. It was blood.
“Is this yours, or mine?” I asked.
“Did I not tell you that I was satisfied?” said he. “My honour is
satisfied. Whether I am whipped through the body, or scratched on the
knuckle, what does it signify?”
CHAPTER XXII., AND LAST.
From the inferior regions now rose the voice of Sergeant Pegden.
“Please, sir, I beg your pardon; but it’s immediate.”
“What’s immediate?” I asked.
“Please, sir,” he replied, “it’s an orderly come from Vittoria; and
brought a letter for you, sir, directed ‘immediate’ on the back of it,
sir.”
“Will you permit me?” I asked M. le Tisanier, raising the trap-door.
“Why, this is perfectly incredible,” said he. “Above, and all around, I
was prepared. It never entered my thoughts that I could be assailed from
the shades below.”
When I had raised the trap-door, there appeared—not Sergeant Pegden,
but—the head of his halbert, and three glistening bayonets, fixed to the
muzzles of three firelocks.
“Ground arms!” I cried. “Sergeant Pegden, show yourself.”
The muskets promptly subsided into the darkness from which they had
emerged, and, with a letter in his hand, the Sergeant slowly rose.
While, partly amused, partly surprised, M. le Tisanier gazed on the
wasted form and pallid visage of the Sergeant, who ascended like a
spectre from the grave, I took the letter and opened it.
It was an order to adopt immediate measures for the removal of my
invalids to the convalescent station at Vittoria, and then to rejoin
forthwith my regiment on the frontiers of France, taking with me, to be
exchanged for Sir Charles Popham of the —— light infantry, my prisoner,
Le Vicomte d’Y, lieutenant of the —— Voltigeurs.
_I._ “M. le Vicomte, I am your most obedient, humble servant.”
_He._ “M. le Capitaine, accept the assurances of my high consideration.”
_I._ “M. le Vicomte, I have intelligence which no doubt will gratify
you. It will be my pleasing duty to attend you to the frontiers, there
to be exchanged.”
_He_ (with nonchalance). “For an Englishman? or for a Spaniard?”
_I._ “Happily, you are considered my prisoner, not a prisoner of the
Spaniards. You will be exchanged for an English officer of the same
military rank.”
_He._ “Very good” (with much dignity). “That is quite satisfactory to my
sense of honour. Were it for a Spaniard, I hardly know whether I could
condescend to accept of the exchange. By the by, since it is as your
prisoner that I am to proceed to the frontiers, I think it best, for
reasons which you will doubtless appreciate, that so long as we are
together I should fully maintain that character. M. le Capitaine, I
offer you my sword.”
_I._ “M. le Vicomte, you have taught me that you can use your sword not
only with courage and address, but with magnanimity. Wear it.”
The arrangements for our departure were soon completed. My sick men were
conveyed to Vittoria. With them went Sergeant Pegden in charge, and the
four French soldiers as prisoners to the English. Then, taking an
affectionate leave of the Padre, we joined a party of British dragoons,
who had been out on a reconnaissance towards Pampeluna, and with them
pursued our route towards the frontiers.
The first day’s march took us across undulating ground, the road
alternately dipping into valleys, and topping the intermediate
elevations. As the Vicomte and I jogged on side by side, I noticed that,
on our reaching the summit of each successive eminence, he cast a
furtive but anxious look backwards, as if watching for some party in the
rear. I also looked back, and perceived that we were followed by a
couple of mules, which bore on their backs two wounded Spaniards.
ש.
THE WONDROUS AGE.
“Oh wondrous Mother Age!”
Wondrous!—such is the title this Age assumes. She wears it written
broadly on her phylactery, trumpets it loudly on quay and bourse, on
platforms and at market-places, blabs it at clubs and reading-rooms,
placards it in railway carriages, puffs it in steam-ships; everything
she buys or sells is docqueted, everything she says or does, engraven
with the epithet—Wondrous! This is the Age of ages—so she says. The
Golden, the Silver, the Brazen, the Iron ages were as nought: it
combines them all, and is grander, richer, stronger in its fusion than
any of these separate stages. Men are now only beginning to live. In
former times they merely dosed or daundered, trifled or philandered,
brawled or rioted, dreamed or philosophised through life, wasting its
golden sands in writing love-songs, and calling that—poetry; in fighting
great battles, and calling that—heroism, chivalry; in sitting by the
midnight lamp, gathering knowledge, which in after years might ripen
into wisdom, and calling that—study; in sitting by hearth or board,
quaffing from the wine-cup, drinking toasts, telling old stories,
singing old songs, and calling that—conviviality, good-fellowship; in
giving alms to beggars, in feeding the hunger of the idle and the
vagabond, and calling that—charity; in uttering strong words, in doing
strong deeds, and calling that—manliness; in upholding nationalities,
and calling that—patriotism. Such are a few delusions in which men were
ever wrapping themselves, until the day of enlightenment dawned, and
this Age burst upon us, with its railways and its steam-ships, its doves
of peace and arks of commerce, its treaties and tariffs, its leagues and
institutes, its unions and schools, its ledgers and invoices, its
cotton-mills and manufactories—proclaiming to the world that the true
purpose of life, the true destiny of man, was to trade, to manufacture,
to make money and circulate it, and, through the medium of cotton bales,
silken freights, cargoes of coal, and sacks of corn, to fulfil the great
mission of peace and goodwill. Knowledge, learning, courage,
perseverance, mind, thought, enterprise, strength, were not to be
utterly repudiated; they were only to be converted to the one purpose,
driven out of the old slow processes of development, touched with the
impulses of the time, and quickened to a more rapid production and
circulation. What boots it that our locomotives go at the rate of forty,
fifty, sixty miles an hour? that our ships cross the Atlantic in eleven
days? that our electric wires carry messages from one end of the land to
the other? that our printing-presses throw forth papers by the hundred
and books by the thousand? Of what use are our political economics, our
statistics, our lectures, our leagues, our steam-power, our mechanical
inventions, our liberalism, if men are to move, talk, think, and
legislate no faster than in bygone days? This must be, and is, the age
of fastness,—of fast travelling, fast talking, fast thinking, fast
reading, fast writing, of fast—no! not fast statesmanship—not fast law.
These remain, like the old vans and coaches in the by-roads of Cornwall
and Wales, to show the world what slow-going was. Men must not now await
the long results of time. They are not to sow in youth that they may
reap in old age—to labour and conceive in patience that they may produce
in strength. The Age will not admit of such stagnation. Its maxim is,
that the greatest production in the shortest time, and at the least
cost, the best markets and the quickest returns, are the only worthy
aims of labour and intellect—the only fit investment for capital of the
brain or the pocket.
Thus the Age is to go on growing stronger, busier, faster, doubling the
power of machinery, multiplying its mills, increasing its exports and
imports, sending forth its freights, machinery, and products as
missionaries to all lands, until, by a loving interchange of cotton and
corn, a sweet intercourse with ledgers and bills of exchange, men are
knit together in a beautiful unity of commerce, and some glorious
consummation be attained, such as the poet sees in his vision—
“When the war-drum throbbed no longer, and the battle’s flags were
furled,
In the parliament of man, the federation of the world,
There the common cause of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe,
And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law.”
And what is to be this universal law, according to the Age, if not to
the poet’s meaning? Love? Honour? Charity? Truth? Religion? These are
all old-world principles. We, in our blindness, ever believed that love,
inspired and propagated by religion, was to be the benign influence
which would still the discords, close the schisms, unite the jarring
creeds and warring nationalities, soothe the angry passions, and wither
the petty jealousies, which set man against man, nation against nation,
and bind them in a world-wide brotherhood. We were walking in darkness.
The illumination of this Age throws its light upon us, and we know there
are other means to this great end: that self-interest, the reciprocity
of producers and consumers, buyers and sellers, the sweet persuasions of
barter, are ultimately to level nationalities, quench the animosities of
race and creed, and create a sort of commercial millennium, in which
Swede, Russ, and Turk, Hun, Austrian, and Lombard, Dane and German, are
to lie down together under one universal tariff.
Gold—the lust of which has been the bitterest curse of sin, and has ever
and ever, through the long roll of ages, begotten hatred, wrath, envy,
oppression, bloodshed, and division,—is at last to be the peace-maker,
the love-mission of the world. This, however, is a vision of the
future—“a wonder that shall be.” Let us turn to the Age as it stands
before us—wondrous. All ages have had their characteristics. There have
been ages of simplicity, ages of grandeur, ages of heroism, ages of
degeneracy, ages of barbarism, ages of civilisation, ages of intellect,
ages of darkness, ages of superstition, ages of philosophy, ages of
faith, ages of infidelity—ages when men have lived the patriarchal life,
sitting under their own vines and their own fig-trees, tilling the
ground, tending their flocks, worshipping earnestly, enacting justice
severely—ages when they revelled in magnificence and luxury, spread
their splendour over the earth, and set it up in palaces and
monuments—ages in which the strong heart and the strong deed, the bold
thought and the generous impulse, were the master agencies, in which
strong men, brave men, noble men, were recognised as the natural
chiefs—ages in which the earth reeked with the pestilential vapours of
vice and dissoluteness, in which manhood and honour had set in long
nights, and the profligate, the profane, the sybarite, walked abroad
without scorn, and sat in high places without shame—ages when man’s
lordship of creation was manifested only in power over brute life, and
in the tenancy of fen, forest, and mountain—ages, again, when culture,
art, refinement, found a ripe maturity and gorgeous development—ages in
which the light and glory of intellect shone on dark places, and the
voices of the gifted echoed through many lands—ages in which such voices
were silent, and both mind and intellect lay shrouded in thick darkness,
or veiled in twilight—ages when men doubted, speculated, and
rationalised—ages when they accepted superstitions as creeds, lies as
living truths, serpents for fish, stones for bread—ages in which faith
was strong, and earnest men lived in it, strove, fought, died for
it—ages when men, worse than devils, neither believed nor trembled. Our
Age was none of these. It ignored, repudiated, superseded all others. It
is the Age of production, of utility, of circulation—to produce the
utmost, by forced processes, from brain and muscle, man-power and
steam-power, hand and loom, energy and ingenuity, capital and labour;
and to circulate the products with a power which almost commands, and a
rapidity which almost outstrips the elements: this is the great wonder
of the age.
Heroism, chivalry, faith, imagination, romance—these are all at a
discount with it; they are unremunerative, unmarketable, could not be
cashed or negotiated. Everything, every man, is to be measured by
productive capacity or practical uses. “He who makes a blade of corn
grow where a blade of corn ne’er grew before, is of more service to
mankind than fifty warriors.” The wit and politician who wrote this, or
something like it, would have stared to see the present development of
his doctrine—to find production and utility the great tests of progress
and civilisation. And is this progress? Is this civilisation? So says
the Age. We had dreamed that progress was of the mind and heart; that
its stages would be marked by the recognition of justice, the
advancement of the knowledge which leads to wisdom, the increase of
honesty, courage, faith, honour, truthfulness, the growth of love, and
the spread of virtue and godliness, as well as by census tables,
statistical returns, financial budgets, and the stock exchange. We had
dreamed that civilisation meant mental and social development as well as
the existence of wealth; that it must be based on a well-balanced
prosperity, which should include a comparative equality in the happiness
of all classes, giving each man a power of well-being and comfort in his
own sphere—the maintenance of the due proportions in society, and a fair
ratio in the increase of riches and the decrease of crime; that it
involved the moral, intellectual, religious, and social growth of man,
as well as the productiveness of his industry and the development of his
science; that it involves the expansion of courtesy, honour, generosity,
kindliness, and good faith, as well as the diffusion and circulation of
merchandise and gold. Were we dreaming dreams? Are these phantasies? So
says the Age; and we, who are living in the glare of its noontide glory,
must fain accept its interpretations with humble submission, and expand
our faculties to the comprehension of its wonders. But whilst we do
this, we may at least indulge in a retrospect of the past,—note what
this great change has cost us, and compare our losses with our gains.
This has been an age of supercession, and ere we swell the triumph which
shall seat the conqueror on its throne, it may be permitted us to look
back on the smouldering walls of old homes, the trampled fields of old
principles, and the ruined fanes of old faiths, which it has left in its
onward march—to mourn over and bury our dead. And what time more fitting
for such a valedictory survey than this?—now, when the Age has paused in
its career at the grim apparition of war, and the world is undergoing a
partial relapse—now, when heroism is once more a power in the land, when
men are talking, exulting, and watching over brave deeds, more than over
funds, invoices, or railway scrip—when fair women are weeping for the
brave dead, and praying for the living brave—now, when a great battle,
or the fall of a city, stirs a stronger pulsation in the nation than the
rise and fall of stock, or the most stupendous bankruptcies—now, when
old things are becoming new, and men are looking back with tolerance, if
not with affection, on old principles and old faiths. Let us then cast a
glance on the past—our own past—the past of our own generation—think of
what we were, and what we are, and strike the balance.
We have little belief in the days of merry England, or in the “good old
times,” that illusory paradise of dullards and sluggards, who would
rather mourn over a lost Eden than find one in the present, or look for
it in a future; but we do remember when the land had more mirth in it
than now, when it was more romantic and picturesque. We remember it ere
the utilitarian spirit had laid its iron grasp on the hearts of our
people, and spread its iron network over our fields and valleys. We
remember it less wealthy, less prosperous, less cultivated, and we
remember it also as more genial, more joyous, and more beautiful. A
change—a great change, almost a revolution—in our social feelings,
thoughts and habits,—in our aims and pursuits—in the character of the
people and the features of the country—has taken place even in our
memory. Has this change wrought most of good or evil? We admit that it
had become a necessity of progress that men should be shaken out of
their domesticity, their local isolation be more centralised, and become
more cosmopolitan—that their intercommunications should be more rapid,
their diffusion more general: we admit that the increase of population
and labour-power demanded that wealth should no longer be hoarded or
land be wasted, and that every penny, every acre, should be made
productive—that some such changes as have come upon us must needs have
come: but have we not bought them at a price, have we not paid for them
at the cost of many manly attributes—many social virtues—by the loss of
much rural beauty, and many characteristics of our pastoral life? We
quarrel not with steam, the great wonder of the Age—the great means to
the mighty end of utilitarianism. We know all that it has done for
us—all it has brought us. We know that it has accelerated intercourse,
impelled industry, expanded our resources, extended knowledge, equalised
consumption and production, given facilities to enterprise, and
opportunities to labour. Much has it done for our material prosperity;
and we should hail it as an altogether beneficent agent, did we not
think—God knows whether rightly or not—that this shuffling together of
people, this eager competition, this hot-bed production which it has
fostered, was rapidly effacing individuality and simplicity of
character—had overstrode that honest persevering industry which toils on
slowly and patiently to its end, which is content to labour and to
wait—had raised an unrest, a rapid craving for quick results, a
discontent with appointed spheres of action, a restless movement of
classes to tread on each other’s heels, and had decreased their mutual
trust and despondency—did we not know that it had invaded the seclusion
of our valleys, smoked and scorched our woods and copses, tunnelled our
rocks, cut up our meadows, and overlaid the poesy of nature by the
materialism of traffic.
Commerce and manufacture! shall we raise our voices against them? God
forbid! Have they not been the great agents in our prosperity? Have they
not created our wealth, begotten our merchant princes, raised our
shipping, filled our island with products, and circulated our own to the
ends of the earth? Have they not promoted science, encouraged
enterprise? Have they not nourished our colonies, given employment to
our growing millions, made this little spot to swarm like a busy hive,
and placed it as the centre of a wide-spreading civilisation—the heart
of a mighty organisation? Should they, however, beget a thirst for
gold—a mad pursuit for wealth, which will engross and absorb our
thoughts and feelings to the exclusion of generous impulses and noble
principles, hitherto main elements in the happiness and greatness of
nations—will they be all gain? Will not there be a balance then—moral
loss against material gain? Answer for thyself, O wondrous Age!
Neither will we quarrel with model farming. The competition of
production, the opening of markets, the pressure of other classes and
interests, have forced agriculture, for the sake of its very life and
being, to adopt utilitarianism—have compelled it to turn every inch of
ground to account. Utility demanded that hedgerows should be levelled,
the waste patches, knolls, and nooks ploughed up, old pollards and
groups of trees uprooted, and that sheep and oxen, instead of cropping
the pleasant herbage in pleasant sunny meadows, should be cooped and
stalled in narrow spaces, fed by rule and measure, and left to fatten in
darkness; that machinery should supersede the reaper’s and thresher’s
work, and that crops should be stacked and garnered as a matter of
business, and not borne home, as heretofore, with festive rejoicings and
thanksgivings. And if the increasing number of mouths required so many
more bushels of corn, so many more pounds of meat, and they can be
obtained only by such means, then must the picturesque, the poetic, and
the beautiful be sacrificed instantly and ruthlessly, that man may eat
and live. Yes! uproot, overturn, change, overlay them all, if thus, and
thus only, the people may be fed, the poor have bread. The beautiful has
ever yielded to the inroads of necessity or utility, which is a sort of
modified and modernised necessity. Yet may we not mourn over the things
which are gone or going, the things belonging to the outer world of the
poetic, the romantic, and the picturesque? They are associated with
sunny holidays, with the memories of boyhood, and the feelings of youth;
and we must mourn them, though their extirpation be the doom of an
imperious and beneficent necessity. We must fain mourn over those
hedgerows, as we remember them, with their soft, grassy banks—the
nursery of early violets and gregarious primroses—the parterre of more
gaudy daffodils, and the nestling-place of hundreds of tiny flowerets,
whose names we knew not, but whose faces we loved, with their tops
crowned by rich-scented hawthorn, budding hazel, and dark-leaved
sloe—with their bases bordered by luxuriant brambles and flowering
gorse. They were favourite haunts of ours, those hedgerows: there we
sought the early nosegay, there we clutched at the ripe brown clusters
of nuts,—the slip shellers, the _Spolia prima_ of the season—our hoards
were gathered elsewhere: there we stripped the sloe-bushes of their
fruit, under the delusion that, by a long process of hoarding in bran,
they would become luxuries, and would not set the teeth on edge; there,
with net and ferret, or with dog and gun, we commenced our initiation as
sportsmen; there, as Dandie Dinmont would say, we were entered on the
rabbit.
We must mourn, too, for these groves and thickets, which lay in the
intervals of cultivation like the remnants of a conquered race amid the
conquerors. Much, very much, did we love to thread these coverts, in the
schoolboy pursuits of nutting or bird-nesting, or to roam in mere
wantonness through the thick underwood, gathering an immature poetry
from the massed foliage of holly, mountain-ash, alder, and willow—from
the tangled shades of briar, woodbine, convolvulus, and the other
creepers which wreathed their wild luxuriance round stem and boughs, or
trailed it in a rich undergrowth along the ground—from the lights, which
fell soft and mellow through the openings and through the leaves on the
long-tufted grass below, rich with blue-bells, harebells, wild anemone,
and many another wildling;—from the fluttering of wings, the twitterings
and the cooings of birds—from the sweet-scented breaths—from the
solitude, and from the many gentle influences through which nature
inspires the beautiful. These places have glad memories—the gladdest of
all—the memories of the full heart, the free fresh impulses, and of
growing thought. On some such spot, too, we took our first stand as a
sportsman. We see it even now—an opening glade, a plash overhung with
the boughs of a holly bush—behind a knot of alders and some tangled
brushwood. Even now we feel our heart fluttering, and our cheek
flushing, as Flush—the best of cockers—after wagging and bustling about
in a most excited manner, gave one sharp bark, one spring, and,
something rising before us, we fired, and a bird fell. We had killed our
first woodcock. Utilitarianism has waged the war of extermination most
ruthlessly against these spots, and the gorse brakes which shone in
golden patches betwixt the fallow and grass lands. There are few left
now. The fields are spread before us, smooth and bare, and the corn
waves on the ground, erewhile cumbered by old trees and brushwood, which
were of no use, save to grow berries, give a covert to birds, rabbits,
and vermin, and to offer the eye a pleasant spot to rest upon in the
landscape. Away with such uselessness! The world is not large enough for
such waste.
Those old pollards, too—those venerable solitary trees which, with their
grey scarred trunks, and the green twigs shooting from their tops,
evidences of the life still within,—seemed to us always the very symbols
of a hale, vigorous old age, furrowed perchance, or shrunken by time,
but crowned and flowering still with the presence of youth. Is there not
room for them? and wilt thou, oh man! regret also that utilitarianism
has wrought such a similitude betwixt agriculture and manufacture,—has
so imbued both with the self-same economy of space and material, that
the buildings and structures of the one are as stiff, formal, and
red-bricked as the other? Yea, O Age! even so far will our perverseness
carry us. Those old farmhouses, with their low thatched roofs covered
with grass and lichens, their stacks of chimney, the old tree at the
gable-end, the trim little garden and the bee-hives in front, those old
straggling farmyards with their ivy-covered out-houses and linheys,
their pools and scattered groups of trees, were doubtless incommodious
and wasteful, but they had a picturesqueness in our eyes never to be
claimed by their successors. Utility seeks not such effects.
Those brooks which used to meander through pleasant meadows and shady
copses, or ripple gently over rocks and yellow pebbles, and whose waters
are now diverted into straight channels and narrow cuts to irrigate land
or turn wheels, are not they a lost beauty? But there is a gain in
water-power, a saving in labour.
Harvest-homes—merry-makings—rural feasts! The Age repudiates and ignores
them utterly. The land is too poor, life too short, for such follies.
Yet do we look back lovingly on the days when the loud shout of the
reapers announced far and wide the cutting of the first sheaf—when the
last load was carried home, attended by a long procession of men, women,
and boys, all rejoicing with shouts, song, and laughter, in the plenty
which had been gathered in; and when the event was celebrated ever with
feasts and mirth, with open-doored hospitality, and open-handed charity.
Nor has there ever yet been a time in the age of the world when the
fruitfulness of the earth has not been hailed by man with joy and
triumph, or the completion of its riches been calendared by festivity
and thankfulness. Now the goodly sheaves are carted and thrown out
before their garners as so much manure or so many cotton bales. “So much
the better,” says utilitarianism; “there is so much time, so much money
saved.”
And are men’s stomachs, men’s pockets, to be the all in all of
consideration? Are their hearts and fancies not to be fed or cultured?
Is man’s labour to find the dead level of toil, ungladdened by the sound
of rejoicing, unbrightened by hours of mirth? Is he to see no other end
and aim in such toil than the receipt of a few shillings at the week’s
end—the fair day’s wage for the fair day’s work? Is this to be the sole
tie betwixt him and the soil—betwixt him and his labour? Is life to be
stripped of all its poetic and noble inspirations, and be reduced to a
dead materialism? Is man’s soul to become merely the motive power in a
mechanism of profit and loss, utility and production? Is thy
civilisation to take this form, O wondrous Age! If so, the experiment
may be a grand one, a successful one; but the experiences of the past,
and the instincts and sentiments of mankind, are against it. For what do
men most love to look into the past? To seek the useful, or the heroic
and the beautiful? Do they pore over musty tomes, and delve into buried
cities, that they may discover the secret of Tyrian dye and Etruscan
pottery, the system of Phœnician commerce and the sources of Egyptian
wealth; or that their hearts may burn with the heroism of Marathon or
swell with the glories of Alexander, and that the thrilling words of
Pindar, the noble thoughts of Sophocles, the beautiful legends of
Grecian mythology, the grand truths of Grecian history, may be their
own? Do they investigate the records of the middle ages to understand
the monetary schemes of Lombardy and Venice, or that they may read how
men fought, how women loved, and minstrels sang—that they may dwell on
knightly courtesy and knightly chivalry? Utility has, I fear, little of
the study. This may be a human error, but it is a deep-seated and
long-standing one. What a Jeremiad to sing over a fine old hedgerow,
rotten stumps, and barbarous customs! Not so, O Age! It is not things
themselves we mourn, but the feelings, the principles they nurtured or
represented.
Agriculture followed of necessity in the march of utilitarianism. It was
challenged to fight for its own footing—to struggle and compete with its
rivals in the quickness and quantity of production. In this struggle it
gained, maybe, much strength from its alliance with science, and added
to its resources by the applications of art; but it lost much of the
Arcadian character, the pastoral beauty, the simplicity of pleasure and
simplicity of toil, the simple honesty and the generous manliness, which
placed in point of attraction the rural life next to the heroic in men’s
minds, which invested the vocation of the husbandman with the graces and
dignity of a higher order of labour, and wreathed the bare facts of his
toil with the garlands of poesy and sentiment. It was forced to strip
for the race, to throw away all its adornments, its poetry and
sentiments, and descend to the bare remunerative materialism of
husbandry. It can no longer afford
“Those gentle hours that plenty bade to bloom,
Those calm desires that asked but little room,
Those healthful sports that graced the peaceful scene,
Lived in each look, and brightened all the green.”
We doubt whether the consummation, imagined by the poet, has arrived,
when “rural mirth and manners are no more,” but we see that they are
being fast swept into the vortex of the great maelstrom of
utilitarianism and generalisation. Carp we at these changes, then? We
merely, according to our first proposition, balance gains against loss,
crediting so many more cultivated acres, so many more turnips, so much
more corn, against the loss of picturesqueness, the loss of many moral
features and characteristics in a class which has hitherto been no mean
element in our commonwealth. Had the Age, however, done no more than
this, we should not have grudged the sacrifices thrown in the path of
the great Juggernaut of progress. Spite of railroad and factory, there
will still be beauty enow in our land—enow for poet and painter. It will
not lie so much in our daily paths; it will not be such a constant
presence to worker and wayfarer; but it will still be found by its
worshippers. Even utilitarianism cannot nullify nature or denude the
world of its Edens. Still must the corn wave, the grasses grow, the
trees bud. Still will the “stately homes of England” stand beautiful
“amid their tall ancestral trees through all the pleasant land,”—the
cottage homes peep from their coverts. Still will the mountains stand in
their grandeur, the rivers run in their gladness, and the valleys laugh
and sing.
The rural virtues, too, may have only disappeared, to reappear under the
influence of a higher intelligence. At least, we feel that a vocation,
which is carried on in the open air, in constant communion with nature,
must ever maintain a certain healthiness of feeling, a certain manliness
of spirit.
But if this self-same utilitarianism, which has levelled our fields,
turned our rivers, and laid open our valleys, be also levelling and
laying bare our hearts, and frittering the great currents of the soul
into a thousand channels—if it be overthrowing our moral landmarks, and
invading the moral principles, which were once laws in our social
cosmos, what hast thou, O Age, amid all thy wonders, to balance such
work?
First of the levelling. We speak not of the changes or influences of
democracy, for we have a firm belief that the proportions of society are
determined by laws so fixed and true, that any attempt to violate them
will eventually produce reaction; but of the changes which are gradually
levelling and overthrowing the moral distinctions and moral barriers of
our social life, and especially those of age. Where is now our
youth?—where our old age? Where are our boys?—where our old men? We have
men-boys and boy-men. But where are the veritable boys—the boys with
eager hearts, throbbing pulses, buoyant spirits, gay hopes, glowing
fancies, unreasoning beliefs, and ready faith—the boys with the young
thoughts and the young feelings gushing through them like the juices of
young life—the boys who hail their stage of existence joyfully,
gathering its pleasures, battling its sorrows, and venting its impulses;
not striving and straining after an unripe knowledge and a forced
maturity? Where are now our veritable grey-beards—the old men who
calmly, and of course, enter on their stage of life assuming its
dignities, claiming its privileges, and fulfilling its functions;
separating themselves from the turbid action, the toil and strife of the
world, and reposing honourably in the retirement of experience and
council; not clinging to the semblance of foregone periods, not envying
the energies of youth or the prime of manhood, but keeping alive the
memories and feelings of both to ray their declining day with mellow
light—the old men who rejoiced to wear their grey hairs as a crown of
glory, and stood amid their fellows with their hoary heads, their wise
hearts, and their brows engraven with the lines of thought like
“The white almond-trees full of good days.”
Such a man the poet draws—
“Behold a patriarch of years, who leaneth on the staff of religion;
His heart is fresh, quick to feel, a bursting fount of generosity.
He, playful in his wisdom, is gladdened in his children’s gladness;
He, pure in his experience, loveth in his son’s first love.
Lofty aspirations, deep affections, holy hopes are his delight;
His abhorrence is to strip from Life its charitable garment of Idea.
The cold and callous sneerer, who heedeth of the merely practical,
And mocketh at good uses in imaginary things,—that man is his scorn;
The hard unsympathising modern, filled with facts and figures,
Cautious and coarse, and materialised in mind,—that man is his pity.
Passionate thirst for gain never hath burnt within his bosom;
The leaden chains of that dull lust have not bound him prisoner:
The shrewd world laughed at him for honesty, the vain world mouthed at
him for honour;
The false world hated him for truth, the cold world despised him for
affection:
Still he kept his treasure, the warm and noble heart,
And in that happy wise old man survive the child and lover.”
Such men may still exist, scattered like old pollards over the levelled
face of society; but they are not thy products, not the results of thy
materialism, O Age! The youth which opens under thy auspices, and runs
by thy creeds, cannot sow the seeds of such a harvest. The youth formed
under thy influences and action will have no growth, will not know the
natural processes of maturation—“First the blade, then the ear, after
that the full corn in the ear.” Thy youth will be put up and fashioned
like a piece of mechanism, set to work like a steam-engine, moving ever
by the same hard heavy material laws,—so much speed from so much power,
so much knowledge from so much pressure.
Such a morning cannot end in the even we have pictured. “The merely
practical,” “the facts and figures,” “the exacting coarse materialism of
mind,” “the passionate thirst,” will be “the leading chains” which must
bind the old age of the man who lives by thy doctrines and fulfils thy
theories. Affection, feeling, imagination, faith, cannot wreathe or
foliage the hoar trunk, for these will have been long before lopped off
and withered by “that solid falsehood, the material.”
Truly the tendency of thee and thy utilitarianism, O Age! is to
materialise the beginning and end of life—to take from youth its
freshness and romance, from old age its geniality and repose; and better
so, thou sayest, for thus will its space, its strength, and its
energies, be concentrated on the great producing period manhood, and not
expended in boyish frolics and follies—in the maunderings and idleness
of dotage. Why should there be these waste places in life? “Is not youth
the preparation for manhood, and old age its result?” Is it not right,
therefore, that our youth should not be fed on nursery tales, prurient
fancies, fiction, poetry, and high-flown sentiment, but be early imbued
with the solid facts, the useful knowledge, the rules of science, and
the power of calculation, which will fit it to play its part well and
ably in the great battle of utility? And why should old age rest, sink
into placid inaction? If it cannot labour, cannot it scheme and
calculate and speculate, till the brain begin to err, and the mind to
fail in its correctness?—then, indeed, let it be thrown aside like an
old file, or used-up machine, to moulder and decay. It were well said, O
Age! if life had no uses save the practical—if this world were merely
one great warehouse, one great mart, one mass on which trade and
manufacture were to erect their _fulcra_, and were not, as it is,
covered and filled with the beautiful and sublime; if man were a machine
of brain, muscle, and bone, and not endowed with heart and soul, the
divine sparks of vitality; if he were to live by bread alone, or be
judged by his gold,—then, indeed, ’twere well said and well done. But
whilst beauty and sublimity still exist as elements of the physical
cosmos, and heart and soul of the moral; whilst we know the glorious
thoughts and glorious deeds which the study and culture of them has
produced through all time, we cannot but think that they will still be,
as ever, chief agencies in this great world of ours; we cannot but think
that the beautiful and sublime, reflected on heart and soul, should now,
as ever, radiate in the warm impulses, pure worship, and warm imaginings
of youth, and beam round age in the sunset hues of a summer day. What
are their uses, sayest thou? What are spring and autumn to the seasons?
What morn and even to the day? Shall there be no more spring shooting of
leaves—no bursting buds, no fluttering or carollings of spring life?
Shall there be no brown leaves, no fallow, no mellow fruit? Shall there
be no rosy lights of morn, no jocund sounds or pleasant sights of waking
life? Shall there be no gorgeous sunsets, no calm splendour of declining
day? Is life to toil and sit henceforth under summer heat, and abide
ever in the blaze and glare of noonday, rising only in the glimmer of
infancy, and setting in the cold gleam of twilight? Shall the bounding
step, the joyous laugh, the free heart, generous thought, and intuitive
heroism, be no longer the attributes of our youth? Have these no uses?
Do they cast no bright lights on a land, raise no pleasant echoes? Have
they no genial influences, no glad inspirations for the working world?
Shall we no longer see the glorious sight—to us the most sublime
spectacle which human life or the world can offer—the sight of a man
resting in old age from his labours, not estranging himself from the
world, but weaning his thoughts from its cares and turmoil, holding
still by its affections and memories, but gently withdrawing his spirit
from the strife, to prepare it by repose for the great emancipation it
is expecting? Has this no uses? Has it no grand lessons—no sublime
teachings—no infinite suggestions? Does it shed no blessing or holiness
around—nor reflect a ray of its own peacefulness on striving, toiling
men? And are these things nought, and shall they not be? Wilt thou dare,
O Age! to cast thy spell over youth and old age, and thus sacrifice to
thy materialism and utility the periods which God has sanctified to the
highest manifestations of spiritualism—to the purest developments of
innocence, love, truth, and faith—to the richest perfectedness of peace,
purpose, and wisdom?
We have seen somewhat of the system by which thou nurturest thy youth,
and like not it nor its results. We love not the _Lanista_, gladiatorial
training by which heart and imagination are rubbed, starved, and sweated
down—and the mind fed, the intellect exercised, for the merely material
struggle—the combat of facts and realities—the great game of profit and
loss. We love not the training, nor love we those who undergo it. They
have not, in our eyes, the loveliness or the lovableness which we used
to associate with the image of youth. Young without youth, old without
maturity, young in form, old in heart and brain, they stand before us,
keen, sharp, and confident; strong in a knowledge of facts, dates, and
tables—a knowledge unleavened by the touches of imagination, unsoftened
by modesty, unmoved by the freshness and simplicity which give such
beauty to youth, and which sometimes make even the wisdom of manhood bow
to its intuitions, confessing with the German philosopher, that “the
fresh gaze of the child is richer in significance than the forecasting
of the most indubitable seer.”
In what spirit dost thou lead them to the first study—the book of
nature? Dost thou spread it before them as a book of God, that they may
see its great wonders, learn its great lessons, perceive its great
symbols, learn its great poesy, and inhale its great sublime
worship,—not comprehending all at once, but gathering them in, for
future thought and future perception? Is it thus thou presentest nature
to thy children, or not rather as a science and mechanism, the laws,
rules, times and measurements of which they must learn and master,
forgetting or heeding not the great principles which these represent,
the great system of which they are a part? Thy children are taught
accurately the distances between stars and the times of their movements;
they can babble of strata and formation, explain the secrets of tide,
and current, and the law of storms; classify plants, from the hyssop on
the wall to the cedar which groweth on Lebanon, and name scientifically
the shells on the sea-shore; but we seldom hear them talk of the glory
of the heavens or the beauty of the earth, or the wonders of the sea, or
point to them as types and revelations of the Power which made and
moveth in them all. Nature, with her laws and changes, appeareth in thy
schools as the result of mechanic forces and chemical combinations. If
thou teachest more than this, we find it not in thy books, in thy public
teachings, or in the minds of thy pupils! Is it not the same with other
studies? History, science, and poesy are, with thee, so abridged,
extracted, epitomised, and tabulated, that only facts are left for the
memory, not thought for the mind. All the noble examples, the heroic
deeds, the noble thoughts, and great principles which they recorded or
contained, are carefully suppressed or parodied; for what have they to
do with the practical work on which this generation is about to enter?
Thus with their catechisms and manuals, thy pupils, learning without
reverence, thinking without feeling, knowing without believing,
unencumbered by modesty, unchecked by impulse, enthusiasm, or
imagination, can rush at once into the arena, ready and confident. And
in choosing this system of training and education, thou art wise in thy
generation—wise as the serpent—for by what other couldst thou hope to
raise men, who, eschewing nobleness, and aspiring not to greatness—who,
rejecting antecedents and abandoning individuality, shall swell the
throng of money-getters, buyers, sellers, producers, contractors,
speculators, and other zealots of utility, and thus elevate thee to the
height of practical glory, thus make thee still more wondrous!
Such men thou wilt have, such men thy system must make; but to quote
more eloquent words and thoughts than our own, “If we read history with
any degree of thoughtfulness, we shall find that the checks and balances
of profit and loss have never been the grand agents with men; that they
have never been roused into deep, thorough, all-pervading efforts by any
commutable prospect of profit and loss, for any visible finite object,
but always for some invisible and infinite one.”
Ages, in which self-interest has been the one pervading principle, this
world has seen before: such an age was that of Louis XV., only that then
pleasure, not profit, was the prevailing object; lust, not mammon, the
presiding deity. Such an era is being now enacted across the Atlantic.
There self-interest, in the shape of mammon, is running its race boldly
and fiercely, unstayed by old traditions, old memories, or old
institutions, and is exhibiting to the world, in all its glory and
success, the reign of the practical, the triumph of utility. Let thy
admirers, followers, pupils, study these well, ere they rush on their
onward career.
We, personally, stand aghast at thy offspring. They terrify us by their
unripe shrewdness and “Smallweed” wisdom. Though verging on the period
of the sere and yellow leaf, we ever loved the companionship of boys,
and were considered rather a good fellow by them. We could discuss the
shape of a bat, the colour of a fly, the merits of a pony, or the
distinction of prison bar and prison base, pretty well, and at a push
could even talk respectably of the stories of old Virgil, the marches of
Xenophon, or the facetiæ of Horace. This was all well. But one does not
now dare to touch one of these young prodigies without a fear that he
will forthwith shoot an arrow from his quiver of facts and dates, by
deliberately asking, how far Saturn is from the Earth, or at what rate
sound travels, or what is the population of China, or the date of the
Council of Nice.
Our flesh quakes even now, and a cold perspiration comes over us, at the
thought of the intellectual contests we shall have to undergo with our
firstborn. That child-man haunts us like a phantom. The vision sits upon
us like a nightmare. We believe him to be our lawfully-begotten
offspring, but he will be thy child, O Age; child of thy nurture, of thy
circumstances, thy influences. Thou wilt be the she-wolf who will suckle
him! We see him grown formal, knowing, and conceited, battering us with
questions from his catechisms, ’ologies, tables, and measures. We are
not yet resolved how to meet this coming contest; whether to read up
covertly for the emergency, or to follow an expedient once successfully
adopted by a patriarch of our experience—that of affecting to despise
and pooh-pooh all elementary knowledge as beneath and unworthy of him.
Yes; we see this our offspring, and we know him chiefly by negatives,
chiefly by contrast with boys of our own youth. We know that he will be
more proper, discreet, and decorous than ourselves or our
contemporaries. We know that he will not be misled by impulse or
sympathy; that his mind will never be led from Euclid or Greek grammar,
by the ringing of some old rhyme in his brain, or the memory of some old
joke, or the thought of the green fields and green woods on which the
sun is shining without; that his pulse will not beat quick at reading of
the heroic three hundred at Thermopylæ; that he will perhaps vote the
Horatii and Camillus humbugs; pronounce the _Lay of the Last Minstrel_
an idle tale, and the _Arabian Nights_ a collection of fooleries; that
he will never believe in ghosts, and will smile scornfully at the
mention of fairies and pixies; that he will never risk a flogging for
the sake of _Robinson Crusoe_ or _Roderick Random_; that _Childe Harold_
and _Don Juan_, so sedulously kept from us, may safely be left within
his reach; that he will never secrete the family tinder-box, or tear
leaves from his father’s logbook to make bonfires on the 5th of
November; that he will never give, except a _quid pro quo_; or play,
except with a calculation of gain or loss. Will he ever know a boy’s
love? Yes, perhaps, but he will pursue it calmly and discreetly, like a
man and a gentleman; will approach his inamorata without diffidence, and
talk to her without hesitation. Not such was our boy’s love; not thus
did we go through that ordeal of beating pulse and rushing thought. To
our recollection, we never spoke six words to the object of our
adoration, and never entered her presence without blushing or
stammering; but the sight of her flaxen curls and blue eyes at the
window would set our brain in a whirl, and a smile or bob of the curls
would cause such a beating of the heart that we forthwith set off at
topmost speed, and were only stopped by loss of breath or wind. After
all such interviews, the said curls and eyes, and certain frilled
trousers with which our deity was generally invested, would come dancing
in on every mote and sunbeam, drawing off eye and thought from slate or
book; and the memory of the many occasions on which we ate cane on
account of such distractions, still causes a tingling in the regions
devoted to flagellation.
Will he be a sportsman? Probably, but scientifically and
unenthusiastically. We think not that he will ever mingle with his sport
that love of wood and fell, stream and river, rock and waterfall, cloud
and sunshine, leaf and spray, without which rod and gun would be to us
as vain and idle implements. We know that he will never sleep in barn or
outhouse to be early by the side of the stream or cover; that he will
never invest pocket-money in flies, until their fitness for the season
or stream has been well tested; that he will never, in anticipation of a
raid on hare or rabbit, collect and lock up all the curs and mongrels in
the neighbourhood, thereby delighting his parents by a midnight
serenade. Will he delight in feasts and revelry? Yes; but staidly and
soberly, dressed in fitting costume, conducting himself decorously, and
talking on most proper topics. He will never, methinks, taste the luxury
of banqueting on potatoes and sausages roasted in the cinders of a
bonfire, or rejoice in the irregular joviality of harvest-home, village
feast, or dancing in a barn. Wretch that we are! the shadows of such
things cling lovingly to the skirts of our memory. One occasion we
remember especially. It was the custom of our _locale_, that every
village should have a day appointed for a feast, and on this all doors
were opened, all friends welcomed from far and near. On such a day we
crossed accidentally the threshold of a yeoman friend, and were dragged
forthwith to a board literally groaning under the weight of a piece of
beef of nameless form, a kid-pie made in a milk-pan, a plum-pudding
ditto, with other delicacies of the like light kind. After trying our
digestion, and working our wicked will on them, we adjourned to the
barn, and there, claimed as a partner by a cherry-cheeked daughter of
our host, we had to confront the struggle of a country-dance or jig,
which or what we know not now, and knew not then. It was a fair trial to
dance each other down. A bumpkin at our elbow looked on us with
invidious rivalry, and commenced at once most outrageous operations with
heel and toe. Our partner rushed recklessly on her fate. We felt
misgivings as to our own powers. The limbs grew weak, the breath faint.
We looked at the Cherry-cheeks; a few oily drops were trickling down
them. We felt encouraged. Presently the steps of our bumpkin fell more
fitfully and irregularly. Again we looked at the Cherry-cheeks; the
moisture was streaming down now in copious rivulets. Bumpkin at last
went off in a convulsive fling, and Cherry-cheeks, with a groan and a
sigh, confessed herself beaten. We stood conqueror on the field. It was
our first and last saltatory triumph. We have never before or since
gained éclat in the mazy. Blush not for thy parent, child of our love,
but throw thy mantle decently over his delinquencies! No such escapades
will ever disturb the regular mechanism of the life which thou and thy
comrades will lead!
Thus we trace him onwards by negatives from a youth without enthusiasm
to a manhood without generosity or nobleness—a perfect machine, with the
parts well adjusted and balanced, regulated to a certain power, fitted
to work for certain ends by certain means—the end profit, the means the
quickest and cheapest which can be found. As such a man, he will be a
richer and shrewder one than his forefathers, and gain more
distinction—perhaps become a railway director, have pieces of plate
presented to him at public dinners, die a millionaire or a beggar, and
be regarded hereafter, according to success, as a great man or a
swindler. Such, O Age! is the distinction, and the reverse, which thou
offerest to thy children!
Yes; so bigoted are we, that we would not exchange the memory of days
spent on green banks, with the water rippling by and the bright sky
above us—of nights passed with an old friend—of hours of loving commune
with the gifted thoughts and gifted tongues of other days—the memory of
the wild impulses, fervid thoughts, high hopes, bounding sympathies, and
genial joys of our past—a past which we hope to carry on as an evergreen
crown for our old age—even to play for such a high stake, and win.
We cannot test thee so well by old age, for the old men now standing in
this generation are not wholly of thy begetting; but, judging by the law
of consequences, we can foretell that material youth and material
manhood must lead to a material old age; that souls long steeped in
reekings from the presses of Profit, and bound for years in the chains
of Utilitarianism, cannot readily escape from their pollution and
bondage; and we can see also, even now, the dark shadow of the present
passing over the spirits of men who began their career in a past. Old
age is not, as of yore, a privileged period. Men no longer recognise and
value it as a distinction, nor aspire to it as to an order having
certain dignities, privileges, and immunities, like the old men at Rome,
who were granted exemption from the heavy burden of state duty, and
served her by their home patriotism and counsel. Men love not now to be
considered or to become old; they fight against this stage of life by
devices and subterfuges, and strive to stave off or disguise its
approaches. Nor are they so much to blame. The relations of age are
changed; it holds not the same consideration or position as in former
days, receives not reverence and deference as its due homage, nor is
accorded by common consent an exemption from attack, a freedom of
warning and counsel. The practical workers of to-day would as soon think
of bowing to the hoary head or wise heart of a man past his labours, as
to the remains of a decayed steam-engine or broken-down spinning-jenny.
The diseased faculties of old age are to them as the _disjecta membra_
of worn-out mechanism. It is this non-estimation, this non-appreciation,
which drives men to ignore and repudiate the signs and masks of a period
which brings only disability and disqualification, and makes them cling
by every falsehood, outward and inward, to the semblance of youth—very
martyrs to sham and pretence.
It was not always thus. Within our own experience, men at a certain time
of life assumed a change of dress, habits, and bearing—not relinquishing
their vocations and amusements, but withdrawing quietly from the
_mêleé_, and becoming quiet actors or spectators; thus signifying that
they were no longer challengers or combatants, but rather judges and
umpires in the great tussle of life. We remember with what respect we
used to regard these as men set apart—a sort of lay priesthood—an
everyday social house of peers—a higher court of council and appeal. How
deeply we felt their rebukes and praises; with what reverence we
received their oracles, whether as old sportsmen, old soldiers, old
scholars, or old pastors. These men are becoming few, for such feeling
in regard to them is dying out or extinct. Your young utilitarian would
show no more mercy to a grey-haired veteran, than the barbarians did to
the senatorial band of Rome, but would indifferently hurl Cocker at his
head, or joust at him with his statics.
How many classes of these old men, familiar to this generation, are
disappearing! We will not touch on the old gentleman, the old yeoman,
and others; their portraits have been drawn most truly already, and are
impressed on most of our memories; but we must mourn over them with a
filial sorrow, believing, O Age! that the high honour, dignity, worth,
courage, and integrity by which they tempered society, were of more use
to it than the artificial refinement, multiplied conveniences, rabid
production, and forced knowledge which thou callest civilisation—that
the moral virtues which they represented were more precious to a people,
and more glorious to a nation, than the products and wonders of thy
mechanism! If thou has bereft us of these, it will be hard to strike the
balance!
One class we miss entirely—the old clergymen. Taunt us not, O Age! with
the fox-hunting, hard-drinking, hard-riding parsons of the last
generation. We knew them too, and knew many whose burden of
delinquencies in regard to horse, hound, gun, and wine-cup, leavened as
they often were by kindly charities and loving sympathies, will perhaps
sit as lightly as that of many a well-oiled, smooth-going machine of
capital, who sets the moral tone for our time. We speak not of these,
but of the mild evangelists—the gentle brothers whose benevolent faces
still beam on our memory; whose gentle words, unmixed with the gall of
controversy or the fearfulness of commination, fell often sweetly on our
hearts. These lived ere this age discovered that the gospel of Christ
required a new development, and the religion of God a new adaptation to
the purposes and destinies of man. In many of the quiet sequestered
villages of England, pastors who were content to preach and live as
their Master had preached and lived, delivering His promises and
commands gently and lovingly, and following faithfully His behest in
visiting the sick, and comforting the afflicted—many such it was our lot
to see and hear. A servant of our household often took us, in our
childhood, as the companion of her Sunday holiday. This woman was most
erratic in her devotions, and wandered indiscriminately from fold to
fold—now sitting under the Established Church, now under Wesleyan,
Brionite, or Ranter. Many a field-preaching and conventicle meeting have
we attended in consequence, much to the scandal of an orthodox aunt. As
she loved, however, to mingle creature-comforts with her religious
exercises, we more often visited some friendly yeoman, and went with him
and his family to the village church. Pleasant is the memory of many of
these Sabbaths; the walk through a quiet lane, or by a shady wood-path;
the entry through the sequestered churchyard, with its grass-green
graves, ‘neath which the forefathers of the hamlet slept; the church,
simple and unadorned, where
“The golden sun
Poured in a dusty beam,
Like the celestial ladder seen
By Jacob in his dream.
And ever and anon the wind,
Sweet-scented with the hay,
Turned o’er the hymn-book’s fluttering leaves
That in the window lay;”
—the minister, reverend and benignant, earnest in entreaty, meek in
rebuke—all these are pleasant memories. We knew these pastors better
afterward, but this was often our first acquaintance. Oft have we asked
for them since. Their places now know them no more. In their pulpits and
by their altars, stand men who would impose religion on their fellows as
a ceremonial, or inflict it as a penance.
Where, too, are the companions, the fellow-workers of these old pastors,
the old-fashioned sisters of charity; those dear old ladies who, with
hearts warmed and opened by the affections of their own social life,
went forth from their hearths to the homes of the poor, dropping here a
word of comfort, here of admonition, here an alms, here a book, and
leaving ever behind them a sense of true sympathy and kindly interest?
They knew not—so dark was their age—that a regular organisation,
discipline, and uniform, a prescribed drill and manuals, were necessary
to the perfection of their mission. Their charity was a natural feeling,
not an instituted effort; their admonition a friendly appeal, not a
systematised summons to reform and penitence; their kindness, an
intuition unset to rule; their books, the selection of their own
reading, not the licensed and revised issue of repositories and
societies. They were the ducts by which many an unseen stream of
benevolence flowed into poor houses. Strange to say, too, though unaided
by tea-drinkings, public meetings, bazaars, societies, public lists of
subscribers, and all the recognised mechanism of modern charity, they
had always the wherewithal to give; and almsgiving, as they gave,
brought no pain or mortification, injured no sense of self-dependence,
and left no moral degradation. They did good in their time—a time when
individual endeavour did the work of institutions and corporations, but
have passed away now, and are superseded by a very different caste.
Their successors march upon us, a stern, zealous, resolute, and to us
rather a grim sisterhood—the trained-bands of morality and charity. They
are an order having outward and inward forms. The outward sign seems to
be sad-coloured raiment; and when we see a young lady dismiss the bows
from her bonnet, and adopt a grey shawl, we know that she is about to
rush on her vocation as a district visitor. They have rules and codes,
an appointed task, and appointed order; and, when duly organised and
drilled, advance on some benighted town or village, each cohort
attacking a quarter with the stern determination to trample down and
drive out poverty, vice, and uncleanliness wherever they may be found.
They are a moral police, detective and repressive, each on a separate
beat, rushing down courts and through alleys in pursuit of want and
immorality. They may fulfil their work, these sisters, and we wish them
good speed; but we believe that they must first clothe their charity
with more love, and learn especially, what their predecessors knew so
well, how to speak to the poor.
We loved those good old sisters and their work. One, whom we remember
well—thanks be to God—still walks this earth, doing her beautiful
mission of love and charity. How or when she began this mission we know
not. It was no sudden adoption, no result of sudden conviction or
disappointed hope. We never remember her except as engaged in this
genial task. It grew with her growth, as the natural ripening of early
sympathies and early feelings. Bred, as gentles often were in those
barbarous times, to regard the poor as their lowly friends, and to keep
up a kindly intercourse with them, she had come to know their characters
and their little histories, to understand their peculiar ways, and to
learn to address them in the language by which alone the poor are
moved,—the language of the heart. Thus, as time went on, the kindly
greetings and kindly interest expanded easily into the higher offices of
comfort, instruction, and relief. The transition was natural, and the
people wondered not to see one whom they had known, loved, and revered
so long, moving among them as a ministering angel of good, chasing
darkness from the hours of the bedridden by her pleasant converse,
uplifting the soul of some stricken sufferer by her cheering presence,
bringing relief to the indigent, or dropping on the ears of some blind
or aged Christian the precious words of Gospel writ. Great, too, was she
in the nursery and by fireside, as we knew full well, and as another
generation is now experiencing. What rhymes she knew, and what stories
she told, and how she told them! and how have her love and pleasantness
followed us from infancy up to manhood! By the by, what story-tellers
there were in those days! The art seems lost at present. People compose
their talk now, and the faculty of easy telling a natural narrative is
getting rare indeed. Patient and gentle, thus for many years she pursued
her loving mission, without the parade of circumstances or ostentation
of duty, and without a murmur; though, in later years, she became the
channel of all indiscriminate benevolence, and the director of all
general charities. No outward humility of garb or look distinguished
this our sister. She went forth even on her errands—lady as she
was—apparelled after the fashion of her order. Nay, it must be confessed
that she rather loved a handsome cloak or bonnet, nor thought them
unbeseeming her mission; for she could not understand, nor can we, why
acts of charity should be done, like deeds of penitence, in serge and
sackcloth. One of her functions was a great mystery to us. Ever and anon
mention was made of a certain bag, in connection with certain women. We
used to wonder, in our small way, what this could mean; and discovered
at last that she was manager of a Lying-in Society, which distributed
bags containing all the requisites for ladies expecting that interesting
event, and that the bag in the gift of our house was in yearly
requisition for a matron, whose habit it was regularly to increase an
already swarming brood of white-headed, freckle-faced urchins, who, as
soon as they could crawl, seized on gutter and dunghill as their natural
heritage.
Her labours were not, however, confined to the homes of the poor, but
extended to a field from which most would have shrunk—the prison. Even
there, amid the reprobate and the vile, she carried her teachings and
her charity, and strove, by earnestness and tenderness, to reclaim and
raise her fallen sisters. Many was the rebuff she met with—many the
scoff from profligate lips; but still she was neither daunted nor
deterred. Vice had for her no pollution, no repulsion; still she
persevered; and though her words were often spoken in pain, yet may they
often have brought comfort to some sin-laden heart, or awoke contrition
in some first sinner. As instances of her failures and disappointments,
she used often to tell, with a playful humour, slightly dashed by
sorrow, how a woman, who had frequently been a tenant of the jail, and
had always left in a feigned state of repentance, on her coming, for the
sixteenth time, greeted her with, “Well, ma’am, I must surely be
converted this time.” Perhaps the mild teachings and sweet truths, so
often told, may, after many days, have been as bread cast on the waters,
even to this hardened heart.
Gentle sister! loving heart! thou didst thy mission in love. There be
those coming after thee who will employ threat, rebuke, and discipline,
where thou wert wont to use persuasion, and strive to force or torture
mankind into goodness by forms and penitential processes. They may
succeed; but we believe, as thou didst, that God’s work is to be done by
gentle influences; that God’s messages should fall on the heart softly
as evening dew; that God’s truths should shine on the understanding like
the summer sunshine; that God’s promises should be wafted on the soul
with the gentleness and fragrance of a south wind. Sweetly does the
memory of thy good deeds rest on many a heart, and sweetly, doubtless,
has their incense risen to Heaven.
There were other old ladies, too, who had no mission save that of their
gentle degree, whom we regard as goodly relics of a past—the old
gentlewomen who sat and moved in a certain state and stateliness, and
surrounded themselves with a dignity which won deference from those who
approached them. We associate these with high-backed chairs, in
wainscoted parlours, hung with dark portraits, with old folio
picture-bibles; with pleasaunces and laurelled walks—with avenues and
parterres—with peacocks and Blenheim spaniels—with gold-headed canes,
ebony cabinets, and wondrous coiffures. We defend not those headdresses;
they stand in evidence against us, in back numbers of the _Ladies’
Magazine_. But we remember sitting with great pride at our first play,
between two turbans—one yellow, one pink—and recollect regarding the
large gold-faced watches which hung pendent from the girdles of our
patronesses, as an almost Aladdin realisation of wealth and splendour.
Lovely were these gentlewomen often, in the richness and mellowness of
their decline, illustrating, by their serenity and peaceful repose, the
beauty and holiness of grey hairs—not mocking old age in a caricature of
youth, nor scaring young hearts by the skeleton image of their own life.
There were old women, too, whom we regret—old servants, old
nurses—garrulous, chattering, snuffy old gossips! O Age! they were
pleasant old women withal; told pleasant stories; had an unprofitable
habit, when their functions ceased, of regarding those whom their care
had brought into the world with a sort of foster affection, and had a
pleasant way of bringing back, by story and anecdote, the image of our
infancy. These reminiscences were not, however, always gratifying to
stripling pride. We remember once, when standing six feet without our
boots, and arrayed in our first London suit, being rather humbled at
hearing of a period when we hadn’t a shirt to our backs, and might have
been squeezed into a quart pot.
We have done with the old age of the past; let it sleep its sleep.
We could instance much more fully, O Age! the levelling tendencies of
thy materialism. But if it be true—and surely there must be proof before
us—that thy doctrines are shading the brightness of youth, and mumming
the majesty of old age, then do we know enough to be certified that
those are not all gain! Ring out the table of thy exports, exult over
the lists of thy shipping, the number of thy markets, the increase of
population, the multiplication of comforts and conveniences, the
rapidity of thy communications, the spread of thy education! Yet still
would we say, Woe to the land whose youth is not as a vision of
gladness! woe to the land where old age is not reverend or revered! Such
a land may know a material prosperity, a commercial greatness which
shall dazzle the world—may produce men, able in counting-house and on
bourse—men ready in speech and debate; but it will not, we think,
possess the elements which produce the great qualities—the Heroic—the
Poetic—the Moral—the Truthful—on which hitherto have been built the
grand structures of the world’s glory. Nor do we think that it would
retain virtue enough to continue a line of merchant princes, such as
England has ever rejoiced to number among her great men.
PUBLIC LECTURES—MR WARREN ON LABOUR.[1]
A social phenomenon of much interest has recently arisen in Great
Britain, and it is one which as yet has no counterpart in other
countries. We allude to the practice, now become systematic, of the
delivery of public addresses and lectures by the leading men of the
nation. We do not refer to the ordinary lectures contracted for by
literary institutions, through which the grown-up public supply
themselves with important knowledge not obtainable by them in youth at
our universities, and for the study of which indeed the brief curriculum
of youth has no spare time. The phenomenon to which we allude is
something beyond this; it is not stipendiary in character and regular in
appearance, but gratis and desultory. It is a spontaneous step taken by
men of standing in the world of politics or literature, with the view of
adding to the knowledge, improving the social condition, or influencing
the political sentiments of their fellow-countrymen. A century ago the
only medium of publishing facts and propagating opinions, was the
excellent but limited one of books; the last half-century has seen the
mighty engine of the Press attain to full power, diffusing views and
statements with less accuracy and impartiality than books, but with
infinitely greater speed and wider range. As newspapers are commercial
adventures, they naturally seek, as their first object, to enunciate
views acceptable to the class to whom they address themselves; and
hence, whenever any party in the country happens to attain a great
preponderance over its rivals, that preponderance is followed by an
increase of newspapers in that interest, which in turn tends to augment
the preponderance, it may be, even into a tyranny. And accordingly, at
times when party-spirit runs high, the side which chances to possess a
virtual monopoly of the newspaper press has it in its power, by bold
assertion and frequent iteration, to make any misrepresentation or false
charges against an antagonist pass generally current as truth, and at
the same time keep from view the real principles by which the opposite
party are animated. We cannot but regard the recent great development
which the practice of making public addresses has obtained amongst us as
in some degree a reaction against this natural one-sidedness of the
newspaper press, and, on the whole, as the happiest remedy for it that
can be devised. For by this means, without the aid of the restricted
arena of Parliament, public men of all ranks and parties become the
defenders of their own actions, the exponents of their own policy; and,
moreover, to a great extent, can thus make the newspapers record at
least all sides of the question.
On the whole, we regard the rise of this social phenomenon with much
satisfaction. It is the best safeguard, and an ever-living protest,
against that worst of all tyrannies, the tyranny of Public Opinion. As
yet even America, where it is most needed, has hardly begun to develop
the practice; and this not from want of toleration (though the tyranny
of the majority be more pressing there than here), but rather from a
want of the class from which the chief public speakers of England
proceed. American society is not old enough, or rich enough, to have yet
given birth to the two classes of public men and literary men, which
give such bloom and power to the British commonwealth, and which,
mutually aiding and correcting one another, together form a vast and
distinguished caste, whose services go directly to instruct, elevate,
and guide the general community. In America, the development of Mind as
a separate profession, has as yet made but little progress, because the
general community is still not rich enough to support a separate
literary class of much extent; and their public men, though many of them
distinguished by elevated talents, belong in the aggregate to a class
entirely dependent for support upon industrial pursuits, the personal
direction of which they cannot afford to abandon without pecuniary
compensation, and to which they immediately return as soon as released
from their legislatorial duties. In Great Britain, on the other hand,
our public men are men of substance, who can afford to devote their time
wholly to the service of the country, and who in very many cases are
trained from their youth to statesmanship as a profession. Such men are
proud of their noble profession; to them, their character as legislators
and administrators is all in all; and they lose no opportunity of
righting themselves with, and impressing their individual views upon the
country at large. Hence the frequent public addresses delivered by our
leading statesmen during the Parliamentary recess; and even when
Parliament is sitting, not seldom do our public men seek a congenial
audience out of doors, to which they may make a profession of sentiments
which perhaps would be very coldly received from their place in the
House. Of late it has been the Peelites and Cobdenites who have stood
most in need of this appeal against public opinion; and the studious
efforts which some of the leaders of these parties have made to prevent
themselves being forgotten, and as protests against the sweeping censure
which their indignant country has passed upon them, have not been
entirely free of the ludicrous. But this makes no difference. We are
proud of a country where opinion is thus free, and where men have the
manliness to speak their opinions even when unpopular. It is a noble
privilege to our public men, a corrective to the press, a benefit to the
community. While it exists, no social or political disease is incurable,
and by such aids and renovating influences, we trust, Great Britain is
yet destined to flourish and progress for ages to come. The tyranny of
the multitude is as odious to England as the oppression of a Czar; and
as long as this is the case, the noble inheritance of British freedom is
secure; for we shall never react into an autocracy until we have first
suffered from the still worse tyranny of the multitude.
But politics furnish hardly a half of that public oratory which nowadays
is ever welling forth, like springs of thought, over the length and
breadth of the land. The other half belongs in nearly equal proportions
to Literature and to practical and patriotic Philanthropy. It is most
gratifying to see, as we so often do, the nobility of Britain stepping
from their baronial halls to the rural meeting or the provincial
athenæum, there to advocate the cause of moral and intellectual
improvement,—in words, it may sometimes be, not overcharged with
eloquence, but still influential and productive of much good from the
position and personal character of the speakers. The place becomes
hallowed where good and kindly words have been spoken; and these public
addresses have unquestionably contributed with other causes to give a
higher tone to many convivial meetings and social gatherings, formerly
remarkable for little else than deep drinking and empty laughter. The
people still look up to our nobles as their natural leaders, and they
may well do so,—for the great body of the aristocracy comport themselves
in a manner worthy of their exalted station; and we doubt not the recent
eulogium and prophecy of Count Montalembert will prove well-founded,
that the nobles of England, ever improving themselves, and still keeping
in the van, will continue to rivet to themselves the respect and regards
of the British nation.
It must be confessed, however, that our nobles and statesmen appear to
greater advantage when advocating the cause of social elevation and
moral or sanitary reform, than in addresses of a purely literary
character. A good man engaged in a good work disarms criticism and
attracts esteem; but when the work essayed is purely literary, the case
is otherwise; and in not a few instances addresses of this kind,
volunteered by men of position in the country, have fallen far short of
the reputation or public position of the speakers. For example, it seems
to us that the dignity of statesmanship must suffer an eclipse in public
estimation, when one who has played so important a part in imperial
politics as Lord John Russell delivers himself of a lecture so
altogether trashy as that which he lately pronounced in Exeter Hall. It
was a voluntary performance made by his lordship to keep himself before
the public eye; but he merely pilloried himself. He has so long regarded
himself as the great champion of civil and religious liberty in this
country, and has been so flattered by his followers, that he has arrived
at a condition in which he is manifestly incapable of measuring his own
powers. In the course of the last twelvemonth his lordship has been in
the Cabinet and out of it—he has gone to negotiate at Vienna and to
lecture at Exeter Hall—he tries everything, and fails in all. In those
stirring times, when public questions of the most pressing moment must
be answered, and problems of the most complicated kind require to be
solved, it was natural to expect that a statesman of Lord John Russell’s
standing, if he did court a public appearance, would at least grapple
with a question of the day; instead of which, he treated his audience to
a piece of “antiquated imbecility,”—as shallow in thought as it was
worthless in style,—wherein the “old saws” were schoolboy commonplaces,
and the “modern instances” came no nearer to us than the days of
Galileo! As a contemporary journal remarked,—“for any sympathy of his
readers, or for any practical effect upon their wills, he might as well
have discoursed to them of the patience of Job or the justice of
Aristides.”
Such exceptions, however, ought not to affect an estimate of the general
system or practice, which we regard as fraught with much good. It is
observable that men of mark who have special relations to any place, to
any town or district, frequently seek to make their literary or
oratorical powers a graceful means of cementing the connection which
subsists between them and the place in question. It is to a kindly
desire of this kind that we owe the lecture or address whose title we
have made a text for the preceding remarks, and which we desire to
commend to the notice of all address-givers as in many respects a model
of this class of compositions. It is well considered,—a tribute of
respect to which every assembly is entitled; the rare but fascinating
charm of style is felt throughout; and its spirit is not more genial and
sympathetic, than its counsels are calculated to be of deep practical
influence in the affairs of life.
In choosing Labour for his theme, Mr Warren addressed himself to a
subject which he knew must interest every unit in the crowded audience
around him. The establishment of the rights of labour is the first-fruit
of freedom, and the maintenance of these rights is the first necessity
of a commonwealth. “Labour,” says Adam Smith, “was the first price, the
original purchase-money that was paid for all things. It was not by gold
or by silver, but _by labour_, that all the wealth of the world was
originally purchased.” And, as that clear-sighted writer adds, “the
property which every man has in his own labour, as it is the original
foundation of all other property, so it is the most sacred and
inviolable. The patrimony of a poor man lies in the strength and
dexterity of his hands; and to hinder him from employing his strength
and dexterity in what manner he thinks proper, without injury to his
neighbour, is a plain violation of this most sacred property. It is a
manifest encroachment upon the just liberty of both the workman, and
those who might be disposed to employ him. As it hinders the one from
working at what he thinks proper, so it hinders the others from
employing whom they think proper.” “Labour,” almost simultaneously
remarked the great and good Turgot, “is the _poor man’s property_: no
property is more sacred; and no time nor authority can sanction the
violation of his right freely to dispose of this, his only resource.”
Words these, as Mr Warren remarks, worthy to be recorded in letters of
gold. In Britain, Labour, like Opinion, is FREE. And so profoundly
cherished by our nation is the principle of freedom in labour, that even
in our colonies we have struck the fetters of bondage from the Negroes,
by an act, we will not say prudent in the manner of its accomplishment,
but noble in the highest degree from the spirit which dictated it.
But things were not always so in England. In the early stages of society
everywhere, the only law is the law of the strongest, and might makes
right. Even in the classic States of Greece and Rome, where civilisation
of a certain kind reached great eminence, the proportion of free men to
slaves was infinitesimal only; and in Russia at the present day, the
vast majority of the nation are still kept in a state of serfdom.
England too had a period—now happily past by six or seven centuries—when
a similar state of things prevailed. The working-classes of England then
groaned in the state of slavery called villeinage,—a _villein_ being as
absolutely the property of his feudal lord as a dog or a hog; unable to
acquire any property for himself, whatever he earned belonging to his
lord,—held to belong to the land and sold with it,—torn at will from his
family,—his children slaves like himself; and if a male and female slave
of different masters married, their masters claimed any children that
might be born, who were divided between them! The thirteenth century had
ended before any considerable proportion of these villeins had risen
into the condition of hired labourers. And the first time we hear of
these on a grand scale is in the year 1348; on which occasion, the great
plague having terribly reduced their numbers, the legislature sternly
interposed, “to deny the poor,” in the indignant language of Mr Hallam,
“that transient amelioration of their lot which the progress of
population, or other analogous circumstances, would, without any
interference, very rapidly take away.” “These poor creatures,” says Mr
Warren, “were naturally anxious to be better paid for their labour, when
it had become so greatly increased in value; and the legislature, in the
time of Edward III., passed acts peremptorily fixing, with great
precision, the rates at which artisans should be obliged to work, on
pain of punishment by fine and imprisonment. This was the famous Statute
of Labourers, passed just five centuries ago (1352), and which applied
exclusively to those whose means of living was by the labour of their
hands—by the sweat of their brow.”
How different the case in England now! What an advance have the virtues
of justice, mercy, and wisdom made amongst us during these last five
centuries! Freedom, whether personal or political, is no longer an empty
boast,—a privilege reserved for a wealthy or high-born minority. Its
only limits are where the liberty of the individual trenches upon the
liberty of his fellows, or the good of the commonwealth. As regards the
rights of labour, of which Mr Warren so ably treats, a British labourer
may work to any master, for any number of hours a-day he pleases, and
may even contract to work for a particular master for his whole
lifetime.[2] But as regards women and children the case is different,
and, acting not in accordance with mere theory, but the dictates of
experience and philanthropy, the British Legislature have found it
necessary to put restrictions upon female and juvenile labour,—these
portions of the community being in certain cases too weak and dependent
to look after their own interests. In factory-works this is especially
the case. The mighty machinery in these establishments requires simply
to be tended, so that a considerable portion of the work can be done by
mere children. And hence it happens that premature and improvident
marriages are frequent among the mill-workers, who, instead of thinking
of supporting their children, look forward to children as a means of
supporting themselves! A most cruel and unnatural state of things, fatal
to the children, and pernicious to the community, which thus witnesses
within its own bosom the growth of a class utterly degenerate in body
and totally uneducated in mind. Acting upon these considerations, the
British Legislature in 1833 passed the first Factory Act, which bore in
its preamble “that it was necessary that the hours of labour, of
children and young persons, employed in mills and factories, should be
regulated, inasmuch as there are great numbers of children and young
persons now employed in them, and their hours of labour are longer than
is desirable, due regard being had to their health and means of
education.” By that statute many excellent regulations were made to
mitigate the evil. And again, in the years 1844, 1847, 1850, and 1853,
other acts were passed, says Mr Warren, “further restricting the hours
of labour of women, young persons, and children, in print-works, mills,
and factories; carefully providing for their education, fixing the time
for beginning and ending work, so as to prevent their toiling
unnecessarily and at unseasonable hours; securing their holidays and
periods for recreation, fixing their meal-times; providing for the
cleanliness and ventilation of the scenes of their toil; guarding them
as far as possible against exposure to danger from machinery; and
subjecting mills and factories to constant and systematic inspection and
regulation by medical men and government officers, whose business it is
to see that the benevolent care of the Legislature is not defeated, or
in any way evaded. Again, no woman or girl, of any age, and no boy under
the age of ten years, is now allowed to work on any pretence whatever in
any mine or colliery; and no boy can be apprenticed to such work under
that age, nor for more than eight years. No young person under
twenty-one years of age is allowed to enter any flue or chimney, either
to sweep it or extinguish fire; and no boy under sixteen can be
apprenticed to a chimney sweeper; and even if he be, the moment he
wishes it, a magistrate will discharge him from his articles.” Such
legislation, undeniably, requires to be very prudently proceeded with;
for, while taking care of the employed, we must at the same time respect
the freedom of the employer, otherwise manufacturing capital will flee
our shores, and the state of the working-classes will be rendered worse
than before.
The question, indeed, at issue between Labour and Capital is one of
exceeding difficulty, yet it is one which every year is pressing itself
more urgently upon the consideration of the country. The present laws
relating to this matter are unquestionably a great improvement upon what
they were thirty years ago. Down to the year 1824, two or three
working-men could not meet together, though never so quietly, to settle
what wages they would work for, and during what hours, without
committing an offence in the eye of the law, and being punished for it;
while the masters, at the same time, were at full liberty to meet, and
agree to give their men no more than a particular sum! That was neither
freedom nor justice; and the late Mr Hume only spoke the truth when,
stigmatising the principle, he said,—“The law prevented the labouring
classes of the community from combining together against their
employers, who, though few in number, were powerful in wealth, and might
combine against _them_, and determine not to give them more than a
certain sum for their labour. The workmen could not, however, consult
together about the rate they ought to fix on that labour, without
rendering themselves liable to fine and imprisonment, and a thousand
other inconveniences which the law had reserved for them.” This legal
inequality has been removed, but how much remains to be done need be
told only to such as shut their eyes to the ever-recurring strikes and
misery which desolate our manufacturing districts. Labour is free,—and
each man wants to get as much for it as he can; but unfortunately
another man as naturally wants to get it for as little as he can. There
is no love, no sympathy, not even a common understanding of each other’s
affairs; each party forms a league against the other,—and so the
heartless suicidal strife goes on. Masters and men—it is hard to say
which party is the more to blame. If improvidence on the part of the
work-people often tempt them into, and aggravate their position in
strikes, by leaving them no little surplus wherewith to meet “hard
times,”—turn to our last month’s article on the Lancashire strikes, and
see if there be not also an improvidence and gambling spirit on the part
of the master-manufacturers, by which the wages and employment of their
men are needlessly placed in jeopardy.
Masters and men combine against each other—that is the barbarous order
of the day. Men who fancy that war with foreign nations can be wholly
abolished by means of arbitration, yet wage an internecine contest with
their own brother-countrymen,—a war which, so far from even
acknowledging the principle of arbitration, is regularly carried on
until one or other of the parties sinks exhausted in the combat! It is
not long ago since the combinations of the workmen on strike were of the
most savage and atrocious character.[3] Of late they have become less
envenomed in spirit; but still the tyranny which trades-unions exercise
over individual members of the trade is as glaring as could be practised
by Governments even the most despotic. The law attempts to remedy this,
but, alas! with little effect. “If,” says the late Chief-Justice Tindal,
expounding the existing statutes upon this point, “there be one right,
which beyond all others the labourer ought to be able to call his own,
it is the right of the exertion of his own personal strength and skill,
in the full enjoyment of his own free will, altogether unshackled by the
control or dictates of his fellow-workmen; yet strange to say, this very
right which the discontented workman claims for himself to its fullest
extent, he does, by a blind perversity and unaccountable selfishness,
entirely refuse to his fellows who differ in opinion from himself! It is
unnecessary to say that a course of proceeding so utterly unreasonable
in itself, so injurious to society, so detrimental to the interests of
trade, and so oppressive against the rights of the poor man, must be a
gross and flagrant violation of the law, and when the guilt is
established, must be visited by a proper measure of punishment.” But the
masters also may now be made to feel the restraining power of the law;
and at this moment one of our highest tribunals, a Court of Error, is
occupied with a question of no small importance and difficulty, arising
from an attempt of eighteen Lancashire mill-owners to enter into a
counter-combination. Their men having combined to support each other in
forcing their masters to yield to their terms, the masters entered into
a bond to each other not to open their mills for twelve months, except
on terms agreed to by a majority; and the question was brought before
the Court of Queen’s Bench, whether such an agreement was or was not one
in restraint of trade, and consequently consistent or inconsistent with
the public good. “The Court differed,” says Mr Warren; “but the majority
held that the agreement was illegal, as unduly restraining the freedom
of trade, holding ‘that if particular masters might thus combine, so
might all the masters in the kingdom:’ and, on the other hand, all the
men in the kingdom might combine themselves into a sort of Labour
Parliament.” The case, it is understood, will not be held settled on
either side until it has been taken to the House of Lords, and decided
by the Court of last appeal in the kingdom.
The principle or object kept in view by the Legislature in framing the
present statutes seems to have been, as Chief-Justice Tindal once
observed, “that if the workmen, on the one hand, refused to work, or the
master, on the other, refused to employ, as such a state of things could
not continue long, it might fairly be expected that the party must
ultimately give way whose pretensions were not founded on reason or
justice—the masters if they offered too little, the workmen if they
demanded too much.” But, says Mr Warren, “this leaves each party to
decide on the reason and justice of its pretensions, and the
unreasonableness and injustice of those of its opponent. And it is more
likely that the Legislature said to itself,—‘It will always be a
question of time; the weakest will go to the wall first, though not till
after it has greatly hurt the stronger.’” They just left each side to do
its worst, and worry or be worried to death by its opponent, without the
State interfering so long as this work of social murder went on
_peaceably_!
Truly, this is sad work! And yet legislation, we fear, though it may in
some degree curb, will never reach the root of the evil. The only cure,
we feel persuaded, will be found in social, not legislative reform.
Better information on the part of the working-classes will do something
to the attainment of this most desirable end; and Mr Warren, while
paying a just tribute to the “keen mother-wit and right honest heart” of
the English working-classes, says,—
“If many years’ observation and reflection entitle me to make a
recommendation, it would be, that the working-classes would find it of
the highest value to acquire, in a general way, as they could with a
little effort,—as by plain and good lectures in this very place,—some
knowledge of the circumstances which determine the rate of wages. That
is a question, in its higher and remoter branches, of extreme
difficulty; but its elementary principles are pretty well agreed upon
now, and directly touch the only capital of the poor man—his labour,
and teach him how to set a true and not a chimerical and exaggerated
value on it, at times when the keenest dispute has arisen on that very
subject. Oh, what incalculable benefits might arise from a knowledge,
by the acute working-classes, of the leading principles agreed upon by
great thinkers, statesmen, and economists of every hue of opinion, as
those regulating the relation between employers and employed, and
establishing, not a conflict of interest, but an absolute identity!”
Yet it is not Ignorance, but Selfishness—that passion the most abiding
of our nature—that is the prime mover in these dire contests between the
employers and employed; and along with every effort for the education of
our working-classes, we should strive also still more assiduously to
cultivate their moral nature and make mutual charity and forbearance
more prevalent both among high and low. Very beautifully, and no less
wisely and earnestly, does Mr Warren speak on this subject. Inculcating
forbearance between master and man in hard-times, he says:—
“Each ought honestly to place himself, for a moment, in the other’s
situation—when each might see causes in operation which he might not
otherwise have seen—trials and difficulties of which he had not
dreamed. Let the master look steadily at the position of the working
man, especially in hard times, pressed down to the earth with
exhausting labour, anxiety, and galling privations endured by himself
and his family, often almost maddening him, as he feels that it _is in
vain for him to rise up early, to sit up late, to eat the bread of
sorrow_: in moments of despondency and despair, he feels as though the
appalling language of the prophet were sounding in his ears—_Son of
man, eat thy bread with quaking, and drink thy water with trembling
and with carefulness!_ He cannot keep himself and those towards whom
his harassed heart yearns so tenderly from the jaws of starvation,
with all his patience, economy, and sobriety; and yet he sees out of
the fruit of his labours, his employers _apparently_ rolling in
riches, and revelling in luxury and splendour! But let that workman,
on the other hand, do as he would be done by: let his master deal with
his capital, which happens to be money, as the workman with his, which
happens to be labour—‘freely.’ Let him reflect on the anxieties and
dangers to which his employer is often exposed, but dare not explain,
or make them public, lest it should injure or ruin his credit: his
capital may be locked up in machinery, or he may be otherwise unable
to realise it, however desperate his emergency, without a destructive
sacrifice: great but perfectly legitimate speculation may have failed
from causes he could not foresee or control—from accident, from fraud,
or misfortune of others—from a capricious change in public taste: he
may have been running desperately, but with an honest spirit, along
the black line of bankruptcy for many months, without his workmen
dreaming of it, and yet has punctually paid their weekly wages to
perhaps several or many hundreds of them, often borrowing at heavy
interest to do so, while these workmen supposed him always the master
of untold thousands! Now I say, let each party try to think of all
these things, and pause before he commits himself to a rash and
ruinous line of hostility. A strike too often partakes of the nature
of a social suicide. Capital—that is, labour and money—at war with
itself, may be compared to the madman who, in a sudden phrenzy, dashes
each of his fists against the other, till both are bleeding and
disabled—perhaps for ever.... Let each party sincerely try to respect
the other; to find out and dwell on those qualities really, and to so
large an extent, entitling each to the other’s respect and sympathy.
Let the master reflect on the patience, ay the truly heroic patience,
self-denial, fortitude, and energy with which the workman endures
severe trials and privations; and let the workman reflect on the
fairness and moderation, often under circumstances of serious
difficulty,—on the generosity and munificence of his master, as could
be testified by tens of thousands of grateful workmen, in seasons of
sickness, suffering, and bereavement.”
Towards the close of his elaborate lecture, Mr Warren discourses nobly
and cheerfully on the Dignity and Consolations of labour, and glances at
the monster evils of Improvidence and Intemperance by which the daily
life of the working-classes is robbed alike of its honour and its
comfort. In this part occurs a passage so striking and so eloquent that
we cannot but transfer it to our pages, and we trust the warning and
appeal which it conveys will animate all who have the privilege of
influencing the working-classes, with an enduring desire to banish the
debasing and all-abstracting passion of intemperance from their ranks.
“I hope and believe that I _must_ go out of this hall, to find a
victim of _Intemperance_! Such a man, or rather wreck of a man, is not
to be found _here_! I know, however, where to find him; there is
another hall in which I took my seat this morning, have sate all day,
and shall be at my gloomy post again in the morning, to
see,—possibly,—standing trembling, or sullen and desperate at the bar
of justice, one whom the untiring and remorseless fiend Intemperance
has dragged thither, and stands grim but unseen beside his victim. He
had been a man, might we say, well to do in the world, and getting
respected by all his neighbours, till _he took to drink_, and then it
was all up with him—and there he stands! disgraced, and in despair. I
need not draw on my imagination for illustrations, especially before
an audience which numbers so many men whose painful duty as jurymen it
is to sit every sessions, with myself, engaged in the administration
of justice. You have seen how often, in a moment of voluntary madness
occasioned by drink, a life’s character has been sacrificed, the brand
of felon impressed on the brow, and free labour exchanged for that
which is profitless, compulsory, and ignominious to the workman,
within the walls of your prison! It would be unjust, however, not to
say that exhausting labour, and the companionship of those who are
together so exhausted, supply but too many temptations to seek the
refreshment and exhilaration afforded by liquor, and which soon
degenerates, from an occasional enjoyment, into an accursed habit.
Home soon ceases to be home, to him who returns to it under the guilty
delirium of intoxication: there, weeping and starving wife and
children appear like dismal spectres flitting before his bloodshot eye
and reeling brain. As the husband frequents the dramshop, so he drives
his wretched wife the oftener to the pawn-shop, and her and his
children at length to the workhouse; or perhaps in her desperation—but
I dare not proceed! The coroner can tell the rest.
“Look at yonder desolate little room, at the end of a dreary court; a
funeral goes out from it in the morning! Enter this evening. All is
silent, and a single candle on the mantel-piece sheds a dull
flickering light on a coffin, not yet screwed down. Beside it sits
morally a murderer; his bloated face is hid in his shaking hands; he
has not yet ventured to move aside the coffin lid, but at length he
dares to look at his poor victim—his broken-hearted wife! Poor, poor
soul! thou art gone at last! Gone, _where the wicked cease from
troubling, and the weary are at rest_! ’Tis a happy release, say the
friendly neighbours, who have contributed their little means to lay
her decently in her coffin. Ay, besotted husband! let your bloodshot
eyes look on that white face, that wreck of a face so sweet and pretty
when you married her! Never fear! the eyes are closed, and will weep
and look mournfully at you no more! Touch, if you dare, those limbs,
which the woman who laid them out said, with a sigh, were _mere skin
and bone_! Dare you take hold of her cold hand and look at her
wedding-ring? Do you see how her finger is worn with the needle?
During the day, during the night, this poor creature was your willing
slave, mending your linen, and that of your wronged children, and what
was left of her own, and which are nearly rags. Do you hear those
children sobbing in the next room? Do you see the scar on that cheek?
Look and tremble. Have you forgotten the blow that caused it, given by
your hand of drunken and ruffian violence? Yet she never reproached
you! And when at length, worn away with misery, starvation, and
ill-usage, she was forced to give up the struggle for life, her
last—her very last act was gently and in silence to squeeze your
unworthy hand! Perhaps remorse is now shaking your heart, and you
inwardly groan—
‘Oh, if she would but come again,
I think I’d grieve her so no more!’
She will come no more on earth, but you will have to meet her again!
So, man, close the coffin lid! Go to bed, and sleep if you can! The
funeral is in the morning, and you must follow the poor emaciated body
close past your favourite dramshop!”
As befitted the audience, it is manual or mechanical labour that Mr
Warren in his essay chiefly concerns himself with. But so eminent an
author cannot be insensible to the still nobler labour of the Mind, or
to the grand and touching lives of so many of its votaries. Manual
labour may appear harder than some kinds of intellectual pursuits, but
it cannot be carried to the same excess. It is less fatal, because less
alluring. The labour of the hands does not kill like the labour of the
head. It is not the lower classes alone that work. Mr Warren well says:—
“The _working-classes_! Are those not worthy of the name, and in its
very highest sense, few in number, comparatively, though they be, who
by their prodigious powers of thought make those discoveries in
science which have given tenfold efficacy and value to labour, turned
it suddenly into a thousand new channels, and conferred on all classes
of society new conveniences and enjoyments? Are we to overlook those
great intellects which have devoted themselves to statesmanship, to
jurisprudence, to morals, to the science of medicine—securing and
advancing the best interests of mankind, and relieving them from
physical anguish and misery; the noble genius devoted to literature,
refining, expanding, and elevating the minds of all capable of it, and
whose immortal works are glittering like stars of the first magnitude
in the hemisphere of thought and imagination? No, my friends; let us
not be so unjust, ungrateful, or unthinking; let us rather be thankful
to God for giving us men of such powers, and opportunity and
inclination to use them, not for their own reputation’s sake alone,
but for our advantage; and let us not enhance the claims of manual, by
forgetting or depreciating intellectual labour. I could at this moment
give you a dozen instances within my personal knowledge, of men whom
God has given very little physical strength, but great mental
endowments, and who cheerfully undergo an amount of exhausting labour
of which you have no idea, in conducting public affairs, political and
legal, and prosecuting scientific researches, immortalising the age in
which they live.”
Genius in all ages commands the spontaneous homage of mankind. And it is
only just that it should be so. “Tell me,” said an acute observer of
human affairs, “what a few leading minds are thinking in their closets,
and I will tell you what their countrymen will be thinking in the next
generation.” It is the great minds of a country that most deeply
influence its fortunes,—it is the great minds of the world that mould
the progress of our race. These men may live a life of toil and
sacrifices in the cause to which their high powers are devoted, and may
die ere the precious seed sown by them has begun to germinate. But they
do not lose their reward. The fruit comes at last. Their words enlighten
the world, hastening its progress to a happy goal; while their example
of high powers and glorious self-devotion reaps a rich recompense by
inspiriting others through future ages to follow in their steps. As
saith Longfellow,—
“Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us,
Footprints on the sands of time:
Footprints that perchance another,
Sailing o’er life’s solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwreck’d brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again!”
TOUCHING OXFORD.
A LETTER TO PROFESSOR NEBEL.
My dear Professor!—You see that I have not forgotten the note of
admiration which your countrymen use at the beginning of letters when
they address each other. It is an easy way of giving emphasis to the
greeting, or of expressing the admiration of the writer for the
character of the person written to. When I last saw you at
Dummerjungenberg, I recollect I promised to write you down the
impressions which an intended visit to my old University might make upon
me, and I hasten to fulfil that promise now. It is superfluous for me to
tell you that the two English universities are essentially different in
their constitution from a German university, as you are well acquainted
theoretically with the constitutions of both. I maintain that each kind
is good, and answers its own end. The German university fully answers
its purpose of making men learned, but the stamp of character which it
affixes to the man is evanescent, and does not follow him through life.
According to the language of the Bursch or German student, as soon as a
man has ceased to be a student, he falls back again, as a matter of
course, into the Philisterium, or limbo of the Philistines, which is the
student’s term to designate the uncovenanted class, which comprises all
mankind excepting the student. On the other hand, we speak of men for
the whole of life as Oxford or Cambridge men much more than we do of
them as Göttingen or Leipzig men, inferring by this mode of expression
that they have been, as it were, fed on the milk of Alma Mater, which
continues through the whole of life to affect their constitutions in a
peculiar manner. So highly do some of our men think of this influence,
that they dread too much infusion of the Germanic element, as dangerous
to this peculiar quality of our universities of forming and stamping the
whole man, instead of merely the logical part of him. I recollect well
that at a meeting of Convocation at Oxford, when some material changes
were brought under consideration, no sentiment was more highly applauded
than one which concluded the Latin speech of a talented polemical
churchman, when he said, “Hanc Universitatem Germanizari non volo”—“I
protest against this university being Germanised;”—by which he plainly
meant, not that he objected to the widening of its scope of teaching,
but that he feared that mere instruction would usurp too much prominence
in the scheme of education, and throw into the shade that general moral
training which is now a most essential part of the system. One of the
feelings, to speak individually, that I should be sorry to lose is that
which this very name of Alma Mater implies. The word “Almus” is one of
the most beautiful in the Latin language; it means that whose nature is
to cherish, nourish, inspire with life. Thus, Venus is called “Alma” by
the ancients, as representing the principle of life in nature; Ceres is
also called “Alma,” as being the goddess that supplies the staff of
life. If it be true, as Mr Carlyle says, that our word “lady” is derived
from two old words, meaning a giver of loaves, it would be a good
translation of the word “Alma.” And desirable it certainly is, that the
word “lady” should bear this fulness of meaning; the function of woman,
in her beautiful ideal, being to give life, to support life, and to make
life worth living. And the poet saw the matter truly, as poets generally
do the most truly, when he said—
“Woman, dear woman, in whose name,
Wife, sister, mother meet,
Thine is the heart by earliest claim,
And thine its latest beat.”
Now, to every Oxford man, his Lady Mother, or Alma Mater, in the
transcendental sense, is his university, occupying nearly as high a
place in his heart as Our Lady occupies in that of the devout Catholic.
And this much I can say from experience. As Hercules could do nothing in
wrestling against the giant Antæus, the son of the Earth, as long as he
persisted in throwing him, seeing that whenever he fell in his mother’s
lap he gained new strength, so is it with myself; the world never throws
me,—I never am cast down by circumstances, but a thrill from the warm
bosom of Alma Mater, as powerful but more enduring than galvanism,
inspires me with a new life, and I rise with fresh courage and fresh
heart to the wrestling-match of life.
I have lately visited my old University after a long absence, and found
its outward aspect fair as ever—nay, rather fairer and fresher than
ever. Changed it is undoubtedly, but changed for the better. Much that
is new and tasteful, at the same time—a rare accident in our times—has
been added, and the hand of Time has been arrested, and that which was
decayed or destroyed has been restored with affectionate fidelity. One
of the greatest improvements, to my mind, has been effected by the
railroad, which was at first greatly feared as a revolutionary agent. It
has diverted from the main thoroughfares that brawling stream of traffic
which formerly flowed through them in the shape of stage-coaches,
stage-waggons, and other properties and accessories of the stage, and
left the town to its genuine academical character of a dignified repose.
Although this change gives to the town, in the eyes of commercial
travellers, a somewhat dead-alive appearance, and although a similar
change in other places seems to take away truly the only life they
possessed, it seems, on the contrary, to have withdrawn an unpleasant
intrusion from Oxford, and left her to the dignified retirement from the
world of bustle and action, in which she most delights.
Oxford is a town which, for its medieval beauty, deserves to be kept
under a glass-case; and nothing can be more advantageous to its
academical character, than diverting from its walls the turbid current
of commerce which belongs to this much-bepraised nineteenth century.
This the railroad has achieved most effectually. There is still
abundance of life in the streets, but life in unison with the history of
the place; and suddenly whirled as one is by the express train from the
turmoil of London to the repose of Oxford, with its lines of venerable
colleges, and troops of sombre but graceful gowned figures, one
experiences a feeling as of having been transported in a trance on the
carpet of the Arabian Nights from one place to another. Never did the
High Street appear so broad or so beautiful as now that its area is
uninvaded by the rattle of vulgar vehicles. The time to see it to
perfection is when the sun happens to set behind the opening at Carfax
Church, dazzling the eye at its focus, and forcing shafts of amber light
out along the fronts of St Mary’s and All Saint’s churches, and the
fantastic façade of Queen’s College. This is a condition which presents
one of the finest town-views in the world that can be seen where there
are no mountains in the case. There is much similarity between Oxford
and the grand old Flemish towns; and the railway has been a boon to
them, as it has been to her, in preserving their quiet character. Unlike
other English towns, the inhabitants of which point with an ignorant
pride to the substitution of stucco-fronted houses, and cockney
plate-glass, for the cross-beamed gables and lattices, all the
architectural changes which have taken place of late years in Oxford
appear to have been for the better. One is certainly sorry to see the
time-corroded and weather-beaten stone disappearing from the faces of
the colleges, and new freestone appearing in its place; but this change,
though one that we may sigh over as even over the seasonal changes of
nature, is, in reality, of a conservative character, and its absolute
necessity is an unanswerable plea. The nature of the stone of which most
of the colleges are built being such as to peculiarly expose it to wear
and tear of weather, we are not sorry to see it replaced by a material
which looks durable in its novelty, and to many generations yet to come
will become more beautiful with age. No expense has been spared in these
reparations; and the stranger will be peculiarly struck with the manner
in which they have been carried out in many of the principal buildings.
In Oxford alone, of all the towns in England, domestic architecture
appears properly subordinate to that devoted to public purposes; and as
she grows in beauty with each addition, her inhabitants may be one day
allowed to boast as the Romans of the olden time,
“Privatus illis census erat brevis,
Commune magnum,”
for the splendour of her public buildings will quickly dwarf the most
ambitious attempts of private proprietors; and one good result of the
communal, or, as a Cantab would rather say, combinational life of
Oxford, is the prospect that things will be achieved there by bodies of
men imbued with the “genius loci,” which would surpass the aspiration,
taste, or indeed ability of most individuals to accomplish elsewhere. So
should it ever be. What can the use be of any individual, whose
establishment does not assume palatial proportions, pluming himself on
the possession of architectural decorations, or masterpieces of painting
or sculpture, which, added to a public gallery, would give delight and
instruction to thousands, instead of administering to the pleasures of a
few? I do not know whether you have ever visited Oxford. If you have, I
may remind you, though unnecessarily, that, besides the world-renowned
High Street, there are two other streets in it not less
characteristic—one the Broad Street, parallel with it for a part of its
length; and the other St Giles’s, a continuation of the Corn Market,
running at right angles to the High Street from Oxford Cross. The Broad
Street is one of those areas reminding us of Continental cities, where
the population might be mustered in arms if necessary. It was in the
middle of this that Cranmer, Ridley, and Latimer were martyred; and at
its junction with St Giles’s is now set up an elegant Gothic monument,
something in the manner of Sir Walter Scott’s at Edinburgh, to
perpetuate the memory of that event. St Giles’s is a most remarkable
street. It has a church at its commencement and near its end, where it
branches into two roads. It is so spacious that the houses on each side,
irregularly built as they are, and ought to be, appear diminutive; and
between the houses and the central road, on each side, is a row of
trees, which gives it the appearance of a boulevard. On entering it, you
have on the right the new buildings of Baliol, and farther on, the more
ancient face of St John’s College; facing which are the new Taylor
Buildings—a structure with which much fault has been found, as a weak
centre on the side towards Beaumont Street appears to carry two heavy
wings, but which must be allowed on all hands to conduce greatly to the
adorning of its site, and indeed of the town generally. It is in this
street that fountains, judiciously placed, would add much to the general
effect; but many may doubt whether fountains would ever have other than
an unnatural and artificial aspect in England, where the wetness of the
atmosphere renders drier objects pleasanter to look upon. There are two
seasons of the year when fountains are especially agreeable—in the
summer heats, when it is delightful to be within reach of their spray;
and in frost, when they are draped with pendulous icicles of the most
fantastic beauty—a phenomenon I have indeed seen on the little fountain
in the Botanic Garden at Oxford. Both these seasons are generally with
us of short duration, and during all the rest, fountains to many would
be somewhat of an eyesore, and create a shivering sensation. Those in
Trafalgar Square count as nothing. As for the Crystal Palace and
Versailles fountains, and all of the same description, people delight in
them more for their mechanical cleverness than their artistic effect,
and they are things got up for holiday occasions, not meant to form
parts of the scenes of everyday life, like the fountains of Italy, or
the gossip-haunted Brunnen of Germany. I fear then that, for the
present, Oxford must be contented with her rivers, and not babble of
fountains. She is one of the few large towns singularly blest with the
presence of ever-flowing and ever-living water. The Isis runs beside
her, covered with a fleet of pleasure-boats, probably as large as that
of Athens during the Peloponnesian war, to which it has been wittily
compared, and in the summer days, swarming in and out amongst each other
like the gondolas of Venice. The Cherwell, which is a river as large as
the famed Cam, or nearly so, encircles the meadows of Christchurch and
Magdalen, and, with its sinuous course, and banks overshadowed with
trees, presents numberless nooks of beauty, and spots of refuge from the
heats of summer. The avenue in Christchurch meadow is second to none in
the world, perhaps superior to all, though there are many like it; for
instance, the avenue at Cambridge, which was compared by Porson to a
college fellowship, as a long dreary vista with a church at the end of
it; the avenue by the Severn, in the Quarries at Shrewsbury: that of the
University of Bonn, and others at royal residences, and near places of
academic retirement. In connection with this avenue, it is well to
mention that there is a time-honoured custom prevalent in the
University, of making it a general promenade on the Sunday in
Commemoration-week, which generally occurs towards the end of the leafy
month of June. On that day, most of the members of the University are to
be seen in their distinctive dresses; and those are considered happy who
are accompanied with friends, called, from their object in visiting the
University, “lions and lionesses;” nor is the wealth and beauty of the
city unrepresented. From this custom arises the name of “Show Sunday.”
The rivers afford an inexhaustible source of amusement, at a cheap and
easy rate, to the gownsmen, who luxuriate in all sorts of boats,
according to their activity or laziness—the energetic eight-oar, the
social four-oar, the friendly pair-oar, the fantastic canoe, the
adventurous outrigger-skiff, the dreamy sailing-boat, and the sleepy
punt, the latter having come into fashion chiefly of late years, and in
the hot season, and being a method of amusement which, at the price of
the violent exertion of one of the party, purchases the perfect repose
of the rest, who lie on their backs in boating-dresses, cigar in mouth,
and the last work of Dickens or Thackeray, chosen for its lightness, in
hand, and watch over the sides the swimmings of their Skye terriers.
This peculiar dog, distinguished from all others by its sagacity,
fidelity, and an ugliness which has worn into beauty, is now quite a
part of the University system; yet I remember when the first was
introduced into Oxford, and considered so remarkable that he gave his
master the name among the townsmen of the “gentleman what belongs to the
dog.” The poor little fellow had to suffer much for his resemblance to a
door-mat, before his position was fully recognised.
Next in importance to the colleges and rivers of Oxford are the gardens.
With the latter we must include the college-meadows, which are composed
of a real meadow in the centre, surrounded by a planted gravel-walk,
bounded generally, on the outer side, by one of the rivers. These
gardens, though private, are liberally opened by the college authorities
to the public, and, occupying a large part of the area of the town, they
invite the residents to a number of short walks and lounges, the
temptation to which in other towns is generally wanting, but which must
be most conducive to health. In some of them—as in St John’s—the members
of the college amuse themselves with archery, in others with bowls—a
truly after-dinner recreation; while in the park that is attached to the
grounds of Magdalen College the eye is gladdened by the sight of a
number of browsing deer, who become singularly tame in consequence of
the attentions of the Fellows. Well might Macaulay call it “their
pleasant abode” of Magdalen! Magdalen is now rendered even more pleasant
to some minds by the choral service of the Church of England having been
brought to perfection in its chapel, so that its members can never
attend Divine service without their ears being charmed by the most
exquisite music. Others may be of opinion that the service solemnly read
produces an effect which is appreciable by all rather than by a few of
peculiar temperament. I do not take upon myself to strike the balance.
In two other colleges is the service sung instead of being said—namely,
in St John’s and New Colleges, and these three colleges are naturally a
source of great attraction to strangers—so much so, that the chapels
being of limited dimensions, admission to them has of necessity been
made a favour. In the chapels at Oxford, customs have been perpetuated
from time immemorial, which would shock rigid Protestantism, unless
inured to them by habitual contact—such as the lighting of candles on
the altar, and painted altar-pieces, instead of the Commandments-table
which is usual in Anglican churches. Be this as it may, the attendance
at morning chapel, which is enforced on the junior members, and
sometimes considered by them a grievance, becomes in time so much a
habit that they feel the want of it when they become parochial
clergymen, and in many cases endeavour to perpetuate it by daily
services (having certainly the letter of the law of their Church on
their side), with considerable success indeed in some town parishes, and
among the richer classes; but with doubtful result in the rural
districts, where the peculiar habits of the labouring poor scarcely seem
to allow them to fall in with it to any great extent.
While on the subject of Oxford, you naturally wish me to say what I
think generally of the system of education of the place. I will tell
you, then, in short, that I consider it the best possible system of
education to form the character of a man and a gentleman. Do you ask me
why? I answer that it is so for this simple reason—that it tends to
develop in the fairest manner all the various energies of that
many-sided creature, Man. There are two sorts of education at Oxford, as
at our public schools—one enforced by law, the other dependent on social
customs: both have their full sway at Oxford. Thus we have a practical
illustration of the strongest kind of the Platonic theory of education.
Plato very properly thought that the development of the bodily powers
was almost of as much consequence as that of the mental, and accordingly
enjoined that education in his Utopia should consist of music and
gymnastics. By music he understood all that falls into the province of
either of the nine Muses. By gymnastics he understood not a dreary
tugging at ropes, and hugging of bars, and climbing ladders with hands,
but a simultaneous exercise of mind and body in pastimes where the body
is deceived by the mind into activity, and cheated into wholesome
weariness—such as contests of strength and passages of arms, hunting,
fowling, and the like. Even so at Oxford physical education is complete;
and although it does not form a subject of examination in the schools
under the new system, it is carried perhaps to greater perfection than
any other kind, and therefore we may conclude that the Royal Commission
does well to leave it where it stands. These Oxford gymnastics (using
the word always in its special and Platonic sense) are for the greater
part perfectly consistent with the “musical” part of the system which
emanates from authority. Occasionally, however, those sports, which, as
a Catholic founder of one of the colleges said, “miram atque
incredibilem delectationem afferunt” (showing that the old boy himself,
though he wished to see his seminary like a bee-hive, thoroughly
appreciated them), interfere with the hours devoted to study; and
therefore fox-hunting, which I especially allude to, is generally
discouraged by the Dons even in the case of those students who are able
to afford it. The delicious languor, so unlike the rude and partial
fatigue resulting from any other exercise, which pervades the whole
system after a good day’s riding, and gives a Parisian savour to the
plainest dinner, is of course fatal for the rest of the day to any other
intellectual work; for who shall deny that hunting is intellectual
work?—intellectual for the hounds, who have the sagest of beasts to
outwit—intellectual for the horses, who have the safest footing to
choose in a moment of time, and the exactest distances to measure;
intellectual for the rider, who requires the eye of an eagle and the
judgment of a Solon to know where he ought to be, not to mention the
huntsman and M. H., whose whole lives, if they take deep interest in the
matter, as they generally do, must be spent in intense thought? An
excellent exercise it is of mind, undoubtedly, but fatal to other
exercises of a less absorbing character, and therefore consistently
discouraged by the Dons. The same may be said of driving. Driving is at
best but a lazy exercise; and though it requires skill, it is not
sufficiently gymnastic; besides, it is expensive, and presents no
advantage corresponding to the expense. But we cannot help thinking that
if the thunders of each university Zeus had been less lavishly launched
against tandem-driving in particular, this antiquated practice, very
good in peculiar countries, but generally merely a puppyish display,
would have died out of itself. There is always a peculiar sweetness to
young minds in forbidden pleasures.
But boating and cricket and football, tennis, rackets, fives, and
billiards, still please, although there is nothing illegitimate about
them, and are perfectly consistent with the earnest pursuits of the
place. With regard to billiards, I must just observe that this
fascinating game has in a great measure lost its reputation, from the
fact that the billiard-room is in most English towns the rendezvous of
all the blackguardism of the place; but in Oxford the billiard-rooms are
private, and engaged by each party of players; they are an especial
refuge on wet days, nor can I see any exception that can be taken to the
pastime, save when it degenerates into the public pool, becomes a
species of gambling, and loses its real character, which is that of a
game of skill, quite as much as that of chess, combined with gentle
exercise. As there is not the slightest danger of the studies I have
mentioned falling into desuetude, so have they been with good judgment
overlooked by the University authorities, and as they present in every
phase an examination of themselves, it has not been found necessary to
create any special honours as a reward for proficiency in them. The
universal existence of this gymnastic education in Oxford, superadded to
a peculiar keenness and dampness in the air, induces an appetite which
can only be satisfied by what appears to strangers an unusual amount of
eating and drinking. In the latter particular there is indeed a great
improvement. Excess in quantity is extremely rare even among extravagant
students; but the fiery wines of Portugal and Spain still hold their
ground against all comers, and public opinion is decidedly in their
favour—so much so, that others are treated with a sort of contempt. It
is said that on the occasion of the visit of a great personage to the
sister University, whose habits bear a strong resemblance to those of
Oxford, when the servants of that personage sent a complaint to the
entertainer,—a Head of a House,—that they were only supplied with port
when they were used to claret, he sent back a message to them that the
college port, with a due admixture of pump-water, would make the best
claret in the world. The substantial nature of an Oxford breakfast,
enough of itself to convert Bishop Berkeley to a belief in the existence
of Matter, is in itself an evidence that the potations of the preceding
night have seldom been immoderate. With regard to that part of the
education of the place, to the furtherance of which its gymnastics and
good fare are supposed only to administer, it is truly “musical” in the
Greek sense of the word. Of music, as we understand it, there is
certainly little as yet enjoined; but every encouragement is given to
its culture by chanted services in certain chapels, by a liberal
allowance of concerts sanctioned by authority, by doctor’s degrees
conferred in it, with a most splendid gown worthy of Apollo himself if
he ever wore one; by especially the Grand Commemoration festival, at
which the first public singers are often engaged. On the whole, there is
a great taste in Oxford for this beautiful art, which requires little
forcing, for it grows of itself in the climate of the place. This taste
is especially shown by the liberality with which brass-bands playing
your national airs are remunerated; but important as it is, it is
sometimes found to interfere with the soundless but sounder elements of
education, and therefore it becomes necessary in certain cases to check
it. The rooms of the men have in general such thin partitions, that the
noise of one seriously interferes with the silence of another. I once
knew a reading man in —— College, who was placed between two
pianofortes, one overhead, and the other underfoot: he especially
complained of the interruption on Sundays, as on that day his more
celestial neighbour played sacred tunes, while his neighbour of the
nether world played profane, producing a discord in mid-air as ludicrous
as painful to an ear of taste. But I take it that the sense in which
music is used in old scholastic Latin, is in general the Platonic sense,
and thus the Music school at Oxford means one not especially devoted to
exercises in what we call music, but to exercises on examination in
belles lettres. That this term has acquired a broader significance by
the recent changes in the Oxford University system, I cannot but think a
subject for congratulation. When the University departed as a general
principle from the practice of making verse-writing in the dead
languages the mainspring of erudition in them—a practice still far from
obsolete in the public schools of England—it became necessary, if only
to take up the time of the students, and prevent them from lapsing into
intellectual inanition, to supply them with other food congenial to the
spirit of the place. The germ of these new studies had existed before,
and only required development. There could be no better foundation for
culture in modern history and jurisprudence than the exact study of the
ancient historians of Greece and Rome pursued under the old system. Even
so with mathematics. The modern examinations are, for the most part,
mere distributions of the former work, and by getting part of it over
sooner, the student is less puzzled as to the disposal of his time. But
the paucity of candidates for mathematical honours, in comparison with
those who cling to belles lettres, is a sign that the exact sciences are
still exotics in the atmosphere of Oxford; and as long as the spirit of
the place remains what it is, they are scarcely likely to become
otherwise. Nor are the physical sciences apparently likely to acquire
soon a hold on the popular feeling of the University. Still, as before,
the pivot around which Oxford studies revolve is formed by the solid
metal of the ancient classical authors, whose words are picturesque and
statuesque, and fraught with the same eternal beauty, the same
adaptability as models for all time, as the things that the hands of
their contemporaries produced. Although as yet no school of modern
languages has been formed in which examination in them forms a part of
the University system, yet every encouragement has been given to the
study of them by the foundation of a professorship supported by public
teacherships; and even if nothing more is done, there is every reason to
think that, supported as it is by the cosmopolitan position which our
country has taken of late years, this important branch of literature
will sufficiently nourish in Oxford.
So far it appears that the changes which have been made in the
constitution of Oxford have been of a conservative character—the reforms
have destroyed nothing, but developed a great deal that formerly lay
dormant in the University system. They will continue to be of this
character if the University is allowed abundance of light and air and
space to put forth its own energies, and not damaged by injudicious
meddling from without. There have been rumours of further changes, some
of which are apparently called for by the necessities of the time, while
others have merely been engendered by the inventiveness of the spirit of
innovation. One peculiarly delicate subject has been brought on the
tapis, which, although I hold an opinion of my own respecting it, I
should prefer stating in the position of one balancing two conflicting
views, as far as my prejudice admits. I mean the celibacy of the
Fellows. In the first place, if it is true that women are like a church,
because there is no _living_ without them, a proposition I heard the
other day in the form of a riddle, the business is settled at once,
because it is cruelty to condemn any body of men to a living grave; but,
on the other hand, if the men themselves acquiesce in this social
burial, and refuse to be delivered from it, they have undeniably a voice
in the matter, even though it be from the catacombs, and ought to be
heard in a manner so nearly and dearly affecting their own interests.
The defenders of the present system have a great advantage in being able
to raise a laugh against those who from within advocate a change,
alleging that they have some gentle reasons for doing so. We are a
nation peculiarly sensitive to being placed in a ridiculous position,
and it requires no small amount of moral courage for any man who is a
member of a body to start opinions which the rest, though they may in
their hearts sympathise with, are not immediately prepared to fall in
with. It must be allowed that the outcry against collegiate celibacy has
been louder outside than inside the walls of common rooms. It may be
said, on the other side, that the voices of those without are not
stifled by the fear of snubbing and ridicule as those within are, and
that those who see the effect of a system on others are better qualified
to judge than those whose own minds are biassed by its pressure. Those
who work in mines and live in unwholesome air only feel by diminished
energy the evil effects of the miasma they have to breathe, while those
who live apart from them see it in their pale and haggard looks. It is
not the bondsman in general who calls for emancipation so loudly as the
spectator who has tasted the sweets of freedom. To come to a practical
aspect of the question; it is urged by the advocates of emancipation
that celibacy was part of the religious system under which the colleges
were founded, and that as that religious system has ceased to exist in
reference to them, there is no object in keeping up a restriction which
can have no such motive; and to those who would urge that the intentions
of the founders ought to be consulted as that of any testator ought to
be, it is answered that it is hypocrisy to pretend to consult the wills
of founders in a matter which is merely a corollary to a rule which has
been essentially broken through, and that the wills of founders are even
in this instance nullified by the marriage of heads of colleges, who
being of necessity priests by the statutes under the papal regime, would
render such a prohibition in their cases superfluous. Again, those who
are for continuing the celibacy system urge that a fellowship is
intended only as a stepping-stone to a permanent provision in the view
of the world, and that to allow the marriage of Fellows would render the
succession so slow as to destroy the practical value of the foundations.
To this is opposed the statement that in fact men are well content to
settle down on a fellowship, which is indeed a premium on indolence, and
that they acquire, even if industrious, habits of expense, which make
them loth to part with a large proportion of their incomes without grave
cause, so that in fact many men do continue Fellows until late in life,
when they care naturally less about marriage; and moreover, that the
slowness of succession might equally be urged in the case of livings
which only become vacant by death, and that for the same reason it would
be equally reasonable to enforce the celibacy of bishops were they not
expressly commanded to be husbands, as some interpret Scripture; yet
more, the fellowship might be made tenable for a certain number of years
only, and superannuation might not entail, as it does now, the loss of
the chance of college patronage to livings. Some satirical writers have
drawn a humorous picture of the condition of colleges with sets of rooms
inhabited by family Fellows, the quadrangles turned into play-grounds,
and the sacred grass-plots invaded by nursemaids with their charges,
still further presuming to imagine intestine feuds between jealous
_fellowinnen_ (as you Germans would call them), which they think would
be incompatible with the feeling of collegiate brotherhood or
sisterhood. To this it may be answered, that, as it is, the majority of
Fellows reside in the country, and are otherwise occupied than with
collegiate duties, and there would be less inducement than formerly for
the plural Fellow to content himself with the limited accommodation of a
college; and it would be easy to make a rule that a certain number of
the Fellows,—that is to say, of the younger, should reside to undertake
the offices; and even if they were married, those offices should only
continue so long as to incur no danger of their inundating the
quadrangles with urchins. The worst of it is, that the Oxford education
has a peculiar tendency to develop the poetical and artistic
temperament; and to men of this temperament, who are, in all countries,
in a much larger proportion to others than is generally thought, the
long vista of celibacy is little else than a long perspective of
purgatory. To all who love the beautiful, whether saints or sinners,
there is one central point round which all their thoughts revolve—one
standard by which all their comparisons are made,—and that is none other
than woman. The musical mind is drawn to her through the symphonies of
Mozart or Handel—through the complicated opera strain, and the simple
national air—
“The soul of love and bravery;”
for even the hero-songs of war, by arousing the manliness of man,
suggest the loveliness of woman. The artistic mind is drawn to her
through all the schools of painting—through even the sumptuous Madonnas
which the sacred painters have imagined, as through the sun-warm but
less heavenly creations of Titian or Correggio. It is impossible for the
artistic eye to look at the symmetry of a tree or the graceful lines of
a mountain, or even the crystal curves in a fountain, without dwelling
on that form which, of all created, is undeniably the most beautiful
without any of its associations, and dwelling on it, too, with somewhat
other feelings than those expressed by the Italian priest when he
remarked, in a tone of reproof, to a friend who wished to call his
attention to a fair lady at an assembly—
“Una bella creatura di Dio!”
Thus I do think that if this celibacy is to be continued, it would be a
great improvement to enjoin the study of pure mathematics on college
Fellows, with examinations at intervals to prove that their time is only
taken up in contemplating the affinities of triangles, and the love of
the angles (not of the angels). The whole series of classical literature
ought to be forbidden them for the time; ditto all galleries, pictures,
and statues, all music and poetry; and they ought, as a final measure,
to be relegated to that monastery mentioned by Mr Curzon, somewhere in
the Acroceraunian mountains, where there were some Greek monks who had
never seen a female face, and had even forgotten their mothers. One of
them asked him whether women were like the Madonna. The poor fellow had
better not have seen that Madonna. Even now, some men in their
undergraduate life grow tired of the exclusively masculine aspect of the
University, and some very good lines on that subject, of which I only
recollect the end, were written by a now eminent poet, when he was an
undergraduate—
“As I am one who feels the full divinity
Of a fair face in woman, I protest
I’m sick of this unvaried regularity
Of whiskered cheeks and chins of black barbarity.”
And one painful consequence of the present system is, the violation of
the good old adage, “Happy’s the wooing that’s not long a-doing:” the
notorious evil of long engagements becomes, in this case, exaggerated to
a painful degree. There being no absolute, but only a conditional
prohibition, and the prospect of a living, certain though distant,
appearing to justify the formation of such ties, engagements are formed
in early life, the ratification of which seems ever near, but never
actually comes, till both parties have passed their meridian, and the
fulfilment takes place, if it is thought worth while that it should take
place at all, rather as a matter of course, than because the parties
really now desire it. The hope deferred which “maketh the heart sick,”
embitters the masculine temper, and withers the feminine frame, even
before their natural bloom would have disappeared. The courage which, in
earlier life, would have taken a bold step, and dared the world to do
its worst, becomes irresolution and timidity; and as it often happens
that those who have been kept without food too long, only know the
sensation of hunger through a general faintness of the system, so the
vacuum of the affections too long kept up by circumstances, becomes at
last a chronic disease, which, to the end of life, remains irremediable.
At the same time, the life of the common-room, and the extreme ease with
which material wants are provided for, acts on the mind as opium acts on
the system, till at last it ceases to care for anything but the drug
which has become a habit. It may be with some of those who have felt the
enduring influence of this soporific regime, as with the lotos-eaters of
Tennyson; they even come to dread a change, and cling to the indolence
from which at first they would have fled:
“Our island home
Is far beyond the sea, we will no longer roam.”
But, on the other hand, it may be urged that the immediate happiness of
those concerned is not so much contemplated in the foundations as their
usefulness, and that they must be content to cull the flowers which grow
beside the path of duty. This may be answered by urging that, in certain
cases, a man’s usefulness is diminished instead of being increased by
his being denied certain sources of happiness. The best workman is ever
the man who is best fed and clothed, and made most generally
comfortable; even so in the great work of human life is that individual
most efficient whose legitimate wants, both of body and soul, are
satisfied. The motives which actuated the founders of the Roman Catholic
colleges were no doubt, as most human motives are, of a mixed nature. On
the one hand, they wished their money to fructify and do as much good as
possible; on the other hand, they wished it to fructify in such a way as
to redeem their own souls from purgatory, by providing a succession of
those who should sing masses for them for all time; at the same time, it
was the prevailing notion in these times, and is now, among Romanists,
that celibacy, if not the happiest, is the holiest state of man.[4] If
there be any truth in this, even to the most limited extent, there is
something to be said for the system; but if the poor founders have been
cheated out of their masses, and may remain, for all the present
generation care, boiling and broiling in purgatory to the end of time,
it seems purely hypocritical to lean on a notion which has no better
foundation than the ruling opinions of founders. All the great and
imposing faith is gone which would support a heavy burden with the
supernatural sinews of religion, and the burden remains still to be
borne as it best may by human muscle alone. But it may be also said, the
fellowships of colleges are in themselves eleemosynary institutions, and
poverty was in most cases made a condition of the enjoyment of them; and
just as, under the new poor-law system, we imagine that a man, though he
has a right to existence, has no right to encumbrances which others must
support, so some would argue that the charity of the founders ought to
be thankfully accepted under all its conditions. But in the first place,
the question may be asked, whether apparent necessity, rather than
humanity, did not suggest the new poor-law system? In the next place,
whether that can strictly be called eleemosynary of which merit is made
a condition? We give to a beggar sometimes, although we know him to be
utterly worthless, merely because he is destitute; and even the utterly
worthless have a certain claim, in right of their Maker’s image; but we
give to a good man as a tribute to his virtue, and the application of
these foundations to proficiency in knowledge is to those who accept
them usually accounted peculiarly honourable, just as a national pension
is to the wounded soldier. Besides, it might be said that all bequests
are in a manner eleemosynary, because the legacy is not a payment for
labour in most cases, but a free gift from the testator to the legatee;
nor is its character materially altered by the fact of its having been
given under conditions. It appears to some that the college property is
as much real property to those who have the use of it, as any property
bequeathed subject to conditions; such as, for instance, the law of
entail in England. Indeed, a case has been mentioned, in which, for some
peculiar reason, a very rich man inherited his estates subject to this
very condition of celibacy. And eleemosynary institutions, strictly so
called, are commonly administered by trustees, not by those who reap the
benefits of them, as is the case with college fellowships. I think I
have now, as well as I can, stated the arguments, both _pro_ and _con_,
though perhaps it is easy for you to see to which side I lean. I confess
that I should regard the repeal of celibacy as a conservative change,
because it would give individuals a more enduring interest in their
University. I dread innovation, and especially from profane hands; at
the same time, I feel the necessity of such wholesome repairs in the
constitution of Alma Mater as shall secure for her, as far as possible,
a perpetuity of youth, or at least a green old age. How other changes,
such as the admission of Dissenters, can be brought about without
ignoring the entire history, associations, and character of the
University, I do not well see. If Dissenters are admitted at all, Roman
Catholics must be admitted with the rest; and they may perhaps lay claim
to a participation in the good things of the University, seeing that the
ancient foundations were undoubtedly made in their favour; and if this
participation be allowed, the rights of the foundation will be again
disturbed; and they may push their claim to the entire exclusion of all
other communities, for, unless there be a reason for disfranchising
them, they will ask why others should share advantages originally
intended for them alone. They are not like the Jews, a sect who keep to
themselves, and seek not to domineer over others; but universal dominion
is as much the policy of pontifical as of imperial Rome. Thus they will
be sure to take every advantage. Thus there is a _primâ facie_ danger in
mooting any integral question concerning the constitution of the
University, lest an opening should be unwarily made which would destroy
everything on which its existence depends; and this is, in my opinion,
the most plausible argument in favour of continuing the celibacy of
Fellows. But averse as all well-wishers to Oxford would be to any change
in the way of subtraction or diminution of her privileges, no such one
could look with coldness on any proposed additions to her area of
efficiency, and especially on extensions which seem suggested by her
natural aptitudes. As Cambridge seems to possess the soil in which
everything connected, however remotely, with science, is destined
especially to thrive, such as natural history in its various branches,
so does Oxford appear to be that University which should assume a
prominently artistic character. The foundations of a new museum have
been laid, which is to be built on a grand and imposing scale. Is its
chief attraction, when completed, to consist in a collection of dried
beetles and stuffed humming-birds, or even a complete skeleton of the
megatherium, if such a thing is to be had; or is an attempt to be made
to bring together, by every possible means, a collection of works of art
which would really do credit to the University? It must be remembered
that we have in England no national gallery worthy of the name; not that
the pictures composing the collection in Trafalgar Square are to be
despised—far from it; but the building which contains them shows them to
so little advantage, and is altogether so inadequate, that it presents
few temptations to large additions, either by purchase, gift, or
bequest. The very atmosphere of London is an argument against building a
new national gallery in the neighbourhood of any of the centres of
metropolitan life. Trees may be blackened, but flourish under the soot;
but the purity of the marble, and the freshness of the canvass, are
liable to be permanently discoloured by the constant action of an air
impregnated with smoke, in a manner far other than that in which they
receive the mere mellowness of age. This would be conclusive against a
central situation, and if such a building is to be placed in the suburb,
to arrive at it would cost a sacrifice of time and effort little short
of that necessary to arrive at a site at a moderate railroad distance
from the metropolis. As it is, Oxford is a great point of attraction to
all strangers, and no Englishman who had not seen it, could pretend to
an average knowledge of his own country. It is even placed within reach
of the working-classes of London by excursion-trains, who are thus led
in the pursuit of pure air to a place full of associations, which are in
every way likely to do them good. It seems to me that it is worth
considering whether the national gallery of England might not with
advantage be placed at Oxford, and combined in some way with the scheme
of the new museum. A school of art would probably spring up around it,
to which the University would naturally present many advantages, and to
which it might well extend peculiar privileges. The present is not the
worst time to consider this matter, when the existence of a great war
postpones the execution of all plans of subordinate importance. It is
quite certain that everything cannot be concentrated in London; and this
being the case, it is well to consider what other places are calculated,
in their own way, to become capital cities. Oxford has already received
some of the Muses as its inmates, and it is abundantly spacious to
receive them all. With respect to the natural scenery of its environs,
very much might be said in favour of its being suited as a residence for
an artist. The banks of its rivers are especially fertile in subjects
for the brush, and though its upland scenery is generally stamped with
that mediocrity which seems peculiar to the central counties of England,
there are spots here and there which, from their wildness or woodiness,
are well adapted for the sketcher. I am sorry to see many of the wild
places round Oxford either already enclosed, or in course of enclosure;
but what I saw with most regret was, that Bagley Wood had been
surrounded with a fence, and placed under a most rigorous _taboo_ to the
public in general. Now, there is some excuse for bringing land into
cultivation which may be made available for the wants of the community,
and can only become so if enclosed; but when the better preservation of
game is the only object, to exclude the public from a place where they
have been accustomed for years to expatiate and “recreate themselves,”
and an intelligent public, such as that of the University;—to exclude
them from one of the spots which Arnold mentioned as giving him especial
delight on his return to Oxford, and as being one of its chief
glories,—this, though perfectly justifiable according to law, is
scarcely consistent with that Aristotelian equity which ought to be
above law, especially in the neighbourhood of those brought up in his
precepts, and whose philanthropy might naturally be expected to be more
expansive than that of other men. It appears, however, that this
mischief has been done for some time; and the only compensation the
public gain is that a fine wide road has been made, which certainly
makes the walk round the wood complete—a poor consolation, indeed, to
those who, like myself, look upon walking along a road as one of the
dreariest duties imaginable, and have an irreclaimable vein of the
savage in their composition. Why, to me the sight of the stiff hedges
and mathematical drains of Bagley Wood would spoil half the pleasure of
shooting there; but, of course, those who have that privilege may say
that the grapes are sour. I may mention that on the walk which crosses
the railway, and cuts across into the Abingdon road, which leads through
Bagley Wood, a large reservoir has lately been made, which in one place
is crossed by a bridge, that seems as if it had been put there on
purpose to give the best near view of the city. The best distant views I
consider to be those about the Hinksey fields, near the spot where
Turner, with singular ignorance of the customs of the University,
painted gownsmen in their academicals among the haycocks; and at a place
near Elstree, called Stow Wood, well known as a fox-cover. But perhaps
the most characteristic view of all is that of the towers of Oxford,
seen reflected in the flooded surface of Christchurch meadow under a red
sky. This view is suggestive of Venice, especially if the boats are
magnified by a slight effort of the imagination into sea-going ships, or
softened into gondolas. I have mentioned the advantages which an artist
might derive from residence in Oxford, alike from the models that might
be placed there, the architectural beauties of the place, and the
natural scenery. To the second of these advantages would belong the
excellent studies of interiors that some of the rooms present. The rooms
of one of my friends, which were those at first intended for the Head of
the College, are quite a gem in the profuseness of decoration,
especially as applied to the ceiling. The halls of many of the colleges
are also remarkably fine, as presenting studies of interiors of peculiar
magnificence. Occasionally the internal decoration of the rooms
themselves, in which individual taste has perhaps taken a wider range
than in any other place I know, would assist a painter in his
composition. Pictures and engravings, profuse in quantity, if not always
good in quality, decorate the rooms of most of the junior members, and a
marked improvement has of late years taken place in this matter,
engravings from good masters, and really good original pictures by
modern artists, having taken the place of trumpery hunting-prints and
portraits of the nymphs of the ballet. Other rooms are hung round “with
pikes, and guns, and bows,” now obsolete, and seemingly made, at the
time of their construction, for this ulterior object of ornamenting a
room, which they fulfil so much better than any modern invention. But
perhaps the most extraordinary rooms of all are those of a friend of
mine, in one of the most picturesque colleges. The whole centre of his
room is taken up by a kind of immense Christmas tree, formed by his own
labour and ingenuity, on which is hung every imaginable article that
would be chosen in an old curiosity-shop from mere oddness in form or
nature. It is a rare collection of what the French call specimens of
“bêtises,” ironically, as I suppose, considering the extreme cleverness
which imagined them all. There are, if I rightly remember, gods from the
Sandwich Islands and fetishes from Africa, clubs from New Zealand and
bows from Tartary, stuffed birds, pipes of all kinds and sizes, skins of
snakes and crocodiles, skulls of men and animals, and everything, in
fact, that ever entered into a skull to devise. The walls are papered
with engravings, and engravings are hung from the ceiling because there
is no room for them on the walls. There is a collection of divers
plants, native or exotic, flourishing in stands or trailing over the
windows, in each of which is a kind of caravanserai for wild birds (not
aviary), for the amiable proprietor does not detain them there longer
than they wish to stay, but invites them in by abundant proffers of
their peculiar kinds of food; and as he sits or reclines by his fire
(for he has abundant facilities for assuming either position) by the
motionless silence which he purposely observes—has constant
opportunities of watching their flittings and hearing their twitterings,
and studying their little habits with the gusto of a naturalist. That
such an inventory, which entirely passes my memory to describe, should
have been amassed in a single room by any amount of time and trouble, is
a marvel to me, only to be explained by the perfect and lotos-eating
repose of a college life. Long may our friend enjoy his quaint and
instructive rooms! Travellers see strange things, but few can say that
they have seen stranger than those that are enshrined in the colleges of
Oxford.
You see that I have carefully abstained in what I have said from making
invidious comparisons between Oxford and the sister university; nor have
I spoken of the universities of the north, with which I am but little
acquainted, but which I should imagine to hold an intermediate place
between the English and the German system. On the whole, it appears to
me that the function of education, comprising theology, philosophy,
science, and belles lettres, is to impress upon the mind images of
Beauty and Truth, and to enable the mind which has received these
impressions to act in like manner through life. If education cannot make
a man’s actions truthful and beautiful, he remains to the end a savage,
or rather, I should say, the scion of a vulgar civilisation, even if he
knows all the poets by heart, or can discourse with the acumen of an
Erasmus or a Crichton. That Beauty and Truth are one and the same in
that perfect sunlight which our eyes cannot see, and from which all
lesser lights proceed, few will deny. But here on earth they may be
considered as in a measure apart, and as exciting, each for good in its
way, separate influences on the moral life of man. Men incline to one or
the other light according to their natural bent or the bias of their
education. It seems to me that if a distinction is to be made between
our universities, the tendency of Oxford studies is to look at Truth
through Beauty, while that of Cambridge studies is to look at Beauty
through Truth. It is therefore that I have laid so much stress on the
capabilities of Oxford as a school of Art. I confess that I am anxious
to gain a closer insight into the nature and life of your German
universities. Probably they are with us but imperfectly and unfairly
understood. If it be true that the Bursch preserves, under his outwardly
rough exterior, any remains of that antique chivalry of thought which is
so fast dying out in this country, he preserves a treasure which is of
inestimable value, and which ought to be secured to him at any price. At
the same time, I think you will allow that our system has certain
superiorities of its own, which deserve at least careful study, if not
active imitation. We, at least, are successful in affixing an
ineffaceable stamp to the character of the great majority, while you
seem only to succeed in permanently impressing the nature of a few, and
impressing only a limited part of that nature. May you live and lecture
many years, Herr Professor; and may your brimming Rhine flow on for
ever, free and German as of yore; and may the vine-blight spare the
clusters that yield that molten gold which, unlike the morbid production
of Australia and California, brings nothing but innocent joy to the soul
of your Fatherland. _Vale!_ and believe me,
Your loving friend,
TLEPOLEMUS.
THE ANCIENT COINS OF GREECE.[5]
Father Hardouin, a learned French Jesuit of the seventeenth century,
lived to the venerable age of eighty-three years, and died, as he had
lived, in the full persuasion that the only authentic monuments which we
possess of classical antiquity are comprised in coins, a few Greek and
Latin inscriptions, with the Georgics of Virgil, the Satires and
Epistles of Horace, and the writings of Pliny and Cicero. Out of these
materials he held that certain ingenious “falsarii,” in the thirteenth
century, whom he styles the “architects of annals,” compiled those
multifarious productions of poetry and prose which we have been
accustomed to regard as a most precious legacy bequeathed to us by
ancient Greece and Rome. This fact we mention to our readers, not with
any view to shake them in their old and orthodox convictions upon the
subject, but simply to show them what a vast amount of _matériel_ this
learned Father had discovered in the study of ancient numismatics. A
coin indubitably presents, within the smallest compass, the fullest view
of ancient times that we possess. Though silent, it is always waiting to
communicate knowledge; though small, it is always ready to teach great
things. “Inest sua gratia parvis,” is the motto of the Cabinet. It would
be difficult, indeed, to say what department of ancient lore—whether in
mythology, or economics, or politics, or chronology, or geography—may
not be elucidated and explained by the study of coins. A series of coins
are, in fact, a series of illustrative engravings, of contemporaneous
date with the literary works of Greece and Rome, and of the noblest
school of art. We may realise much of what we read by turning to designs
executed by artists who lived in those very countries, and at that very
period. The lordly oak is uprooted by the tempest, the lowly willow is
spared. While the temples of the gods and their concomitant myriads of
statues have been reduced to unintelligible fragments, those coins which
formed the medium of ordinary traffic—the tetrobolus, the soldier’s
daily pay—the drachma, that of the mariner—and the tetradrachmon, which,
by virtue of the archaic visage of Pallas, with her rigid smile, passed
current among merchants of every state and province,—these have remained
safe in their hiding-places under the soil, and may be found in nearly
the same condition in which the Greeks handled them more than two
thousand years ago.
Cities have been built with the express intent of perpetuating the glory
of a founder, and after all the founder’s intent is achieved, not by the
enduring testimony of edifices and streets of marble, but by that of its
coins. Thus the Emperor Augustus thought to immortalise the fame of his
victory over Antony and Cleopatra at Actium, by erecting a city on the
shores of the Ambracian Gulf, which city he called by the appropriate
name of Nicopolis. It was supplied with the usual complement of public
edifices; a gymnasium and a stadium were built in a sacred grove in the
suburb; another sanctuary stood on the sacred hill of Apollo, which
surmounted the city. It was admitted by the Emperor’s desire into the
Amphictyonic council, and was made a Roman colony. Sacred games were
instituted, accompanied by a sacrifice and a festival, equal in dignity
to the four great games of Greece. Coins of the city were struck: and in
commemoration of a favourable omen which had presented itself on the
morning of the day of battle, a group of bronze statues, representing an
ass and his driver,[6] were placed, among other dedications, in the
temple of Apollo Actius.
Such were the forward-looking expedients of the conqueror to perpetuate
his fame;—and what has been the result?
“Look, where the second Cæsar’s trophies rose,
Now,—like the hands that made them, withering.”[7]
A long succession of ruined edifices, in one part converted into a
sheep-pen. In fact, before four centuries had elapsed, a contemporaneous
author tells us that the town of Nicopolis had fallen into lamentable
decay. The palaces of the nobles were rent; the aqueducts crushed;
everything was smothered with dust and rubbish.—The bronze statues of
Eutyches and Nicon, after being removed first to Rome, and then to adorn
the Hippodrome at Constantinople, were at last melted down by the
barbarous Latins on their capture of the city in A.D. 1204. All is gone
of Nicopolis except the coins. The coins may be seen in the cabinet of
the numismatist, by time as yet uninjured; and we find upon one of them
the head of Augustus himself with the description of Κτίστης or founder,
and the appropriate figure of Victory holding a garland in her extended
right hand.
In connection with this city of Nicopolis, we may mention the fact that
one of the most important transactions in Colonel Leake s diplomatic
career—namely, a conference with the celebrated Albanian Vezír, Ali
Pasha, which led to the ratification of a peace with the Porte in
1808—took place on the sea-beach, near the ruins of the ancient aqueduct
of the city, on a stormy night in the winter of 1807. The crafty Vezír,
in order to throw dust into the eyes of the French consul, who was
watching the proceedings with much jealousy, had previously got up a
sort of scene in his presence,—receiving an English messenger, whom he
had himself instructed to ask for permission to purchase provisions,
with affected sternness,—haughtily refusing to grant his request,—and
declaring that the two nations were still at war;—although he had
already made with Colonel Leake a private arrangement to give him the
meeting that same evening on the beach. As the day declined, the weather
became so threatening that the captain of Colonel Leake’s ship was
afraid to anchor off the coast; and so dark was the night, that had not
Ali himself caused muskets to be discharged, the appointed place of
rendezvous on the beach could not have been discovered. At length the
boat neared the land, and the Vezír was found seated under a little
cliff attended by one or two of his suite, and a few guards. Dr Johnson
might seem to have anticipated this scene, in his tragedy of _Irene_,
where he describes an interview between the Greek Demetrius and the
Vezír Cali in these words:—
“He led me to the shore where Cali sate,
Pensive, and listening to the beating surge.
There, in soft hints and in ambiguous phrase,
With all the diffidence of long experience,
That oft had practised fraud, and oft detected,
The veteran courtier half revealed his project.”[8]
During the two hours the conference between Colonel Leake and the Vezír
lasted, the surf rose considerably; and it was not without a good
drenching from the rain and the sea, and some difficulty also in finding
the ship, which they could hardly have done without the aid of the
lightning, that the boat returned on board. The ship then stood away
from the coast.[9]
But to return to our subject. Every one who feels a thirst for
knowledge, must value coins as the medium of acquiring knowledge: every
one who has an eye for grace and beauty, must value them as presenting
unrivalled specimens of grace and beauty: every one who is susceptible
of the charms of fancy, must love to study the hidden meaning of those
imaginative devices, which sometimes, as Addison says, contain as much
poetry as a canto of Spenser. Let not the study be condemned as dry and
crabbed, for Petrarch was a numismatist. Let it not be condemned as
connected with only a bygone and obsolete school of art, for Raffaelle
and Rubens, Canova, Flaxman, Thorwaldsen, and Chantrey, delighted to
refresh their powers by it. Condemn it not as beneath the notice of the
philosopher, for Newton and Clarendon were among its votaries. Say not
that men of active pursuits can find no time for it, when you hear of
the collections of Wren, Mead, and Hunter.
There were numismatists among the ancient Romans. Admirers and
collectors, as they were, of the other productions of Greek art, we
should conclude that they were admirers and collectors of Greek coins
also, even if we had no direct evidence upon the subject. Suetonius,
however, expressly informs us that the Emperor Augustus was
accustomed—probably at the Saturnalia—to distribute among his guests a
variety of valuable and interesting gifts, and, among the rest, pieces
of money—not modern money, but of ancient date—not Roman, but foreign;
and some of it the coin of ancient kings. May we not recognise in this
description the beautiful coins of Greece and her colonies—the coins of
Syracuse and of Tarentum—of the Seleucidæ and other Asiatic kings—of the
kings of Macedonia, Epirus, and Thrace? A facetious friend of ours
professes to enrol Horace also in the list of numismatists; and we have
often smiled at the mock solemnity with which he argues his point. He
holds, for instance, that the passage,
“Nullus argento color est avaris
Abdito terris”—
refers, not as we have been taught to interpret it, to the unwrought
silver lying hidden as yet in the mine, but to those choice productions
of ancient art—Syracusan medallions, for instance, or the rarer
tetradrachms of the Seleucidæ—which blush unseen in their subterranean
lurking-places, and are kept out of our cabinets by that churlish miser
the earth. And he holds that the poet very consistently, in the same
ode, assigns the regal diadem, and the laurel crown of virtue, not to
the man who is simply master enough of himself not to covet his
neighbour’s money-bags,
“Quisquis ingentes oculo irretorto
Spectat acervos,”
but rather to the noble self-denial of that numismatist, who can pass
from the contemplation of the well-stored cabinet of his rival without
one sidelong glance of envy.
And in that well-known passage where Horace says, in a rather boastful
strain, that the fame of his lyric poetry will be more durable than
bronze, our friend observes that if the poet alluded to the statues of
bronze which met his eye at every turn in the city of Rome, it did not
follow that his lyric fame would be of any long duration; for of all
articles of bronze the statue was doomed to the earliest destruction,
and but few, in comparison with the number of marble statues, have come
down to our time. Many a graceful figure which Horace had seen and
admired in the palace of Mecænas, for instance, ere many centuries had
elapsed was melted down by greedy plunderers, and played its part a
second time in the brazen caldron of the housewife. But the medal of
bronze survives the wear and tear of centuries full a score. The medal
it is,
“Quod non imber edax, non Aquilo impotens
Possit diruere, aut innumerabilis
Annorum series, et fuga temporum.”
Our observation has been drawn by some modern writers to the supposed
existence of a sacred character or quality in the coin of the ancients.
It is the opinion of the most experienced numismatists that the Greek
coin was invested with a character of sanctity, arising from the head,
or figure, or symbol of some deity which it usually bore; that the ἐικών
or image upon it was really and truly an idol. We believe that such a
notion prevailed, to a certain extent, both among the Greeks and the
Romans. Not that we regard the worship of Juno Moneta as a case in
point. We think that the worship of Juno Moneta was the worship of a
deity who was supposed to have admonished the Romans that there are
other things in the world much better worth attending to than money, and
that money would not be wanting to them, so long as the weapons they
fought with were the arms of justice. At the same time, there was
indubitably a reverence paid to the coin, even down to the Roman times,
for the sake of its religious symbol or device. The people of Aspendus,
in Pamphylia, professed to hold in such reverence the effigy of the
Emperor Tiberius upon his coin, that they found a certain fellow-citizen
guilty of impiety, simply on the ground of his having administered a
little wholesome chastisement to a refractory slave who happened to have
at the time one such coin in his pocket.
It has been thought that the practice which prevailed among the Greeks,
of placing a piece of coin in the mouth of the corpse, originated in
this notion of its sanctity, inasmuch as it was supposed to insure the
protection of the deity, whoever it might be, to whom the coin was
attached by the symbol it bore. But we must confess that, for our own
part, we still cling to the old story of the fee required by the Stygian
ferryman. Hercules informs Bacchus, in the _Ranæ_ of Aristophanes, when
he is meditating a visit to the shades below, that he will arrive at a
wide unfathomable lake, and that an old man who attends for the purpose
will ferry him and his companion across it, on receiving the fee of two
oboli. Lucian, too, has a joke about Charon’s complaining that, in
consequence of the slackness of his trade, he cannot raise money enough
to supply the necessary repairs for his boat. The _mouth_ was so
commonly used as a purse by the Greek in his lifetime, that we can
scarcely wonder at this method being adopted for his carrying money into
the other world with him when dead. Colonel Leake mentions the discovery
of a coin of Motya in the mouth of a skeleton in the island of Ithaca,
in a tomb of the first century before Christ.
At the same time, although we believe that the myth of Charon was more
closely connected with this practice in the minds of the common people
than any other consideration, we doubt not that the sanctity of the coin
was also taken into account. We find that notion of sanctity prevailing,
not only among the Greeks and Romans, but among other nations, to a
considerable extent. The Mohammedan coin bears invariably a passage from
the Koran, or some other religious text, quite sufficient to insure its
reverential treatment by the faithful Mussulman; and we read in
Marsden’s _Numismata Orientalia_ of a certain class of very rare gold
coins of ancient date, to which the Hindoos avowedly paid religious
worship. Of this coin the Rajah of Tanjore was so fortunate as to
possess two specimens.
Whether the sect of gold-worshippers is yet extinct is a question which
we must leave moralists to settle among themselves. It has been remarked
by an accomplished scholar and excellent numismatist,[10] that “gold has
been worshipped in all ages without hypocrisy.” That there were many in
ancient times who held the coin in reverence for the sake of an
indwelling sanctity connected with the symbolic representations which it
bore, we fully believe; and that there may be some in modern times who
hold it in reverence,—ἀισχρου κέρδους χάριν,—we are by no means disposed
to deny.
There is no doubt that pieces of antique coin have been frequently
carried in the purse or in the pocket as a sort of charm or amulet; but
we question whether this notion of their supernatural power has any
connection with the supposed sanctity of the legends or symbols with
which they are impressed. We should ascribe it rather to the same
feeling which induces some old women, and young ones too, to carry a
crooked sixpence in their purse—the charm being supposed to reside, not
in any device or legend of the coin, but simply in its curvilinear
shape. So in the cases we have just alluded to, the charm lies in the
mystery of the coin’s unknown and ancient origin—“omne ignotum pro
magnifico est.” Stukeley tells us that, in the neighbourhood of one of
the ancient Roman sites which he visited in his “_Iter Curiosum_,” Roman
coins were known among the peasantry by the appellation of “swine
pennies,” from the fact of their being often turned up by that
indefatigable excavator in his search after something more succulent. To
the mighty Cæsars this was truly a degradation. But at Dorchester he
found the same coins known by the name, assigned with more semblance of
respect, of “Dorn pennies,” after some mythical king Dor, whom tradition
states to have once resided there. The rustic antiquary is wont to
labour under a sad confusion of ideas. The Roman he confounds
perpetually with the Roman Catholic. We remember ourselves—after
visiting a sort of bi-linguar monument near Hadleigh in Suffolk, which
marks the spot of the martyrdom of Dr Rowland Taylor, under Queen
Mary—to have asked a passer-by whether a certain antiquated mansion by
the road-side had ever been inhabited within his recollection; to which
we received the oracular reply that, to the best of our rustic friend’s
belief, it had never been inhabited since the Romans occupied it, in the
days of Dr Taylor!
This, however, is rather a digression. We learn from Trebellius Pollio
that, in the fourth century, the coins of Alexander the Great were
supposed to insure prosperity to any person who was prudent enough to
carry one of them constantly about his person; and we find this, and all
other such notions, strongly condemned by Chrysostom. An Italian
traveller tells us that, in 1599, the silver coins found in the fields
in a certain district in the island of Crete were called by the people
after the name of St Helen; and that the story went that this saint,
being in want of money, had made a number of coins of brass, endowing
them, at the same time, with such miraculous properties, that the brass,
in passing into the hands of another person, was at once changed into
silver; and, moreover, that any such silver coin being held fast in the
hand, will cure the falling-sickness. Mr Pashley, who visited Crete in
1830, found that the possession of an ancient coin is looked upon as a
sovereign charm against maladies of the eyes. In the year 1366, the
discovery made by some children at play of a number of ancient coins, at
Tourves, near Marseilles, threw the whole community of the district into
a state of alarm and consternation. The coins were some that had been
struck at Marseilles at that early period when, under the name of
Massalia, it ranked among the most thriving colonies of ancient Greece.
They bore on the one side a head of Apollo, and on the other a circle
divided into quadrants. In the chronicles of Provence, where this
discovery is recorded, they are described as bearing on the one side a
_Saracen’s head_, and on the other side a _cross_. This was interpreted
as bearing some portentous allusion to the Crusades. And the devout
writer intimates that, while one part of the community look upon it as
an omen of good, and the other part as an omen of evil, Heaven only
knows how it will turn out.
We believe that some persons, sedulously devoted to other branches of
the study of classical antiquity, are deterred from availing themselves
of the aid of coins, by a fear of being imposed upon by forgeries. This
is an easy, but an idle mode of putting aside that which we have not
courage to investigate. We shall add a few remarks upon the subject.
In the first place, we shall venture to ask these anti-numismatic
sceptics, whether they think we ought to cease to read and to admire the
dramas of Shakespeare, because it is questionable whether one or two of
those which pass under his name were really of his composition?—or,
whether we shall shut our eyes before all pictures which pass under the
names of the Old Masters, because spurious ones have been palmed off
upon the self-dubbed connoisseur?—or whether all autographs of
illustrious men are to be condemned as trash, because Ireland attempted
to impose upon the public with some that were not genuine?—or whether
all currency is to come to an end, because clever knaves have succeeded
in counterfeiting it? Everything, in short, which is valuable, offers,
in proportion to its value, a temptation to ingenious and unscrupulous
men to show their cleverness by imposing upon the world with an
imitation of it. The Holy Scripture itself has not escaped.
And after all, in regard to coins as well as in regard to the other
subjects which we have mentioned, although forgers may be clever,
detectors are clever also. The numismatic phalanx of investigators are
more than a match for the “falsarii.” The skill of Cavino, Gambello, and
Cellini, has been met with equal skill on the part of the numismatist.
The eye that has been accustomed to wander over a well-selected cabinet
acquires a power of ready discrimination,—a power difficult to teach by
theory, but not so difficult to gain by practice. Solitary instances may
occur of a solitary numismatist fondly persuading himself that some
clever forgery which he possesses is a genuine coin, but we would not
give much for his chance of beguiling others into the same belief.
Unwilling he may be to have the “_gratissimus error_” extracted from his
own mind, but he never will succeed in engrafting it upon others. Never
does the eye of man exert so much jealous vigilance as when it is
employed upon the coin of a rival numismatist claiming to be genuine
upon insufficient grounds, The House of Lords sitting upon a claim of
some peerage in _abeyance_ is nothing to it. We apprehend that scarcely
an instance is on record of a forged coin having enjoyed for any length
of time, unquestioned, the honours of a genuine one. Nor do we think
that there are many instances of a forger’s attempting to falsify
history. He generally aims at making his invention tally with historical
fact as closely as he can. And if his inventive powers are not at all
brought into exercise, but he simply produces a coin which is a
_fac-simile_ or reproduction of a genuine one, for purposes of study
that _fac-simile_ will be equally available with the genuine coin, and
no further harm is done than the abstraction of a few shillings more
than its value from the pocket of the unwitting purchaser.
At the same time we would not let the forger go unpunished. Though the
evil actually done be small, the intention is bad. We would have him
tried by a jury of numismatists. Or if the offence should have been
committed in a country where the power of punishing the offence resides
in one magistrate, we should say that that one magistrate ought to be a
numismatist. It is said that a distinguished archæologist who possessed
this power in virtue of his office as Her Majesty’s consul at Bagdad,
very recently exercised it by directing that a Jew “falsarius” should be
bastinadoed. We applaud his Excellency’s most righteous judgment. The
man who had counterfeited the famous sequins of Venice, and had
aggravated his crime by doing it badly,—
“Che male aggiusto ’l conio di Vinegia,”
is represented by Dante as worthy of an especial notice among those
sinners against laws divine and moral with whom he has peopled the
shades of his _Inferno_.
Seriously, however, we think that any clever work of art is worthy of
being preserved, and none the less for its having taken in some who set
themselves up as judges. Even in Pliny’s time a counterfeit denarius of
superior workmanship was sometimes thought cheap at the price of sundry
genuine denarii. The tasteful device of Cellini, or of some cunning
artist of Padua, must not be thrown to the dogs, merely because it was
produced with the intention of rivalling the work of ancient artists,
and of testing the acumen of the cognoscenti. Those figures of Cellini,
for instance, which some one brought and exhibited to the artist himself
as antiques, and respecting which the nobleman who was their proprietor
declared, when he saw a smile playing upon the conscious visage of
Cellini, that there had not lived a man for these thousand years who
could have wrought such;—would not those figures have been worth
preserving? And in like manner a coin which, by the excellence of its
workmanship, has raised a doubt whether it may not have been really of
ancient origin, ought by no means to be treated with contempt, even
though it proves to be modern.
The learned work of Colonel Leake, now before us, has supplied a
desideratum in the archæological literature of our country. It is the
first work of the kind upon Greek coins which has been published by an
Englishman, and those of our readers who are acquainted with his
character will agree that no Englishman could have been found to do it
so well as Colonel Leake. The vast amount of knowledge which he has been
laying up for more than half a century, in regard to the literature, the
mythology, the political and social history, and the geography of
ancient Greece, supplies an infinity of streams which flow over the
pages of his work in the form of notes. No longer shall we blush under
the well-grounded reproach that all the standard works upon Greek
coinage are written by foreigners. Already, indeed, we observe that
Professor L. Müller, in his _Numismatique d’Alexandre_, just published
at Copenhagen, has made ample use of Colonel Leake’s volume, which must
necessarily become a text-book in this branch of Greek archæology. For
the convenience of those who may consult it, not only is every ordinary
variety of index supplied to the coins themselves, but we observe that,
in an appendix, an index is added to the valuable information contained
in the notes. We observe, also, in the appendix, a very interesting and
learned dissertation upon the weights of Greek coins, in which Colonel
Leake traces the Attic didrachmon—which seems to have been a sort of
standard or unit in the monetary scales of Persia and Lydia, as well as
of the cities and colonies of Greece—to Phœnicia, and from Phœnicia to
Egypt. It would scarcely be in accordance with our usual practice to
enter into the more erudite part of this important subject, and we shall
therefore conclude our remarks by making one reference to the work, in
order to show how successful its author has been in availing himself of
the light which a coin may throw upon the more obscure portions of
ancient geography.
In Colonel Leake’s collection there is a coin, recently brought to
light, of a people called the Orthians, bearing the Thessalian type of a
horse issuing from a rocky cavern, in allusion to the story that Neptune
produced the horse originally by a stroke of his trident upon a
Thessalian rock. Now a city, called “Orthe,” is mentioned by Homer in
the second book of the Iliad.[11] With regard to the site of this city,
there was a difference of opinion among geographers even in Strabo’s
time; the majority seem to have identified it with the acropolis of a
more modern city, which at that time was known by the name of Phalanna.
But inasmuch as there are coins now extant of Phalanna, and of a date
contemporaneous with that of Colonel Leake’s coin of Orthe, it is
evident that Phalanna and Orthe were two separate and distinct places.
The appearance, therefore, of this previously unknown coin of Orthe
corrects an error which prevailed among geographers as far back as the
time of Strabo. It shows that Phalanna and Orthe were not the same
place. Out of the five cities mentioned by Homer in this passage, Strabo
had well ascertained the position of three; and Colonel Leake is now
enabled to fix the probable position of the fourth. In reference to such
facts as this, Colonel Leake observes in his preface that they have an
important bearing upon the great question as to the origin of the
Homeric poems.
“It seems impossible,” he says, “for any impartial reader of the
_Iliad_, who is not seeking for arguments in favour of a preconceived
theory; who visits the scene of the poem; and who, when making himself
acquainted with the _Dramatis Personæ_ in the second book, identifies
the sites of their cities, and thus finds the accuracy of Homer
confirmed by existing evidence,—to believe that no such city as Troy
ever existed, and that the Trojan war is a mere poetic invention;
this, too, in defiance of the traditions of all antiquity, and the
belief of intelligent historians, who lived more than two thousand
years nearer the event than ourselves. The _Iliad_ differs not from
any other poetical history or historical romance, unless it be in the
great length of time which appears to have elapsed between the events
and the poem; but which time was employed by an intelligent people in
improving and perfecting their language and poetry—in committing, by
the latter, past occurrences to memory; and the principal subjects of
which, therefore, could not have been any other than religious and
historical.”
The study of coins has been very much facilitated by recent improvements
in the art of electrotype, which now enables the collector to obtain
perfect copies of the rarer and more costly specimens, and to render
them as useful to art and literature as the originals themselves. For
purposes of reference we have a noble collection in the National Museum,
as well as another which, although of much more limited extent, is
nearer to ourselves, and therefore more accessible to students on this
side of the Tweed, at Glasgow. In the concluding paragraph of his
preface, Colonel Leake mentions these two collections in connection with
each other; and with that paragraph we shall also conclude our remarks
upon his valuable work.
“Augmented as our National Collection has been by the bequest of Mr
Payne Knight, by the purchase of the Bargon Collection, and by similar
acquisitions on the dispersion of the Devonshire, Thomas, and Pembroke
cabinets, it now rivals most of those on the Continent. With the
addition of the Hunterian at Glasgow, which the Trustees of the
British Museum have now, at the end of eighty or ninety years, once
more the opportunity of acquiring, with the assistance of Government,
it would be the richest in Europe.”
TICKLER AMONG THE THIEVES!
EXTRACT FROM AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY, WITH A PREFATORY NOTICE.
Poor Tickler! The thing happened in this wise.—But, by the way, before
coming to that, it may not be amiss to give the reader some idea who
Tickler is:—to wit, a very Skye of Skyes, with a mouth the roof whereof
is dark as midnight: his glittering eyes are black as jet; his ears
short, his legs none of the longest, but his body is: his tail is a
triumph, when fairly spread out; and as for the strength with which it
is attached to his body, you may hold him up by the aforesaid tail as
long as you can—with one hand. Then his hair is pepper-and-salt in hue,
long and curly, and—if I may so speak (though no one but myself and the
family will know exactly what I mean by it)—with a kind of silken
wiriness. And as for cleanliness, why, he is washed thoroughly every
Friday morning, and carefully combed afterwards; and the recurring day
of that jobation (to use a word of his own) he is as perfectly
acquainted with as the gentleman who performs the operation, and has
come, in process of time, even to like the thing: witness how he jumps
into the tub of warm water of his own accord, alike in winter and
summer, with a kind of alacrity. He makes no fuss about it, except that
sometimes, when the soapy water gets into his eyes, they wink at you in
silent suffering, which he unconsciously aggravates, instead of
alleviating, by putting up his wet paw to rub them! Through this
operation he has gone for now nearly twelve years, and a sweeter dog
there is not than Tickler. I may indeed almost say as much in respect of
his temper, which is excellent whenever he has everything his own way. I
have reflected a good deal on the dog’s idiosyncrasy, and think I now
know it well. ’Tis tinctured by a warm regard for himself, with respect
to the good things of this life; he says, reasonably enough, that if
there are good things to be had, he cannot think why he should not try
to get them, and like them, since he is formed for the purpose, if he
can get them; and as for huge or little hungry dogs in the street, of
the plebeian order, he does not dislike to see them enjoying themselves,
by way of giving a zest, as it were, to starvation,—if he have no fancy
himself for what they have routed out of the gutter. He says he thinks
they must often be sore driven; for he has sometimes seen a gaunt dog
crunching a dirty bone till he has actually almost eaten it! I am sure
Tickler is not without feeling; for one day he was sitting on a chair,
with his paws resting on the top of it, near the window, in a warm
dining-room, on a blighting day in February—the dust-laden wind without
seeming to cut both man and beast to the very bone: and at the foot of
our steps there had presumed to sit a dirty half-starved cur, shivering
miserably in every muscle, but uttering no sound—neither whine nor bark.
“He starved, and made no sign!”
Was it necessary for that lout of a fellow that passed, to kick the
unoffending brute (which did not belong to him) from our steps, it
showing, however, no resentment, but simply sitting and shivering a foot
or two farther on? Then Tickler (who is of patrician descent), whose
eyes had been for some time fixed wistfully upon his plebeian brother,
could hold his peace no longer, but gave a loud, fierce, little bark,
jumped down from his chair, and fawned whiningly on me; and when I took
two nice chicken-bones from his plate under the sofa, and called the
forlorn victim of man’s chance brutality into the hall, and gave him the
bones, which he was for a while too cold, and also timid, to eat for
fear of another kick,—Tickler stood by, not only without growl or bark,
though he knew the victuals were his, but very complacently wagging his
tail. He had pity for his poor brother, who seemed such a wretched
little outcast! And as for the poor voracious creature before him,
crouching guiltily as if he had done wrong in enjoying himself, we could
hardly find it in our hearts to put him out again into the street. If he
could have carried away sixpence to a tripe-shop, he should have had it
to get a complete feast for once in his life. I think the incident made
a deep impression on Tickler; for when he returned into the dining-room,
he went again to the window, and sate for some time looking through it
wistfully, and whining; and then jumped down, went under the sofa, and
lay there for upwards of two hours, sighing several times, and without
touching his victuals.
But, on proper occasions, Tickler could show a proper spirit. We have a
cat; and if there be any force in the new saying, the right cat in the
right place, Tickler was the dog to insist on its being observed; for if
ever poor Tom presumed to steal up-stairs out of the kitchen (which, it
must be owned, was his proper place), there was no end of uproar on the
part of Tickler; though Tom would sometimes turn round, on his way down
stairs, and, curving up his back, and showing his teeth, glare at his
little tyrant with an expression that was perfectly fiendish; and
tended, moreover, effectually to keep the right dog in the right place,
viz. the dining-room, to which he would on these occasions retreat in
good order, perhaps, not without needless delay. Thus Tickler had a
notion of fitness.
He was also of a very contemplative character, shown by his long
sittings on the chair nearest one of the windows—in fact, always the
lefthand side window. He would sit on the chair, with his fore-paws
resting on the top of it, and his mouth between them, calmly surveying
so much of human nature as passed before our windows. It would have been
strange, indeed, if he could have lived so long with us,—growing up with
our children, and growing old alas! with ourselves,—without having
endeared himself to us all in a hundred different ways, and becoming
thoroughly familiar with our ways and habits. Can any one persuade me
that the little fellow did not know 6.30 P.M. o’clock, at which hour I
pretty regularly returned to dinner, when he used always to take his
seat on his chair a quarter of an hour before that time, with his
jet-black nose and watchful eyes pointed in the direction in which I
always came; and when I approached the steps, he would leap down and
bark like mad, till the dining-room door was opened,—and then the front
door? And how he jumped up against my legs, when I entered, and
scampered wildly to and fro! I know he liked me, and “no mistake,” as
the Great Duke said. But besides this, I am morally certain that he
always knew the Sunday morning. Even as early as breakfast-time, he was
grave and restrained, looking as though he knew that there was something
or other in the wind; and when we severally went out, he made no
indecent and clamorous attempts to accompany any of us, but lay looking
solemnly at us, as we respectively took our departure—and as soon as we
had all gone, he invariably went up to his bed, which was under our own,
never stirring till we returned; and who shall tell what he was thinking
of on such occasions? Did he sleep, dream? That he does dream, no one
knows better than I; for he talks—I beg pardon, barks—in his sleep
almost every night, often waking me from my own dreams. But what has
particularly pleased me in Tickler is, that when I sit up after
everybody else is gone to bed, he has, for years, voluntarily remained
with me, however long I may remain. I wheel an easy-chair (my wife’s)
towards the fire as soon as we are left alone, he waiting for it quite
as a matter of course, and jumping into it, immediately turning round,
slowly and thoughtfully, three or four times, and then settling down
into what he at length, I presume, conceives to be a comfortable
position—his mouth resting on his paws, and his eyes fixed on me, till
he falls asleep, with one eye open. Bless his little soul (for
_something_ of that sort he assuredly has)—how well I recollect one
night, soon after Madame and the young ones had retired, taking out of
my pocket a hard-hearted and insulting letter received during the
day—laying it down after reading it, with a sigh, and then gazing
affectionately at my faithful Tickler, whose watchful eyes were fixed
all the while on me! Ay, my little friend! this would try _your_ temper;
but dogs are mercifully spared such anxieties, although you have your
own sensibilities! In a long series of years, I have sate up many hours
engaged on my great work, in seventeen folio volumes, entitled, _The
Essence of Everything from the Beginning_; and if it please Heaven to
spare my life to finish it, I undertake that it shall finish the reader.
Well, it has been such a comfort to me, night after night, every now and
then to watch Tickler watching me, as I cannot describe; and I do
believe he has contributed, whether consciously or unconsciously, to
divers fine ideas of mine—at least I think them fine, and tranquilly
await the judgment of the critics, or such of them as shall survive to
see my great work, and, above all, survive the reading of it. How snug
he has made me feel, with my huge easy-chair exactly opposite his
smaller one (which is my wife’s till she goes to bed), my table and one
or two chairs covered with books, the crimson curtain drawn close, and
the fire crackling briskly; many and many a time have I been inwardly
tickled by seeing and hear him dreaming, his breathing quickened, and
his bark short and eager, but suppressed. I am certain that he sometimes
has nightmare! How pleasantly we used thus to keep one another company
in the winter nights! When my work was over, often not till two and even
three o’clock in the morning, Tickler had notice thereof by the act of
shutting up my desk, till which moment he never stirred; but that done,
and before I had extinguished my candles, he descended from his chair in
a leisurely way, and yawned and stretched himself; I often holding him
up by his tail, just to let him feel that all was right, and that he was
really awake. Then we both crept up-stairs to bed, as quietly as
possible, lest we should disturb the sleeping folk. And if I should
happen to have to go down stairs again to look at a book, or bring up my
watch left on the table, Tickler seemed to feel it his duty to get out
of his snug bed, and come pattering softly down stairs at my heels.
He was almost as vivacious as ever, though twelve summers had passed
over him at the period of that serious adventure which is presently to
be laid before the admiring reader. But no amount of vitality has
sufficed to prevent Mr Tickler’s face getting white; so that, when he is
in his lively humours, he suggests to my mind the funny face of a
frolicsome little elderly man, or a dog who had plunged his nose into a
flour-bag. I took him with me last autumn to a place which I described,
but without specifying, as may be seen in the October and November
numbers of Maga,[12] and the trip did him a world of good. Do you
recollect something that befell me there? viz., that I lost him for a
while, to my grievous discomfiture and painful exertion—finding at last
that the sweet little rogue was not lost at all, but squatting
comfortably on our drawing-room sofa? How little I dreamed, however,
that this might be deemed the shadow cast before, of a coming event—a
loss of Tickler!! in right earnest? Only the very midnight before this
startling occurrence he was sitting in his old place, about twelve
o’clock, opposite to me and the table, whereon lay a portion of the
stupendous accumulation of MSS., through which I was patiently
distilling off _The Essence of Everything_. I got up from my seat and
yawned with a sense of weariness, when he did the very same thing, and
thereby attracted my attention to him. So I sate down beside him, and,
tickling his ears, said, “Ah, you little runaway! A pretty wild-goose
chase you led me at——!” on which he wagged his tail, and smiled: but no
one can tell a dog’s smile that has not studied his countenance as I
have Tickler’s. The next morning I lost him in right earnest—in dreary
earnest! He left our house at 10 A.M. on Monday the 4th December, in
company with a steady middle-aged servant, almost as much attached to
him as we were ourselves, and who had come down on an errand to me—but
having left with Tickler, he arrived at the place where I pass most of
my day-time, without his better half. “I thought,” said I, on my
arrival, and finding him sitting in the ante-room, “that you were to
bring Tickler with you, for a walk?”
“So I did, sir, but I’ve lost un, sir, I’m afraid,” he replied stolidly.
“Lost Tickler!” I echoed in consternation.
“Yes, sir. Missed un in a moment, like, and couldn’t vind un anywhere!”
“Why, when did you leave our house, sir?”
“Just as the clock struck ten.”
“And now it’s not quite half-past!! What upon earth were you about not
to stop and look for him?”—Suffice it to say, that he described himself
as having suddenly missed Tickler, who had been following as usual close
at his heels, when at only two streets’ distance from our house,—had
consumed five minutes in looking for un—and then came quietly down
without him, to me! He said he thought the dog might have returned home
“of his-self! as he had done at ——!” I was disposed for a while to
entertain a very particular view of this strange transaction, but in the
mean time sternly despatched the delinquent back, at top speed, to
acquaint our family with the loss of Tickler; and also sent a trusty
messenger after him, in the forlorn hope that Tickler _might_ have
returned home “of his-self.” Nothing of the kind; he was gone, poor
little fellow, in earnest: and as he wore his collar, with my name and
address in full engraved thereon, it was plain that unless he quickly
made his appearance, he must have experienced the professional
attentions of a very vigilant class of London practitioners. Every
member of my family spent the rest of the day in scouring the
neighbourhood, especially the more dubious (_i. e._, discreditable or
suspicious) portions—but in vain. Our baker, whom Tickler used to visit
on business every day, saw him walking past the shopwindow, alone, and
at a leisurely pace, within about ten minutes of the time of my
servant’s missing him—but supposed, as a matter of course, that he was
in attendance upon some member of the family! Inquiries were made of all
our tradespeople—only to be answered by exclamations—“What! Tickler
gone? poor little thing, we loved him like a child!” “He can’t be far
away—you’ll be sure to see him by nighttime, in particular as he had his
collar with his master’s name;” “and, ma’am,” added one more sagacious
than the rest, in a mysterious whisper—“if you don’t—why, in course!
he’s been stole!” “He was the hamiablest of dogs—so petecler well bred!”
“Oh, you see, Miss! he’ll be sure to come back!” Then we betook
ourselves to the Police Station; where the courteous inspector, having
listened to us, said, with a quiet oracular air, “He’s not far away;
he’s taken of course for the reward, and as he had his collar on, they
know where to find you when they choose. Is he an old or young dog?”
“He’s in his thirteenth year!” “Oh, then, you’ll have him back very
soon; the dog-stealers are knowing fellows, and he won’t do. But take my
advice—advertise him in to-morrow’s _Times_, and offer only one pound
reward, and be sure to add, no further reward will be offered.” This we
did; and the next morning appeared the following public indication of
our calamity, drawn up by my own masterly pen, and all out of my own
head: “Dog Lost. One Sovereign Reward. On Monday the 4th inst., between
—— and ——, a pepper-and-salt Skye terrier, answering to the name of
Tickler. Collar round his neck with,” &c. “inscribed on it. To be
brought to that address. No further reward will be offered.” Having
dropped this our little line into the huge water of the _Times_
advertisement sheet, we awaited a nibble with such patience as we could
command. But we got no nibble at all, and very dull our house seemed,
without our merry and sagacious little Skye friend. Why, there was not a
room in the house, or a chair or sofa in it, that did not remind us of
him; and as for my wife’s little easy-chair opposite mine, when she had
gone to bed, and was no longer succeeded by Tickler, I wheeled it into
the corner of the room, and did not write at my _Essence_ with anything
like my former satisfaction or spirit. The advertisement in the _Times_
had explained our disaster to all our friends; and no one called on us
that did not ask, “Well, any news of Tickler?” or say, “Poor little
fellow, how you must miss him!” At length an exceedingly knowing person
came, and said, “Have you been to ——’s? You can’t do anything without
him; he knows all the respectable dog-stealers in London, and enjoys
their confidence.” So my wife and daughter went to him the next day; and
following his advice (given after a minutely accurate description of
Tickler), I inserted in the particular newspaper which he said was
likely to be read by the parties concerned, the following advertisement,
which no false modesty shall prevent my owning to be, in my opinion, a
choice morsel of expressive pithiness: “TICKLER.—One sovereign reward,
_and no more_, will be paid for the recovery of a pepper-and-salt Skye
Terrier, answers to the above name, and lost near ——, on Monday the 4th
instant. Had on a collar, with the words,” &c. &c. “In its 13th year,
and many teeth gone. To be brought to the above address.” It grieved me
thus to publish to the world poor Tickler’s age and infirmities; but
needs must, when a certain Jehu drives:—and the way in which I
vindicated my advertisement against the reclamations of all Tickler’s
friends was the following: If I show the thieves that I am quite wide
awake to the poor little dog’s age and infirmities, it may certainly be
no news to those gentlemen, so experienced in those matters, but will,
peradventure, add force to the three pregnant words in italics in the
above advertisement, “_and no more_.” The more candid of my opponents
said that there was something in this; but they held that I had,
nevertheless, greatly hurt Tickler’s feelings, if ever he came to hear
of it. The more long-headed of my friends went so far as to say,
besides, that it was, after all, a toss-up whether I ever got him again!
Now comes a remarkable occurrence, and the reader may depend upon its
being told him exactly as it occurred, viz., that on my returning to
dinner, one day, a strange Skye terrier presented himself to me, on
entering our dining-room. He had followed home two young ladies in the
neighbourhood, who took him to be our dog, of the loss of whom they had
heard. So they brought him to us; and on our saying that it was not
Tickler, they left, followed by the stranger, but refused to allow him
to enter their house. Now it was a blighty December afternoon, and this
poor _Waif and Stray_ sate outside their door shivering in the cold: so
our servants got leave to bring the poor thing into our house, to be
taken care of as a sort of _locum-tenens_ of poor Tickler. The Stranger
behaved so well, and had so many nice little tricks, that we all were
satisfied he was a gentleman’s or lady’s dog, and we began, in spite of
ourselves, to like him very fast: for his face reminded us of Tickler a
good deal; but on a more narrow investigation of Stranger’s pretensions
to our affections, it was discovered that he was not thorough-bred, as
testified by the mottled roof of his mouth; and also in respect of his
configuration, he seemed not like a canine homogeneity, but as it were
two dogs joined together—or rather a Skye terrier’s head stuck on a
rolled-up door-mat. Still we liked him, and called him Snap, to which
distinguished name he soon learned to answer, to our considerable
satisfaction, especially in respect of the younger folk. Still, he was
by no means Tickler; and besides this, suppose any of us took him out
for a walk, and the owner should claim his or her own in a disagreeable
kind of way? and threaten to do by us as we should have been quite ready
to do by those whom we believed to have been unconscientiously possessed
of Tickler? These were delicate matters; and as they impinged on the
dividing line between civil and criminal responsibility, what more
natural or praiseworthy than that we should have recourse to our old
friends at the Police Station? Those to whom we appealed, however, in
this our little quandary, seemed qualified to be Under-Secretaries of
State, in respect of a prodigious apparent sense of responsibility, and
a certain flatulent incertitude. They humm’d and ha’d, and finally said
that we had better do as we thought best, for that we must be too
respectable to be supposed to be dog-stealers; however, they said they
would send some one to us in the evening “to give us directions.” But by
that time the following state of things had come to pass.
“O, papa!” said one of my children, on my knocking at the door in the
evening, “news of Tickler!” “News of Tickler? Pho!” I exclaimed, half
hopefully, however. “But there really is!—A man came here at six
o’clock, and says that he really thinks he has heard of a dog that must
be ours!”
“Did he, indeed? Why?”
“He says that, from what people have told him, the dog he found some
time ago wandering about the suburbs, must most likely be ours! But
he’ll call again at half-past seven o’clock.” So, in short, and in due
time, we sate down to dinner; I indulging in sundry surmises concerning
the probability of our mysterious friend paying us his promised visit.
And while we sate at table, the following titillating story was told us,
as touching the subject of dogs, then uppermost in our thoughts.
A certain celebrated painter of animals as they never were painted
before, and may never be painted again, had painted the portrait of a
splendid Newfoundland dog, but he strayed or was stolen as he was
returning from his last sitting. His owner was inconsolable; but,
knowing the distinguished artist’s large and intimate acquaintance with
persons who confidentially concern themselves with other people’s dogs,
repaired to him for advice, and authorised him of the magnificent
palette to offer ten pounds reward for the recovery of the missing
favourite. The artist soon put himself into communication with one of
his private friends, who asked him what kind of dog it was? “Why,” says
the artist, “look here; this is his picture: should you know him again?”
The fellow gazed at the vividly faithful representation for a minute or
two intently, and then said, “I thinks I’se got him now; I shall know
him if I see him. But what’s the tip?” “Ten pounds.” “Werry ansome,
indeed, and worth a little trouble; but such a prime hanimal as that
’ere will cost a deal of trouble to get hold on, such uncommon care is
taked on ’em by them as has got ’em. Howse’er, I’ll do my best;” and
again he glued his eyes on the pictured dog, and then withdrew. A month
elapsed without tidings of the missing Ten Pounder; but at length, in
the dusk of the evening, the great artist was summoned into his
painting-room, and there found his confidential agent. “Well, Bill,”
quoth the former, “any news about the dog? I have given it up.” “O no,
don’t, sir,” was the reply, with a wink. “I do _rally_ b’lieve I’ve got
him at last. But is the tip all safe still, and no mistake?” “Ay—have it
anyway you like.” “It an’t a check” asked his astute companion. “No—a
ten-pound note, two fives, or sovereigns.” “Well—and no questions an’t
to be asked? lest I should get any friends into trouble?” “Only you
bring the dog, my man, and you take the money, and all’s done for ever.
Honour!” “Well, sir, where that word’s said by a gent, there’s an end of
everything; so the dog will be here in half-an-hour’s time, and a pretty
business I’ve had to find him.” Half-an-hour’s lapse saw this little
stroke of business complete, and dog and cash exchanged. “Well now, my
man,” said the artist, “and it’s all over, though I said I wouldn’t ask
you a question, I can’t help it, merely out of curiosity. I give you my
honour that I have no other motive, and will take no steps at all, in
consequence of what you may tell me. Did I ever deceive you?” “No, sir,
you never did.” “Well—do you know who stole him?” “Quite sure you won’t
do nothing if I tell you?” “Honour—honour!” “Well, sir, I was the chap
as prigg’d him.” “_You!_”—echoed the artist with expanded eyes, uplifted
hands, and a great start. “Yes, me, sir. I took’d the dog, and no
mistake.” “Whew!—Well—but now I’m more curious still to know why you
chose to be so long out of your money—your ten pounds? Why not have
brought him back in a few days and got your £10 at once?” “’Cos, sir,
you see, I sold un to another party for seven pounds, who took such a
liking to the creature, that I hadn’t the heart to steal un from him,
till he’d had a week or two’s comfort out on him; but as soon as he had,
I know’d how to prig the dog. I, as could do it once, could do it
twice—and now you’ve got what you want; but it sartinly sounds coorious,
don’t it?” “Why you consummate scamp,” quoth the artist, almost
splitting with laughter—“you’ve got seventeen pounds out of the dog!!”
“Yes, sir, that’s the figure, exact,” replied the stolid Man of Dogs.
“Well, but, you impudent vagabond—if you could prig a dog, as you say,
once, and twice, you may _thrice_——” “Well, sir, so I may—but this here
dog will be looked arter unkimmin close _now_, and I shan’t run no
risk.” “Well, honour among thieves—eh?” “Quite correct, sir,” quoth
κυνοκλεπτης.
We were laughing at this story, as we sate at dinner, when a single
knock came to the front door—and in a trice our servant, the unhappy
cause of all our sorrows, whisked out of the room, opened the Hall door,
and after a hasty colloquy returned. “He’s come, sir!—the man about
Tickler, sir,” said he, re-entering the room, excitedly. In a trice I
was in the Hall, followed by my two sons and the servant. My visitor
stood, his cap squared in his hands, in the angle formed by the side of
the Hall and the door.
“Well, my man, do you really know anything about my dog?”
“Why, sir,” he answered, very respectfully, “I think I do; it must be
the same dog.”
“What sort of a dog is it?”
“A Hile of Skye terrier, sir—pepper-and-salt, and rather white about the
mouth, and a many teeth gone.”
“Well; but does he answer to the name of Tickler?”
“Can’t say, sir, really. Haven’t seen him myself, sir; only my friend as
found him wandering about, a good way off.”
“What! haven’t you seen the advertisement in which he’s called Tickler?”
Here was a moment’s embarrassing pause.
“No, sir, can’t say I have; but maybe my friend has.”
“Why, do you mean to say that you’ve never heard him called Tickler?”
“I never see’d him, sir; and never heard the name Tickler.”
“What! not in the advertisement?” At this moment a heavy single knock at
the door, against which I was leaning, made me start. I opened it, and a
policeman stood there. “Is the inspector come, sir?” he asked. My friend
in the corner was instantly aghast, and seemed in the act of squeezing
himself into the wall (to avoid being seen by the grizzly visitor), his
eyes fixed on me with an expression I shall not soon forget.
“No; and you may tell him he need not come now. I am much obliged to you
both; but I now don’t want to part with the dog.” The policeman bowed,
descended the steps, and I shut the door. This visit had been paid us in
consequence of our application to the station-house for advice how to
dispose of Snap. My visitor had grown considerably whiter than so much
as was visible of his shirt!
“Don’t be under any apprehension, my man,” said I, with a smile; “it is
certainly one of the oddest coincidences I ever saw; but I pledge my
word to you that it is purely accidental, and in no way relates to you
or my own dog.”
“O no,” he exclaimed, with yet a scared and distrustful look; “in coorse
you knew it couldn’t consarn me anyhow, ’cause I an’t done nothing
wrong, I know; but it sartinly looked werry peticlar funny, didn’t it
now, sir?” wiping his forehead; “but when a gent gives his word, I
believe him, sir.”
“Well, but about _my_ dog; you’ve never seen him?”
“Never set these blessed eyes on him yet, sir.”
“Come, come, my man,” I said, good-naturedly, “I have acted honourably
by you, and do you so with me. I pledge my word that no harm shall come
to you through me. Now tell me—you _have_ seen Tickler!” I added, so
suddenly that I took him off his guard.
“Well, sir, you speak so werry ansome—I _have_ seen the dog, and I an’t
no manner of doubt it’s your’n.”
“His collar on.”
“Oh, he han’t got any collar on _now_—least wise, when I picked him up.”
“Why, I thought you told me your friend picked him up?”
“Did I indeed? Well pra’ps he did—but there an’t no collar.”
“Well, as to the Reward—you saw the advertisement offered only a
sovereign?”
“O, yes sir, that’s quite correct—” forgetting that he had _not_ seen
it—“but I expect to be paid for my two walks up here to-night, sir,
beside.”
“And what do you expect? I’ll give you half-a-crown.”
“O, no, _that_ won’t do,” he interrupted me peremptorily—“I always has a
five-shilling tip.”
“Always!!”
“Yes, sir—quite regular—ahem!” he suddenly stopped, as though he had
caught a glimmering of having committed himself.
“Let the dog die then, sir,” I said sternly, opening the door for him.
“Very well, poor thing!—if it’s your’n, which I’m sartin it is.”
“Well, I suppose I must pay it you!—That will be £1, 5s.?”
“Quite correct sir—and if you’ll let your man come with me, I’ll give
him the dog, after he’s given me the money.”
“But the dog must be present before he gives you the money.”
“O, yes, sir—all right—but all’s quite _honour_ in such things as
these.”
“How soon will the dog be here?”
“In less than an hour, sir.” With this I directed all three—my two sons
and the servant, to put on their greatcoats, and accompany him; first
whispering a hint to leave watches behind. After they had been gone five
minutes, the servant returned, saying that the man had advised him not
to go, as _three_ beside himself looked so suspicious-like, and might
prevent us getting the dog. My two sons accompanied their honourable
companion till he had got them into Drury Lane! And there he dodged them
about, up and down, and in and out of court after court, and alley after
alley, till they had reached a very little dirty public-house, into the
parlour of which their guide conducted his two companions. Such a
parlour! about six feet square, and reeking with odours of gin and
tobacco smoke. Another gentleman was sitting there, who had just been
discharged out of prison, he said—“And it wasn’t unlikely he might be in
again soon, for something or other—for he _must_ live!” He was giving a
very lively account of prison life, when my son’s companion
returned—after a ten minutes’ absence—with—Tickler! the true identical
dear old Tickler, and no mistake whatever about it! But—instead of
rushing up to his former patrons and playfellows, he came into the room
timidly, and, strange to say, seemed disposed to make the acquaintance
of two cats who were in the room, and who seemed quite at home with a
dog. When called by his name, he hardly noticed it, and seemed to have
forgotten my sons, or to feel no particular interest in them! The money
having been given, my sons took poor Tickler in their arms for safety’s
sake, quitted the vilest neighbourhood they had ever been in, and
carried him nearly all the way home—which he reached in half-an-hour’s
time. We were on the look-out at the windows for the poor little
fellow—and the moment we saw him, I rushed to the door and opened it,
just as Tickler came up the steps; but there stood Snap also—having run
up suddenly from the kitchen, whither he had been relegated by my
orders, to prevent his encountering Tickler—who, however, immediately
spoke to his _locum-tenens_ in a quiet friendly way. Then the latter was
carried down bodily into the kitchen, and Tickler whisked into his old
quarters in the dining-room. We resolved to take matters very quietly,
having been told that dogs had been known to die of joyful excitement
under such circumstances. So we all took our seats, eyeing his
movements. He ran rapidly to and fro about the room—under the sofa, the
tables, the sideboard, as if his scent were gradually reviving old
recollections and associations. Then he began to moan, or whine,
piteously, but in a very low tone; and finding a little bone which had
been left by Snap, he seized on it ravenously. On this we ordered him up
a little meat; and, in the mean time, he stood up against each of our
chairs, moaning while he looked into our faces, and trembling. “Tickler!
Tickler! dear old Tickler, how are you?” quoth I, gently; on which he
trembled, looked sorrowfully in my face, and wagged his tail slowly. To
aid him in recollecting himself, I resorted to one of my old habits with
him—viz. lifting him up gently by his fore-paws; but I almost let him
fall again, with concern; for the poor little fellow seemed not half his
former weight! And when I felt his backbone, how sharp and bare it was!
“Poor Tickler! what have they been doing with you?” said I. His whine
told of starvation. He seemed indeed perfectly blighted: and when we all
went up to bed, I following after a little interval with Tickler, it
gave me pain to observe the want of his old elasticity in going
up-stairs. He was evidently thin and weak. The next day I was anxious to
hear his adventures; but I knew that he felt embarrassed if required to
speak in the presence of any one beside myself: so I waited till I had a
favourable opportunity, which occurred on the next night but one. About
an hour after all except myself had ascended to their respective
dormitories, and when I was busy distilling off _The Essence of
Everything_, Tickler, who had been lying curled round himself, so to
speak, in his usual fashion, suddenly rose, shook himself, and in a
sitting posture, thus addressed me.
—But his adventures (for I had asked him to tell them to me) were far
too interesting and affecting for me to give them to the world at large,
before affording him an opportunity of hearing me read them to him for
his correction. That I shall do, and then let the reader form his own
judgment—next month:—but I feel it a point of honour to impress upon the
reader that he is to make no attempt to identify persons or localities!
[_To be concluded in our next._]
THE DRAMA.
Sir Andrew Agnew may have been a very good man, but he never said more
than one good thing—if even that is original. In one of his letters he
characterises the wit of the three kingdoms as follows: The Scotch play
upon the feelings, the Irish play upon ideas, the English play upon
words. The distribution is clever and very plausible, if not altogether
true. It is correct enough, we believe, as far as regards the Scotch.
There is little wit, but a great deal of humour in their fun; and
wherever there is wit, almost always it manifests itself in union with
strong feeling of some kind—is at one time sarcastic, at another time
profane. A Scotchman seldom indulges in pure wit—takes no especial
interest in a purely intellectual, or a purely auricular surprise. His
logical habits unfit him for that confusion of ideas which Sir Andrew
attributes to the Irish, and disincline him for that confusion of words
which he attributes to the English jesters. It is with reference to
these last that his division is most at fault, and it is also at fault
with regard to the Irish. An immense number of Hibernian witticisms, it
is true, are to be classed with those Yankee and negro sayings, of which
the point depends on a singular confusion of ideas, and of which the
following may be taken as typical examples: “Pompey and Cæsar very much
like, ’specially Pompey;”—“Uncle was so tall that he had to mount a
ladder every day to put on his hat.” A practical instance of the same
kind is the story of the Irishman who cut a great hole in his door for
the sow to pass through, and a little one beside it for the
sucking-pigs. But this very confusion of ideas is so apt to express
itself in a contradiction of terms, that the wit for which Paddy is
celebrated all over the world is known as an Irish bull; and an Irish
bull is as much a verbal play as an English pun. The difference between
them may be stated thus loosely: In a bull, the double meanings are
incompatible and contradictory; in a pun, they blend together, and do
not interfere with each other, except in the way of curious comparison
or odd contrast. Now, although perhaps no people have such an inveterate
habit of punning and quibbling as the English, it is not true that this
is the great characteristic of their wit. With all the reputation which
they have on the Continent for melancholy, with all that tone of sadness
which pervades their poetry, no people have ever displayed such a hearty
enjoyment of fun as the English, and no other comedy has such a wide
range as theirs. It contains every variety of humour and every variety
of wit. And however much we may despise puns, they have often been used
as the expression of profoundest feeling by men of the largest grasp.
Shakespeare is an example; his range of comicality is greater than that
of any other writer in the language, and he puts puns into the mouths of
his heroes and heroines, even in the moment of maddest passion. Thomas
Fuller is another instance of a man of deep sympathies and earnest
views, who gave expression to these sentiments in what we are accustomed
to regard as the most trivial and equivocal of forms.
But while Sir Andrew Agnew’s definition of English wit is extremely
partial, it has certainly at this season of the year the appearance of
conveying the whole truth. The puns are as thick in a Christmas
pantomime as plums in a Christmas pudding. They come out at this time of
the year as naturally as berries on the holly; and whoever means to
enjoy the season must accept it all, quips and quibbles, puns and buns,
the light fantastic toe at night, and the headache next morning. Of what
avail is it to shake one’s head over the mince-pies, to tell that young
savage, Mr Tommy, that he has eaten too many raisins, to look dismal
over another glass of champagne? It is all right; digestion will come in
its own good time; and what is the use of Christmas if one cannot once
in a year dismiss all thoughts of the doctor and his senna? What is the
use of Christmas, too, if theatrical managers cannot for once in a year
snap their fingers at the critic and his nauseous doses? On boxing-night
comes the pantomime, all paint and spangles, scenery and machinery,
fooling and pulling about; it is the reign of good-humour; clown grins
from ear to ear; pantaloon takes all the buffets he gets with the
greatest pleasure; while the manager is as obstreperous as the one, and
the critics are as delighted with his hard hits as the other. The fact
is, and there is no denying it, that the pantomime, and all that it
includes of burlesque and extravaganza, is at present the great glory of
the British drama. The drama has all gone to pot (the paint-pot), and
out of it has arisen rollicking pantomime, even as out of the caldron of
Medea, what went in an old ram came out a young lamb. That this young
lamb is the pride of the British stage at the present time, will be
evident to any one who enters a theatre. No chance of getting a seat,
even in the larger houses, if you happen to be half-an-hour late. And
not only are the houses crammed, the audience is different from the
usual audiences. There is a prim old lady, with a pursed-up mouth, in
the boxes, whose presence is accounted for by the fact that there are
two fairies at her side, who are as much in love with Clown as ever
Titania was with Bottom. Everybody who looks at the stalls knows that
the bald-headed old gentleman with the capacious waistcoat is “the
father of a family,” even were there no long lines of children on either
side of him. And will it be believed that through the curtain of the
private box there is peering, with his ivory opera-glass to his eyes,
that long-faced Grimshaw, who never enters a theatre—never—and who never
perpetrated a joke but once, when he quite seriously compared the pit to
the pit of Acheron, and wondered that when people saw written up, “The
way to the pit,” they did not take fright, and vow never again to enter
a playhouse? Everybody goes to the pantomime. It is the only successful
effort of the British drama. Tragedy has become so very tragic that she
has cut her own throat; comedy has been so very comical that she has
choked herself with laughing; and burlesque comes up like a demon
through the trap to supply the place of the one, pantomime comes
tumbling in head-over-heels to supply the place of the other. Every one
has his day: Shakespeare has gone out; Planché has come in. Let no one
accuse us of treason to “the divine William,” as Dumas calls him, when
we say that Planché is a kind of Shakespeare. He is precisely such a
Shakespeare as entered into Dr Johnson’s imagination when he said, “A
quibble was to him the fatal Cleopatra for which he lost the world, and
was content to lose it.”
It must be confessed that although most of Mr Planché’s extravaganzas
are published, there is not one of them that is readable. They are meant
to be acted, not read. Effervescing from the mouth of the performers,
and eked out with look and gesture, scenic effect and musical rubadub,
the galleries make a vociferous noise, and the boxes make a magnificent
show of teeth. Now it is some pun which has been lying in wait from the
beginning of the scene, now some extraordinary rhyme which seemed as
difficult to match as Cinderella’s glass slipper, now an allusion to the
events of the day, now the sudden falling into slang in the midst of
some high-flown language.
“But Cupid is a downy cove
Wot it takes a deal to hinder;
For if you shuts him out o’ the door,
Vy, he’ll valk in at the vinder.”
Nobody cares to read such verse, but, sung by Robson, it brings down the
House. As a specimen of the wit, it is difficult to make a selection
worthy of Planché from his latest pieces at the Olympic; but take the
following from the _Prince of Happy Land_, which he has repeated in a
weaker form in the _Yellow Dwarf_. The princess is to choose a husband
out of ten suitors.
“_Duchess._ ——You’d not refuse
Ten sovereigns in succession?
_Princess._ Yes, indeed,
If they’re bad sovereigns, madam.
_Duchess._ Bad ones!—Read,
Grand duke, the list of their illustrious names,
Sent in with all their portraits—
_Duke._ In such frames!—
It is impossible to find ten finer!
First, here’s the Emperor of Chelsea China.
_Princess._ A China husband!
_Floretta._ Off with him, I’d break.
_Duke._ The King of Chess.
_Princess._ A king one cannot take.
_Duke._ The Doge of Tennis.
_Floretta._ A sly doge, no doubt.
_Princess._ And much too prone to racket, sir, about.
_Duke._ The Dey of All-jeers.
_Princess._ Hey-day! that’s all joke.
_Duke._ The Sultan Meer-schaum.
_Princess._ Meer-shams end in smoke.
_Duke._ The Rajah Ram Jam Juggle Jib a hoy.
_Princess._ The name’s enough—
_Floretta._ I wish his lady joy.
_Duke._ Ali Kampain, the Shah of—
_Princess._ Pshaw! pooh! pooh!
_Duke._ The Khan of Creamo Tartar.
_Princess._ Cannot do.
_Duke._ The Prince of Orange Marmalade.
_Princess._ Too sweet.
_Duke._ The Duke of Mangel Wurzel.
_Princess._ Must be Beet.”
What a riot of words! what an amount of subtlety is here expended to no
purpose in stultifying the dictionary, and giving to words every
possible meaning but the right one. In this noble art, however, Mr
Planché is excelled by some of his disciples, and in the parody of
_Shylock_—the _Jerusalem Harty-Joke_—written by Mr Talfourd for Robson,
the system of punning has been carried to the limit of endurance. Let
any one read the following address of Gratiano to Nerissa, and attempt
if he can to make any meaning out of the puns, or see the fun of
continually violating the rules of the language merely to help a failing
rhyme.
“The pangs of Cupid I the first time knows-em;
His bows and arrows pierced my harrowed bo-sum.
Let’s off to-night—there’s no chance of diskivery.
With me, dear, _put up_, and don’t _stand at livery_.
Blush not that I’m a flunky, I implores;
Let not my plushes be the cause of yours.
_You_ to the eyes—but, though more difficulter,
_I_ to the knees plush as the _knee plush ultra_.”
Take another specimen, and then, as Mr Talfourd says, we shall bid
“a-Jew” to _Shylock_. Remember, too, that we are quoting the best bits.
“_Shylock._ Jessica! my own flesh and blood revolted?
I locked her in.
_Tubal._ And she herself has bolted!
_Shylock._ I always wondered why she eyed the men so!
What’s the dog’s Christian name?
_Tubal._ I think Lorenzo.
She’s got the start of us, and bolted right off.
_Shylock._ _Heavy_ the day that first the sun the _light_ off!
Offer rewards! Use every means to save her.
Let be but catch—I’ll _lather_ the young _shaver_.
My only _heiress_ folks will say in mock,
Fled like the _timid hair_ from a _Shy lock_.
Take with you, though, unthinking girl, my curse.
_Tubal._ She’s taken something more.
_Shylock._ What’s that?
_Tubal._ Your purse.
_Shylock._ You cannot mean she’s robbed her poor old father?
_Tubal._ I hate strong language, but I fancy—rather.
_Shylock._ Unfeeling child! who’s left her _sire_ to _sigh_
Without or _tie_ or _prop_, or _property_.”
This is what the fast young men of London call brilliant writing. All
this meaningless clatter of words, to produce which requires little more
skill than to clash the cymbals in the orchestra, there are crowds of
young fellows about the theatres who would give a great deal if they had
the brains to emulate. It is out of such slender materials that Robson
works up his effects, making the glitter pass for gold, the trash for
truth, the bad grammar for good sense, and the abortive pun for pointed
wit. Give us good puns by all means, if there is nothing better to be
had, and we shall laugh at them; but save us from word-torture as
incomprehensible, dull, and valueless as the anagrams which used to
puzzle and amuse our ancestors.
Cease your funning;
Force of punning
Ne’er shall Maga’s laugh trepan;
at least such punning as we have quoted. If we are asked to define
legitimate punning, take an example from _Punch_, who sums up his
metaphysics in the following queries and answers:—“What is matter? Never
mind.—What is mind? No matter.”
If any one wishes a defence of punning, we must refer him to the
Germans, and especially to Herman Ulrici, who thus discourses on the
quibbles of our great English dramatist: “If, then, we go back to the
origin of this verbal play, and further reflect that Shakespeare never
kept up this game of rejoinder and antithesis emptily and unmeaningly,
but that with him it has always some meaning, and _not unfrequently a
most profound significance_, we shall see good reason for the whole
representation being pervaded by it. For in this discrepancy between the
indicated matter and its indication, and the appropriateness of the same
or similar words to express wholly different objects, we have the
revelation of the deep fundamental and original disagreement between
human life and its true idea; as well as the inadequacy of human
cognition and knowledge of which language is the expression, for the
wide range of objective truth and reality, and consequently of the
weakness entailed upon man’s noblest intellectual power by the Fall and
the first lie.” So that puns are the result of the Fall, and the fruit
of the forbidden tree. Horrible thought for Mr ‘A Beckett—puns
impossible in paradise! Without, however, going to the profundities of
Ulrici, we have to point out the propriety of this style of wit in the
peculiar species of drama which it adorns. A pun is on a small scale
what parody is on a large. Accept the burlesque drama wholesale, and
there is no reason why one should object to the quibbling in detail. It
is consistent throughout.
The Olympic is the theatre in which Planché appears to the greatest
advantage—the intensity of which Robson is capable, giving a force to
the representation with which all the brilliance and gaiety of the old
Lyceum spectacle are not to be compared. It is one of the two best
theatres in London, in which one is always sure of good and finished
acting—the wayward humours of Robson being in fine contrast with the
sustained art of Wigan. Than the latter there is not a more accomplished
actor on the stage; he really acts; and it is a high intellectual treat,
which one does not often nowadays enjoy, to see how with successive
touches he works out a character, or graduates a passion with a delicacy
of detail that is not more marvellous than the consistency of tone
throughout. As Wigan satisfies the lover of intellectual enjoyment,
Robson satisfies the craving for excitement; the one is perfect art, the
other perfect nature. Perfect nature in burlesque—impossible! It is
possible, however, with Robson. Usually burlesque acting is the most
unnatural thing in the world; no single passion or state is represented
truly; every word, every tone, every look is false. With Robson,
however, every tone is true, every look is nature; it is in the jumble
and juxtaposition of details that his burlesque consists, in suddenly
passing from the extreme of anger or fear to the extreme of humorous
ease, in suddenly relapsing into vulgar slang in mid-volley of the most
passionate speech, and all with the most marvellous flexibility of voice
and feature. Presto! faster than we can follow him, he has changed from
grave to gay, from lively to severe. The _Yellow Dwarf_ of last year was
probably his greatest effort, although _Prince Richcraft_ of the present
season is not far behind. It has a mad scene which is equal to anything
he has ever personated. The story it is needless to recapitulate—it is
taken from the collection of _Mother Goose_. They are all nearly alike.
There is sure to be a prince or princess in disguise; a good fairy and a
bad one; an army extravagantly armed, murders by the score, magical
fruit or something else, a strange discovery, and the prince and
princess married at last, in spite of the villain, all his wiles and all
his passion. A strange life it is, that pictured in the fairy tales
which are worked up into these extravaganzas,—a life in which trap-doors
and invisible springs are as essential as patent-leather boots and gibus
hats are to us, in which there is always a gutta-percha eagle that comes
flying with a necessary key in its claw, and fish are poking their gills
out of still lakes with lost rings in their mouths, a purse of gold lies
on the ground just when it is wanted, beautiful witches in red-heeled
shoes come hobbling down to the footlights; and in the last tableau of
all, there are all the fairies in their fairy palace standing
pyramidally one above the other. As in the _Arabian Nights_ the
characters are always asking each other to tell tales—lives are saved by
stories well told—and one gathers that the thread of Arabian existence
is one long yarn; so, in the extravaganzas, songs are all the rage,—the
enchanter sings his victim to sleep, the princess wins her lover by the
charm of her voice,—the lover serenades his mistress; the king must be
amused, and his only amusement is “The Ratcatcher’s Daughter.” Music is
not only the food of love, but the blue-pill also; and it is the food
and the blue-pill of every other feeling as well. There is another
characteristic feature of the _Arabian Nights_ which is prominently
exhibited in the extravaganzas—the disregard of life. Murder is a mild
word for the destructiveness of the kings—they literally massacre all
around: it is the dance of death. But let no one confound all this
murder and massacre with the similar tendencies in the low
gallows-literature of the present time. All the murdering of the fairy
tales is counterbalanced by the effect of the slaughter. The victims are
scarcely ever killed outright—they are instantly transformed, they start
up and fly away in some new shape. The idea of death as annihilation
never enters into the fairy tales; all is immortal: murder is but the
plucking of a flower that will grow again; the massacre of a village is
only a series of dissolving views.
The Olympic is the only theatre without a harlequinade attached to its
fairy tale. For tricks of clown and pantaloon one naturally travels to
Covent Garden and the adjacent theatres. Who shall describe all the
nonsense and merriment that passes current in these temples of the Muse?
Puns, puns, nothing but puns—and such rough practical joking as the
youth of England delights in! What an immense deal of laughter they
manage to get out of that part of the body in which angels are said to
be deficient. It is kicked, pins are stuck into it as into a convenient
pin-cushion; Clown puts a live lobster into his comprehensive pockets,
and jumps up with fearful grimaces. Then what pulling of noses; how they
are flattened, how they are lengthened, how they are blackened with
soot, how they are filled with snuff till the poor member sneezes and
bleeds! And how the little fellows in the boxes laugh and crow over the
practical jokes! It is such rare fun to see Clown stumble over a baby,
and crush its head like a pancake, and double it up into the cradle. O
glorious to see a shopkeeper’s window smashed, and his coat torn off his
back; to see Clown burning the potatoes and licking the roast, and
throwing carrots and turnips about the stage; to see Pantaloon pitched
into the pot, and turning out a plum-pudding; to see Clown’s head cut
off, and the body running headless about the stage, the head crying out
for the body,—glued on to the shoulder, and so happily united that Clown
takes a leap through a window, and tumbles back as well as ever through
the grating below; to see the sucking-pig running about, and given to
the nurse instead of her lost child; to see Clown for all his iniquities
put into a great gun, with lots of powder, and shot to perdition, next
hanging like a caitiff from the top of the theatre, and suddenly
flopping down on the devoted heads of first and second fiddle in the
orchestra. Hip, hip! away, you little wicked-eyed younkers, and when you
go home put the poker in the fire, Master Jacky, turn in your small
toes, and with your redhot plaything burn holes in the tails of papa’s
coat, while Sarah Jane dances about in all the ecstasy of Columbine.
There is not much interest in going minutely over the theatres, and
recording all the peculiarities of treatment. At Covent Garden the
preliminary burlesque is the best subject that can be imagined— _Y^e
Belle Alliance_, but it is very poorly treated. The most remarkable
thing about the pantomime is the curtain. What is that, most gentle
reader? An immense advertisement sheet, in which Mechi, and Moses, and
Madame Tussaud, and all the notorious puffers, dazzle the eye of the
spectators, with magic strops and wonders of cheapness, until the
curtain rises on the usual trickery of the evening. “Shilling
razors”—“Whiskers in five minutes”—“Baking powder”—“Who’s your
glover?”—“Look to your legs”—“Gentlemen’s hair dyed in half-an-hour,
ladies’ in an hour”—“Caspiato, or the folding bonnet; to fold in a box
two inches deep”—“The Teflis silk umbrella,” and all the chicanery of
Sheffield and Brummagem wares;—these are the objects of contemplation
that, as a kind of mercantile prelude, in which the auctioneer’s hammer
and the chinking of coin are the principal instruments, are intended to
prepare the mind for the more honest arts of harlequin and pantaloon.
Let us go to Drury Lane, the lessee of which is a man who seems anxious
to be regarded as the English Barnum, and who probably, like his
American prototype, would accept it as the greatest of compliments were
we to describe him as the most perfect humbug in London. Jenny Lind, the
Feejee mermaid, and the woolly horse, were all the same to Barnum. The
African twins, Vauxhall Gardens, the cage of lions, Charles Mathews, or
Miss Glyn—it is all the same to E. T. Smith. His great guns for the
present are Charles Mathews and Tom Matthews. The _Great Gun-Trick_, of
which the former is the life and soul, appearing as Professor Mathews,
the wizard of the S.S.W. by S., is a really clever little piece, happy
in idea, brilliant in execution, and worthy of all its success. The
pantomime, _Hey, diddle diddle, the cat and the fiddle_, is all
fiddlededee. Tom Matthews, the clown, plays the deuce with the tea and
the pale ale, and when Jim and Jerry go to the public-house hard by,
with the name of Tom Matthews above it, and his picture as merry-andrew
above that, don’t they expect to see a red-and-white face peeping from
the back shop, and wonder what sort of a man Mr Clown is at home, and
what sort of fourpenny he can recommend? Pass down the Strand to the
Adelphi. There is an audience on the most friendly terms with the
performers, an unsophisticated audience, that roars and screams, and
thoroughly enjoys. When Wright takes off his hat, how they laugh; when
he puts it on a chair, how they scream; when he sits on it, what
convulsions! The peculiarity of the pantomime here is, that Madame
Celeste appears as harlequin. She goes through the performance with
marvellous agility, but, on the whole, one could wish that in this case
the cap of harlequin had really the power of rendering the wearer
invisible. At the Haymarket, Mr Buckstone has turned his attention to
entomology, and given us _The Butterfly’s Ball and the Grasshopper’s
Feast_. He has succeeded in overcoming our antipathy to insects, in
teaching us to endure wasps, negotiate with fleas, hobanob with spiders,
and flirt with flies. If the Haymarket is entomological, Sadler’s Wells
is decidedly feline, and the Princess’s partly feline, partly canine,
partly ornithological. The latter is without doubt the best pantomime of
the year—the best in idea, the best put upon the stage. It is impossible
to give an idea of it without going more into detail than we can afford.
The introduction is supposed to take place partly in the land of birds
and partly in the isle of beasts; the canaries and humming-birds are
afraid of the cats, and the story of the Maid and the Magpie is
interweaved with the hopes and fears of the bright-plumed birds and the
gigantic grimalkins, that play and roll over each other like veritable
kittens on the hearth-rug. Then, in the harlequinade, we have the _pas
des parachutes_ by the young ladies, who come upon the stage—how?
dropping from the clouds; the gymnastic feats of Mr Tanner’s wonderful
dogs, who poise themselves on barrels and dance on their heads as nimbly
as clown in the sawdust of the circus; and best of all, the
representation of the banquet in _Henry VIII._ by a troop of children,
the little bluff King Hal making love to a diminutive Anne Bulleyn, a
miniature Queen Kate scratching the face and tearing the eyes of her
maid of honour in a way that would have shocked Shakespeare not less
than Dr Watts, who declares that little hands were never made for such a
purpose.
The Princess’s Theatre ought to produce the best pantomime, for it is
the theatre of all others which pays most attention to stage effect; and
it would be strange, if, eclipsing all others in the illustration of the
Shakespearean drama, it should be behindhand in the representation of
its pantomime. It is no vulgar brilliance of scenery, no clap-trap
effects of green, red, and gold without meaning, that Mr Charles Kean
introduces to his audience. There is always something striking,
something to remember, something wholly original and highly suggestive,
sometimes even poetical, in his scenic effect. Take the angel tableau in
_Faust_ and _Marguerite_, which is substantially the same as in the
dying vision of Queen Katherine, what a fine solemn effect it had in
feeling, how pure and beautiful it looked as a picture, and, last of
all, how cleverly managed as a mere mechanical contrivance—the angels
sliding down without any visible support. Or take the banquet scene in
_Henry VIII._; there was a marvellous originality in the point of view
from which the banquet-hall was seen. It was represented slanting up the
stage, so that the spectators were supposed to stand, not at the end,
but at the corner of it. There is a picture in the window of every
printshop, in which the Duke of Wellington is represented feasting his
Waterloo comrades, and which is drawn from a similar point of view. Make
the slant greater, cut the table off in the middle by the side-scenes or
the picture-frame, and we have the suggestion of a room of illimitable
extent. Compare this imaginative mode of suggesting a great space, with
the vulgar method adopted in Drury Lane, where, in the absurd procession
of idols that ended Fitzball’s Egyptian monster of a play, the stage was
thrown open to the back wall, and one looked at a stream of cats, rats,
and crocodiles, coming down a small street. The scenery and upholstery
of Mr Charles Kean, it is true, are very much decried by certain
writers, and are continually brought forward as evidences of the low
estate of the drama. These writers, however, seem to speak with a
personal feeling against the manager of the Princess’s, and with very
little knowledge of the history of the drama. And on these two points,
the present low estate of the theatre and Mr Kean’s share in that
degradation, we have a few remarks to make. Praise it or blame it—the
tendency to scenic illustration is the characteristic of the British
theatre in its latest development, and rightly to understand its
intention, is rightly to comprehend the position of our modern drama.
With regard to the present decline of the drama, we must point out that
in its entire history there never has been a time when it has not been
exposed to the severest condemnation which our language is capable of
expressing. It has always been giving up the ghost, always dead, or
worthy of death. Shakespeare began to write for the stage in 1589.
Exactly ten years before was published the earliest diatribe against the
stage, at least the earliest of importance:—“The School of Abuse:
containing a pleasant invective against Poets, Pipers, Players, Jesters,
and suchlike Caterpillars of a Commonwealth: setting up the flag of
defiance to their mischievous exercise, and overthrowing their bulwarks,
by profane writers, natural reason, and common experience: a discourse
as pleasant for gentlemen that favour learning, as profitable for all
that will follow virtue. By Stephen Gosson.” After Gosson came Philip
Stubbes, then Rankins, then Rainolds; then _Histriomastin_, the play:
and many years afterwards, the still more celebrated _Histriomastin_ of
William Prynne, which took the author seven years to compose, and four
years more to pass through the press. These attacks were levelled
against the licentiousness of the stage; had in view the suppression,
rather than the reformation, of the theatres; and were so far successful
that for a period of years, in which the drama suffered greater
comparative injury than has ever since or was ever before inflicted on
it, the acting of plays was entirely prohibited. So great was the injury
inflicted that from this time forward—from the reopening of the
playhouses under Charles II. to the present hour—the cry has never
ceased to be heard that the British drama is either dead or dying. All
manner of changes have been rung upon it. At one time, amid the
unparalleled licentiousness of Wycherley and Congreve, Vanbrugh and
Farquhar, when a hard heart was the best flint for wit to sparkle from,
and a hardened conscience the best steel to make it sparkle, the
conclusion was drawn quite logically that artistic degradation is the
inevitable accompaniment of such moral debasement, the sensual inhuman
spirit tending to destroy that power of sympathy which is the
fountainhead of dramatic inspiration. Then when the Italian opera came
into vogue, and the fashionables of London turned a ready ear to the
poetry of an unknown language, it was declared (by Sir Richard Steele,
if we remember rightly, or at all events in the epilogue to one of his
plays) that the English, who had eschewed Popery in religion, were
hankering after Popery in wit; and loud and many were the warnings
raised against the growing apostasy. Again, when the vein of native
talent seemed to have been exhausted, and almost every piece that could
boast of the slightest success had a plot borrowed from the Spanish, and
sentiment borrowed from the French, refugee characters and the refuse of
foreign wit, how bitterly was it lamented that so wealthy an heiress,
and so beautiful, as the muse of the British drama, having squandered
her dowry and prostituted her gifts to ignoble ends, should thus at
length be driven forth in penury to live on alien charity, and perhaps,
like another Jane Shore, to end a wretched existence begging on the
highways and byways of literature? At a later period, the ignominious
demise of the British muse was expected with still greater certainty,
when the play-wrights seemed to have forgotten even the art of forging
clever imitations, seemed to have lost even the Spartan talent of clever
plagiarism, and their highest achievements were avowedly translated from
Kotzebue and other Germans. And afterwards, when some of the poets who
adorned the early part of the present century—Coleridge, Maturin,
Milman—surrounding as it were the deathbed of the old lady, did their
best to keep her in life, critical doctors shook their heads and
shrugged their shoulders as if the labour were useless, and but a
prolonging of the last inevitable agonies of a toothless, palsied,
miserable old beldame, that had better die than live. She has not yet
given up the ghost, however, nor is likely to do so in a hurry.
Nevertheless the symptoms of dissatisfaction, so far from being
silenced, are more frequent and doleful than ever, and are now directed
not only against the dramatists, but also against the actors, there
being no doubt that, to whatever cause it may be owing (probably it is
very much due to that commonly assigned, the abolition of theatrical
monopoly, which has distributed amongst a number of companies the
histrionic talent formerly concentrated in two), it is extremely
difficult to secure for a comedy, and almost impossible to secure for
the highest tragedy, a strong and thoroughly good cast, so that from the
protagonist down to the meanest performer every part is well fitted, and
the result on the stage, with all the accompaniments of costume,
scenery, and music, is a perfect whole, a true work of art. When, partly
on this account—namely, the inefficiency of the actors—but partly also
through a tendency which is inherent in all art, Mr Macready and other
managers after him paid extraordinary attention to the dressing of the
stage, so that cases have occurred, on the representation of a new
piece, of the audience calling before the curtain, not the author who
planned the whole of it, not the manager who brought it effectually to
light, not the actors who stood forward as the chief interpreters of the
play, but the scenic artist who, with his paint-pots and his Dutch foil,
his muslin waterfalls and his paper moons, wrought in the gorgeous
background,—dire were the denunciations hurled against those who seemed
bent on transforming the theatre into a prodigious panoramic peep-show,
to which the dialogue of the players has about the same merely accessory
relation as the music of the orchestra. And these last are the most
frequent cries, now that Mr Charles Kean has so far outstript his
predecessors as almost to create an epoch in the history of the stage,
by the production of spectacles which, for splendour and truth of
representation, could, some years ago, have hardly been deemed possible.
On the production of _Sardanapalus_, it was said that he had turned his
theatre into a Gallery of Illustration, and that, properly read, his
playbills invited the public to witness, not the Drama of
_Sardanapalus_, but the Diorama of Nineveh.
Now, suppose that this, and worse than all this, is true—granting that
the stage is in the worst state possible, let us compare the
denunciations now directed against it with the description that Gifford
gives of a period which we are accustomed to look back upon us a kind of
golden age. It may be instructive to quote the passage, as a warning to
those who may be disposed to howl too lugubriously over the fancied ruin
of the drama. In the preface to the _Mæviad_, published in 1795, he
writes as follows: “I know not if the stage has been so low, since the
days of Gammer Gurton, as at this hour. It seems as if all the
blockheads in the kingdom had started up, and exclaimed with one voice,
‘Come, let us write for the theatres.’ In this there is nothing,
perhaps, altogether new; the striking and peculiar novelty of the times
seems to be, that ALL they write is received. Of the three parties
concerned in this business, the writers and the managers seem the least
culpable. If the town will feed on husks, extraordinary pains need not
be taken to find them anything more palatable. But what shall we say of
the people? The lower orders are so brutified by the lamentable follies
of O’Keefe, and Cobbe, and Pilon, and I know not who—_Sardi venales_,
each worse than the other—that they have lost all relish for simplicity
and genuine humour; nay, ignorance itself, unless it be gross and
glaring, cannot hope for ‘their most sweet voices.’ And the higher ranks
are so mawkishly mild that they take with a placid simper whatever comes
before them; or, if they now and then experience a slight fit of
disgust, have not resolution enough to express it, but sit yawning and
gaping in each other’s faces for a little encouragement in their
culpable forbearance.” Then, in a note to the _Baviad_, he speaks of a
deep even lower than the bathos of O’Keefe. On referring to Morton,
Reynolds, and Holcroft—to “Morton’s catchword,” to Reynolds’ “flippant
trash,” and to “Holcroft’s Shug-lane cant”—he asks, “Will future ages
believe that this facetious triumvirate should think nothing more to be
necessary to the construction of a play than an eternal repetition of
some contemptible vulgarity, such as ‘That’s your sort!’ ‘Hey, damme!’
‘What’s to pay!’ ‘Keep moving!’ &c. They will: for they will have
blockheads of _their own_, who will found their claims to celebrity on
similar follies. What, however, they will never credit is, that these
drivellings of idiotism, these catchwords, should actually preserve
their respective authors from being hooted off the stage. No, they will
not believe that an English audience could be so besotted, so brutified,
as to receive such senseless exclamations with bursts of laughter, with
peals of applause. I cannot believe it myself, though I have witnessed
it. _Haud credo_—if I may reverse the good father’s position—_haud
credo, quia possibile est._” And not to quote further, let us but cite
his description of the tragedy of the time:
“From first to last
Your joy is fustian, and your grief bombast;
Rhetoric has banished reason; kings and queens
Vent in hyperboles their royal spleens;
Guardsmen in metaphors express their hopes;
And ‘maidens, in white linen,’ howl in tropes.”
Terribly severe is all this—terrible for its truth. Gifford was not the
man to write mincingly. Nor ought we, at the present day, to write
mincingly of the iniquities and stupidities of the stage. But the fact
is, that whatever be the shortcomings of the British stage at the
present moment, and however much it may deserve the denunciations of
criticism, it is incumbent on us to dwell on those indications of
promise which are too much overlooked, rather than on the enormous
deficiencies which are patent to every observer. Let us see whether the
illustrative tendency of the time may not have its bright side as well
as a dark, and may not have a higher purpose than spectacular effect.
It would indeed be a great mistake to imagine, that in the production of
_King Henry VIII._, and the other dramas that went before it, the
principal object of Mr Charles Kean was simply to place upon the stage a
dazzling spectacle, and that his success as a manager has been due to a
correct appreciation of the public taste in this matter. Were this the
case, there would be nothing special in his managerial career. Brilliant
spectacle is nothing new in the history of the theatre—and the history
of the English theatre. In the days of James I., some of the stage
properties were so very splendid, that we have read of certain lieges
who were afraid lest the double-gilt magnificence of the tragedy-kings
should cast the majesty of the real sovereign into shade, and so
endanger the crown. However absurd and chimerical, what could be more
gorgeous than the masques and pageants which were so common in those
days? Our extravaganzas (counterparts, to a certain extent, of the
ancient masque), although they are more appropriate in costume, and
altogether more matter of fact, are not nearly so garish. Where,
nowadays, shall we find a queen willing to act like Queen Anne of
Denmark—she and the ladies of her court acting the negresses in Ben
Jonson’s masque of _Blackness_? Such magnificence Mr Charles Kean
assuredly cannot rival, and his claim to originality is not founded on
the gorgeousness of the spectacle which he has placed before the
footlights: he claims the praise of historical accuracy. It will be
remembered how, in the playbill of his _Macbeth_—a curiosity in its
way—he cited the authority of Diodorus Siculus, Pliny, Strabo, Xiphilin,
Snorre, Ducange, and the Eyrbiggia Saga—(not bad for a playbill, the
Eyrbiggia Saga!)—and in the not less remarkable programme of
_Sardanapalus_, he lays so great a stress on the virtues of antiquarian
research and historical fidelity, as not only to speak of his having
learnt that scenic illustration, _if it have the weight of authority_,
may adorn and add dignity to the noble works of genius; and to assert
that in decoration of every kind, whether scenic or otherwise, he has,
in the first instance, aimed at truth, with the grand object of
conveying to the stage an accurate portraiture and a living picture of a
bygone age; but also to point it out as a note-worthy fact that, until
the present moment, it has been impossible to render Lord Byron’s
tragedy of _Sardanapalus_ upon the stage with proper dramatic effect,
_because until now we have known nothing of Assyrian architecture and
costume_; so that, according to this view, it is not enough to have for
such plays an architecture and costume artistically correct—they must
also be historically genuine. This magnifying of historical truth, this
drifting from the open and trackless sea of fiction to the _terra firma_
and unalterable landmarks of fact—a strong tendency to REALISM, is the
chief characteristic of Mr Kean’s management. And it is observable not
merely in his mode of placing a drama upon the stage, but in his own
style of acting. Look at Louis XI.—look at Cardinal Wolsey, remarkable
for the specification of little traits and details that serve to realise
the character as much as possible in that style which has been called
pre-Raphaelite.
Nor is this tendency peculiar to the management of the Princess’s
Theatre. It is manifested in various ways on nearly every stage
throughout the country, sometimes absurdly enough. A provincial theatre
announces a grand chivalric spectacle, “with seven hundred pounds’ worth
of real armour!” A New York theatre announces that the _School for
Scandal_ will be produced with magnificent carpets, mirrors, and genuine
silver plate! _Whittington and his Cat_ is produced with a _real_ rat
amongst the crowds of sham ones, only the sense of reality is destroyed
by the terrier that plays the cat, forgetting his catskin and beginning
to yelp. One of the City theatres, in announcing the _Hertfordshire
Tragedy_, set forth that the very gig in which Thurtell drove his victim
to be murdered, and the very table on which the pork-chops were
afterwards devoured, would form part of the stage properties—being
expressly engaged for this theatre. In contrast with such inane realism,
one had considerable satisfaction in gazing on the dog which Launcelot
Gobbo, in Mr Talfourd’s travesty of _Shylock_, so triumphantly led
about—a toy-spaniel on wheels. It is perhaps unfair to quote in such a
connection the latest vagary of this realistic tendency—a curious bit of
pre-Raphaelitism—on the part of Messrs Tom Taylor and Charles Reade,
who, intending in the _King’s Rival_ to produce as complete a picture as
possible of the times of Charles II.—with its wit and wantonness,
courtesies, familiarities, periwigs, Mr Pepys, and Spring
Gardens—actually brought Major Wildman on the stage, in shirt and
breeches, wet and torn, and abominably plague-stricken, all the people
flying from the unsightly wretch as from an Afrit of the horrible Kaf,
or a Goul of the bottomless pit. And so, for the sake of presenting a
picture of perfect accuracy, these authors chose to turn the theatre
into a Chamber of Horrors. And since this pre-Raphaelitism, or an
antiquarianism worse than pre-Raphaelitism, is the order of the day, we
are sometimes surprised that none of the managers has seized upon that
one of Shakespeare’s plays in which, of all others, there is room for
the display of historical ingenuity, and all the originality of
research. We allude to the _Tempest_, and hope they will make use of the
idea, when we point out that as, according to Mr Kean, it was impossible
to represent the _Sardanapalus_ of Lord Byron upon the stage until Mr
Layard made his discoveries at Nineveh; so, until about fifty years ago,
when Mr Malone’s _Essay on the Tempest_ was published, it was impossible
to produce that play adequately in any theatre. The Rev. Joseph Hunter
has attempted to identify the abode of Prospero with Lampedusa, an
island half-way between Malta and the African coast, grounding his
opinion upon this amongst other facts, that Lampedusa furnishes the
Maltese with firewood, and Prospero sends Caliban forth to collect
firewood! This, however, is but child’s-play to the labour of Malone,
who not only succeeds in identifying the island with the Bermudas, but
actually discovers the identical tempest that gives its name to the
play—“the dreadful hurricane that dispersed the fleet of Sir George
Somers and Sir Thomas Gates, in July 1609, on their passage with a large
supply of provisions and men for the infant colony in Virginia, by which
the Admiral ship, as it was called, having those commanders on board
[‘some noble creatures’], was separated from the rest of the fleet, and
wrecked on the Island of Bermuda.” Then come the incidental phrases
descriptive of the storm that identify it with the _Tempest_—“Admiral
ship parted from the rest of the fleet”—“they resolved to shut up the
hatches”—“take leave of each other”—“ship struck upon a rock”—“most
luckily thrown up between two, as upright as if she had been on the
stocks”—“arrived in safety without the loss of a man”—“Bermodes”—“Isle
of Devils”—“enchanted place”—“sea-monster in shape like a man”—“richest,
pleasantest, most healthful place ever seen.” What a splendid hit Mr
Kean or Mr Phelps would make if only some possible Mr Layard could be
found who should go and excavate the cell of Prospero! Why not? Is there
not perfect truth in what Mr Charles Mathews says:—“In France the
dramatic authors have free permission to distort history ingeniously, on
condition of being gay and witty. In England, provided we are true to
history, we have free permission to be dull and tiresome.”
Now, if some of the phrases which we have been using, have been used
correctly; if we have been right in speaking of the pre-Raphaelitism and
realism of the theatre, it will be evident that the question as to the
present state of the drama, in particular, resolves itself into a much
wider question as to the present state of art generally. And the fact
is, that the more narrowly we examine the sister arts, the more nearly
do we find that they assimilate. In the pictorial art we find the same
symptoms of disintegration and decay as in the dramatic; in both, we
find the same elements of promise. Look at the walls of our
exhibition-rooms, and behold the inanities that figure there,
contemporary with the inanities of the theatre. This picture either
displays as little action as a modern tragedy, or its action is as
spasmodic as an Adelphi melodrama. In how many of these pictures do we
find the artists compensating for bad drawing with gaudy colour, hiding
vacancy of expression in a blaze of light, feebleness of passion in a
tornado of shadows, and blundering perspective, aerial and linear, in a
mist as convenient as the clouds by which the gods of Homer saved their
heroes from the lances of the enemy? The very faults we find in the
theatre! Eternal mannerism, staginess, mimicry, trickery, grimacing,
catchwords, red lights and blue lights, and the name of the perruquier
mentioned in the playbills in large letters! In how many pictures of
naked legs in the last Exhibition, did you not recognise the calves of
the gallant grenadier who is now fighting the battles of his country?
That beard, that turban; we think we have seen the face of that Turkish
Jew in at least fifty-seven pictures; and he so haunts us throughout the
Exhibition-rooms in a thousand intolerable disguises—his long nose here,
and his cold brown eye there, as if, after using him whole as long as
possible, the artists at length cut him into little pieces, and made a
division of his remains, that really it would be a pleasure to know that
such had been his actual fate. It is the very vice of the stage, where
we find Mr A—— (who plays the villains), or Mr B—— (who plays the
enamoured young gentleman), or Mr C—— (who does the comic), eternally
playing themselves, and through every possible transformation presenting
us with the same legs and arms, and expressive nose and cracked voice.
Whether on the boards or on the canvass, incapacity and commonplace
issue in virtually the same results. And it so happens that if one were
asked what are the most striking, the most note-worthy, or the most
notorious peculiarities, at this moment, of our picture-galleries on the
one hand, or of the theatres on the other, one must inevitably fix upon
the pre-Raphaelitism of the one, and the Revivalism of the other, and
recognise them as twins. Only it must be remembered that the
pre-Raphaelitism of the picture-galleries is but one of the forms,
although the most peculiar form, in which the tendency to realism is
manifested. It is manifested not less determinately in the prominence
given to portraiture—portraits of “men, women, and Herveys,” portraits
of dogs, portraits of horses, portraits of prize oxen and pigs, and dead
game, and black-faced ewes. The colouring which Gibson gives to his
statues is a move in the same direction. And the tendency is symbolised
and strengthened by the photographic art which has sprung up within the
last few years, and promises, whether for good or for evil, to exercise
so much influence on every easel throughout the country.
To come to the point then: What is the meaning of all this realism? If,
with all the multiform absurdities in which it is manifested, it must
nevertheless be admitted that all or most of the symptoms of vitality in
the imitative arts are at the present moment expressed in this manner,
what is the value of it?
The fact is, that whenever this tendency to realism is manifested with
more than ordinary force (we were going to say, virulence), it is a most
critical symptom. It is distinctive of what the old physicians would
have called two separate climacterics in the history of art. It marks
the infancy and the old age of art—the rise and the fall. It is just as
in the individual man—at first in childhood, and at last in second
childhood, he worships the real, and refuses to accept what he cannot
believe in as absolutely and historically true. “But is it true?”
inquires the child; “is it a fact?” says the old man. The precise
difference between the realism of infancy and that of age is another
matter to which we shall afterwards have to refer: at present we have
only to do with their generic identity. And as the individual man is in
almost every respect a miniature of the race, so we find this generic
realism characteristic of at once the beginning and the end of art. In
the middle space it culminates towards the pure azure of the ideal.
We are not sure, however, that this doctrine as to the periods of
realism, evident as it would seem to be, will obtain the immediate
acceptance of every reader: we are not sure, because the counter-view
has more than once already been put forward—and by some of the critics
in the present century has been maintained with great vigour, that art
displays most imagination in its infancy, and that—as at once a proof
and illustration of the fact—we find its most ancient works to be the
best. While the doctrine, as commonly advanced, seems to make this wide
and sweeping generalisation, it is of course more cautiously worded, so
as to apply chiefly to poetry—epical and lyrical: as applied to the
dramatic or imitative arts, there is such a mass of evidence against it,
that it could safely be advanced only by implication. But it is not true
even with reference to the narrative poet—call him what men will—bard,
aoidos, minstrel, maker, minnesinger, scald. For observe, that the point
in dispute is not whether the most ancient poets are the best; grant for
a moment that they are: but wherein lies their distinguishing
excellence? are they more _imaginative_ than later ones? Nothing of the
kind: the _imaginative_ poets belong to what a geologist would call the
pleiocene formation—a much later epoch. The elder bards are remarkable
above all things for their truthfulness, their minute observation, their
naturalness, their reality. Life, the present life in the present world,
was to them an overwhelming reality, and they had no inclination, little
need, to imagine a new world, and go and live in it. A most wonderful
imagination they certainly displayed, but they were quite unconscious of
the gift: they did not imagine, like Edmund Spenser or John Keats, for
the sake of imagining; they did not dream for the mere pleasure of
dreaming. Their pleasure in dreaming was a sub-conscious pleasure. Truth
was the grand and ostensible object; and if the facts which they
proposed to discover and describe were often mere fancies, still they
were not recognised as fancies. A mere imagination they would have
regarded as a mere lie. The so-called facts for which, in modern phrase,
they were indebted to imagination, they professed to have received from
reason, from memory, from inspiration, from veritable supernatural
vision, always from a credible source. And here, indeed, lies the
strength of the argument which refers the origin of verse to the
requirements of memory, so that versification was in its first intention
but a system of mnemonics. Right or wrong, that theory has been endorsed
by illustrious names; and it must be admitted even by an opponent, that
the whole tone of the elder poetry speaks in its favour. There is a tone
of sincerity in the elder poets, as if they could not play with their
subject, and as if upon them all had been bestowed the gift which a
fairy is said to have bestowed upon Thomas of Ercildoune—the tongue that
could not lie, the tongue that could not feign. They never seem to be
telling tales; they are relating histories. They do not attempt to
tickle the imagination; they are committing important and interesting
facts to memory. And this also is the reason why the rhyming
chroniclers—say Robert de Brunne, or Robert of Gloucester, who were
nothing but rhymers—were nevertheless regarded as true poets. They
narrated history in numerous verse: what more did those who were truly
called poets profess to do? These latter made their narratives more
interesting, but it was not recognised that the narratives were of a
different kind. Psychological analysis had not yet penetrated so far as
to discern imagination in the true poet, and none in the rhyming
chronicler. It had not yet discovered that the office of the poet is
more than this—viz., to tell what he knows faithfully, pleasingly, and
in verse. Credibility was deemed the first virtue of the poet, the
primrose of the poetical flora. What if their world be all or half
unreal?—still they believed it to be real. As it is long before the poor
mortals who have been snatched away to Elfland discover that all the
splendour which surrounds them is but a dream, that the gold is dross,
and the diamonds glass, and the brocades worsted, and the velvets
cotton, and all unreality; even so the poets of a country (children
kidnapped from a better world) do not all at once discover that the
world they live in is wholly unreal, wholly ideal. They are, at first,
the most extreme of realists.
It thus appears that even in poetry the early period is remarkable for
its realism. The poets do not begin with sublimated fancies in the
highest heaven of invention. The ascent of Mont Blanc is quite a modern
feat. All that old Provençal minstrelsy—sirvente and chanson—murmurs at
the foot of the Alps. And if this be true of poetry, it is much more
true of the imitative arts—the drama, painting, and sculpture. If
sculpture perished in the realism of Roman portraiture, it began with
the realism of Egyptian mummy—inglorious attempt to preserve the real
thing. The same law holds in painting. In his work on the North American
Indians, Mr Catlin describes a little incident which furnishes a very
good illustration of how a savage regards painting, and how the art in
its infancy would infallibly be treated. In taking the likeness of one
of these Indians, Mr Catlin proceeded to paint the shadow of the nose,
to the no small bewilderment of the onlookers, who immediately found
fault with the dark patch. He pointed out the shadow of the nose which
it was intended to represent; but no—they were unable to understand; it
was an injury to the countenance of their medicine-man; there must be no
shadow, and without shadow the picture was painted. They insisted on his
painting reality, not appearance. We find the counterpart of this in the
old medieval pictures—all so shadowless. The feeling for shadow stole
very gradually over the artistic mind. And in many other details one
might note how the painter, in the early dawn of the art, seeks to
represent the object before him, not as it appears to his eye at one
particular moment, but as it is, or as he knows it to be, in reality. He
knows, for example, that a hand is the flattened extremity of the arm,
ending in five points; in his pictures, accordingly, the hand is
invariably spread out with the unmistakable digits—one, two, three,
four, five—always five. And we do not know that there is anything in the
history of art more remarkable than the contrast between our present
mode of regarding a picture, and that which we find current in the olden
times. We regard a picture as a picture—a representation—a memory—an
imagination. Three hundred years ago, it was the established formula of
praise to say that it was a reality—the thing itself. One might still go
farther back and recall the anecdotes told of the old Greek painters—of
the horse neighing to the picture of a horse by Apelles, and the curious
test which Zeuxis applied to one of his pictures, the birds coming to
eat the grapes, which were thus shown to be well painted, but
unterrified by the figure of the man who carried the grapes, which was
thus shown to be badly painted.[13] And we might quote whole pages from
Vasari to show how an artist and a critic of the _cinque cento_ looked
upon a work of art. We will quote but one or two sentences: “Every touch
of the pencil,” says Vasari of one of Raphael’s Madonnas—“every touch of
the pencil in the heads, hands, and feet of this work, has produced such
effect that the parts seem rather to be of the living flesh than the
mere colours of the painter.” Again, with reference to musical
instruments in a picture of St Cecilia, he says, that they “lie
scattered around her; and these do not seem to be merely painted, but
might be taken for the real objects represented.” Yet again he says, “It
may indeed with truth be declared that the paintings of other masters
are properly to be called paintings, but those of Raphael may well be
designated the life itself, for the flesh trembles, the breathing is
made obvious to sight, the pulses in his figures are beating, and life
is in its utmost animation through all his works.” Here we find still in
force the old feeling after realism which is characteristic of the
earliest period of art, and we find it coincident with a style of
painting that more and more daily tended towards conventional treatment
and idealisations—until at length, in course of time, ideality, having
reached its highest point, passed into allegory, and in these allegories
too often took the one venturesome step from the sublime to the
ridiculous, so that we can scarcely regard Goldsmith as indulging in
caricature when he described the painting of the Wakefield family, with
Mrs Primrose as Venus, and the worthy doctor in a gown and bands
presenting her with his books on the Whistonian controversy; Olivia, an
amazon, dressed in a green Joseph; Sophia, a shepherdess, with plenty of
sheep; and poor Moses with a hat and white feather. Let any one who
doubts this turn to Rubens’ allegories descriptive of the life and reign
of Marie de Medici, where naked young gentlemen appear at court beside
ladies overladen with dress, where the caduceus fraternises with the
crosier, and the queen grasps indifferently a thyrsus or a sceptre;
where Mercury stands unabashed by the legate of the pope, his winged hat
in delightful contrast with the red hat of the cardinal; and where one
can hardly tell which is more terrible, the lion raging on earth, or the
lion gloriously rampant amongst the signs of the Zodiac. And if now,
against such bewildering allegory and algebraic generalisations, the
caricature of ideality, we find the present generation of artists
protesting with perhaps too much vehemence, and all more or less in one
way or another—sometimes soberly, sometimes extravagantly—returning
again to realism, what are we to say? Is it the art of painting sinking
into dotage, or the art of painting renewing its youth? Certainly,
whatever faults have been attributed to the realists of our time, we are
not aware that they have ever been charged with the sin of paralytic
senility.
The charge of senility might be brought with far more appropriateness
against the drama in its present state, although, even as applied to the
drama, one cannot choose but indulge the belief that it is too severe.
If we detect at one and the same time a tendency to excessive realism in
the drama, and in the pictorial and plastic arts, it is difficult to
believe that what, with all its extravagance, is symptomatic of youth
and progress in the one, should be symptomatic only of decrepitude and
ruin in the other. These arts are so nearly allied that one might almost
say they rise and fall together. At all events, their history is the
same, and runs the same cycles. We have spoken of the realism out of
which painting and sculpture spring. Like painting and sculpture, the
drama springs out of realism the most extreme: it springs out of
lyricism. The lyric, strictly speaking, and in its fundamental idea, is
an expression of the real feelings of the singer himself: he is not a
lyrist, but a dramatist, who gives expression to the supposed feelings
of other people. The true lyrist sings because he cannot help singing—a
dirge because he is sad, an elegy because he mourns the loss of a
friend, pœans because he is joyful, sapphics because he is in love,
anacreontics because he has tasted the pleasures of wine. And so with
every lyrical art; it is the irrepressible ebullition of a genuine
feeling. Take dancing, for example. The ballet, as every one
understands, is not natural dancing; the ballet-dancers are not true
children of Terpsichore (she is their step-mother, if you like). Every
one understands that in its central idea dancing is the expression of a
real, not an assumed feeling on the part of the dancer: he dances for
joy—he dances because the music excites him to motion. Music is, in
fact, the redeeming principle of dancing on the stage and for show:
without music it would be meaningless. The orchestra furnishes to the
apprehension of every spectator a sufficient reason for the evolutions
of the dancer, so that the dancing is but the visible incarnation of the
melody. And music in this way preserves, to a certain extent, the
lyrical character of the ballet, all the gyrations and saltations of
which appear to be the natural consequences of a _genuine_ feeling,
which has been created by the music, and which the spectators have in
common with the _corps de ballet_, and therefore know to be real. Thus,
even when it mounts the stage, the lyrical art must authenticate itself;
even in assuming a dramatic form, the lyric must attempt to establish
its own veracity in the highest and strictest sense—its own reality.
Now it is out of such realism that the drama by every natural process
arises. And we are not theorising when we say this. It is a well-known
fact, that the Greek drama—the tragedy not less than the comedy—sprung
out of the Dionysiac festivals, and the drunken dithyrambic revelry of
its songs and dances; and there is no theory in the world that can half
so well illustrate the relation of the lyric proper to the drama proper,
as the history of the rise of the histrionic art in Greece. There the
ancient worshippers sang their choral odes to the great
Dionysus—Dionysus, not merely the god of wine, but the very vital
principle of nature. They hymned his praises with extraordinary
fervour—with such enthusiasm, in fact, that they passed beyond the
merely lyrical expression of admiration and devotion into the dramatic
imitation of his traditional exploits. As the god of Nature, he was the
god of endless transformations, and these enthusiastic revellers not
only sang the glories and the eclipses of the changing year, but in the
height of the inflamed zeal which carried them away, enacted in their
own persons, and according to certain typical traditions of Satyrs and
Fauns, Dryads and Hamadryads, the stupendous mysteries of physical
mutation. They assumed the goatlike appearance of Satyrs; they dashed
about like woodland nymphs; Pan became innumerable; Silenus appeared in
a thousand reflections. It is utterly prosaic to speak of these hirsute
appendages, multitudinous horns, leaves covering the face, the manifold
strange disguises assumed by the populace, as if they were the mere
masks and dominoes of a modern revel. They were much more than masks and
dominoes. They were the poetical costume of the characters with which,
in all the heat and flush of wine, the worshippers identified
themselves. It was an extravagant fanaticism by which, in celebrating
the joys and the sorrows of Dionysus, they passed out of themselves,
ceased to sing of the god as far away, and of his history as belonging
to the olden time, and suddenly became there and then that which they
celebrated;—an extravagance to which a parallel may be found even in
some of the phases of the Christian religion, as amongst not a few of
the extremer Protestant fanatics, and notably in Catholic countries
amongst the mystics—the Estatica, rising beyond the lyrical mood of
adoration and enraptured gazing, suddenly stretching forth her arms and
limbs until they become cruciform, and so standing entranced and
dramatised, until actually, by a peculiarly subtle sympathy, which the
physiologists regard as not inexplicable, the stigmata may be traced on
the hands and feet. And so it ever happens that the dramatic is evolved
out of the lyrical—the assumed out of the real—the representative
impersonation out of the genuine sentiment. It is an historic fact that
the drama, with its myriad personalities, is generated from the lyric,
as the colours of the prism form a ray of pure light; and that, as for
example in the Greek Æschylus, and the English Marlowe, it is in its
earliest development imbued with lyricism. In other words, it is at
first essentially Realistic.
But here arises a question to which we have already referred. If the
imitative arts begin with realisation, and end in realisation, what is
the difference between the beginning and the end? What is the difference
between the child looking up in your face, and saying, “But is it true?”
and the old man asking, “Is it a fact?” We must beg pardon if we attempt
to answer that question by help of a little psychology.
The Scottish philosophers talk a great deal about the fundamental
beliefs of the human mind, one of the most important of these being our
belief in the uniformity of nature. Granted—that we have a general
belief in the constancy of nature, and in this faith expect that the
future shall be as the past. But with the usual meagreness of the elder
Scottish psychologists, and with an absence of scientific precision that
is also too frequent, they stated the law very loosely: they stated the
law, not as we find it aboriginal in the human mind, but as we find it
corrected by experience. In its aboriginal form, the belief may be
stated thus: whatever is, must be, and could not have been
otherwise—whatever happens, happens of necessity. A child accepts every
event in this simple faith, and it is often exceedingly difficult to
convince the little soul that what has happened once, may not and will
not happen again. Experience comes with years, and corrects the
stringency of the law; the idea of accident enters, and while a general
belief in the constancy of nature still remains, it no longer usurps the
throne of absolute law. Perhaps the process goes even further, until at
length, in the mind’s dotage, certainty is banished from our
expectations, the muse of history becomes the most incredible of
Cassandras, and the whole world lies dead before us and around us, with
men and women rattling over it like dice from a dice-box. And here we
detect precisely the difference between the realism of childhood and
poetry, and the realism of dotage and prose. The child in everything
perceives the element of necessity; the old man perceives only the
element of contingency. In particulars, the child perceives the
universal; the old man perceives in particulars only the particular.
This makes all the difference between prose and poetry. In the
intermediate space between infancy and dotage, dissatisfied with the
real, we create an ideal world, where all is necessary and universal.
There is nothing true in history, says Horace Walpole, save the names
and the dates; and so we pass into fiction, where the names and the
dates are the only things that are not true. But at the two poles the
ideal is forgotten. At the one—namely, in the youth of men or of
nations—the real supplies its place, being viewed in that generality,
necessity, eternity—call it what you will—which is the condition of the
ideal. At the other—namely, in the decline of individuals or of
nations—the real is all in all; and it is nothing but the real, just as
in the case of Peter Bell,—
“A primrose by the river’s brim,
A yellow primrose was to him,
And it was nothing more.”
It will be observed that, in contrasting the two poles of realism, we
have not made any allusion to the absence or the presence of
imagination; and this because the word is so liable to misconception.
But if we are correct in distinguishing the realism of youth from the
realism of senility, by saying that in the one case every circumstance
is recognised as a necessity, every detail is viewed as eternally and
universally true, while in the other all is more or less regarded as
chance-work, which might or might not have been—what is this but saying,
that in the one case facts appeal to the imagination, in the other
merely to sense? It is the imagination that magnifies insular facts into
continental truths, and immortalises momentary feelings by raising them
into eternal laws. The Imagination is, _par excellence_, the faculty of
generalisation—a fact which the psychologists commonly overlook. It
indeed always regards the concrete, always regards the individual; and
that is the great fact which the psychologists are accustomed to dwell
upon, while at the same time they overlook the principal characteristic
of imagination, which is this, that it never regards the individual
merely as an individual, nor the concrete merely as a concrete; it
regards the individual as representative of a species, and the concrete
as a type of something more general. The imagination is to our other
faculties what Cuvier or Owen is to other men. Give to Professor Owen a
single bone—even the single bone of an extinct animal, and he will
determine the size and position of every other bone, and the entire
structure of the bird or beast. Give to the imagination a single fact,
and it has the same marvellous significance, and myriads of other facts
link on to it by the most inevitable obligation. And it is because in
this temper the youthful mind seizes upon facts, that even when it
clings to them far more tenaciously, and dwells upon them far more
minutely than superannuated minds do, its realism has a worth and a
hopefulness to which any other kind of realism can make no pretensions.
The realism of dotage is gossip—merest gossip. The lace in a Dutch
portrait—every thread and loop painted, what is it but old wives’
gossip? Compare this uninteresting imitation of point lace, velvets, and
silks and satins, with the young Titian painting in the eye of one of
his figures the reflection of a window. This is the realism of a boy,
that is the realism of old women.
The drift of our argument will now be apparent. We have shown that the
distinguishing feature of the modern drama is its tendency to Realism,
and that it exhibits this tendency at present in common with the other
imitative arts. We have also shown that the tendency to realism is
characteristic of art in two periods of its history—namely, its rise and
its decline; and we have endeavoured to explain the difference between
the realism that characterises the rise of art, and the realism that
marks its decadence. Then here arises the question of questions: To
which period does the realism that signalises at present the imitative
arts in general, and the dramatic art in particular, belong? Is it the
realism of progress, or the realism of decay? It is the most difficult
question of all; at least, it is the question to which it is most
difficult in our present circumstances to give a very decided answer.
Having stated the law and summed up the evidence, we should certainly be
glad to shift to a jury the responsibility of pronouncing an absolute
verdict as to the question of fact. The difficulty of pronouncing such a
verdict is easily accounted for. In a period which is one of revival and
not of imitation, it is most natural that we should find the two kinds
of realism more or less blending together—the literalness of an
exhausted epoch, and the faithfulness of a regenerated life. And amid
all the pre-Raphaelitism of the stage and of the picture-galleries, it
is nothing wonderful that we should find much to condemn, much of that
literalness which is unworthy and imbecile. When, to quote an extreme
instance—when Thurtell’s gig, with “some of the real water from the
pond,” is exhibited on the boards of the Surrey Theatre, it is such
another exhibition as we find in the degradation of the Roman drama—a
degradation, by the way, which old Thomas Heywood describes as amongst
the highest honours of the drama. There is so much naïveté in his
description that we shall quote it:—
“Julius Cæsar himself, for his pleasure, became an actor, being in
shape, state, voice, judgment, and all other occurrents, exterior and
interior, excellent. Amongst many other parts acted by him in person,
it is recorded of him that, with general applause in his own theatre,
he played Hercules Furens; and, amongst many other arguments of his
completeness, excellence, and extraordinary care in his action, it is
thus reported of him: Being in the depth of a passion, one of his
servants (as his part then fell out) presenting Lychas, who before had
from Dejanira brought him the poisoned shirt, dipt in the blood of the
centaur Nessus, he, in the middest of his torture and fury, finding
this Lychas hid in a remote corner (appointed him to creep into of
purpose), although he was, as our tragedians use, but seemingly to
kill him by some false imagined wound, yet was Cæsar so carried away
with the violence of his practised fury, and by the perfect shape of
the madness of Hercules to which he had fashioned all his active
spirits, that he slew him dead at his foot, and after swung him,
_terque quaterque_ (as the poet says) about his head. It was the
manner of their emperors in those days, in their public tragedies, to
choose out the fittest amongst such as for capital offences were
condemned to die, and employ them in such parts as were to be killed
in the tragedy, who of themselves would make suit rather to die with
resolution, and by the hands of such princely actors, than otherwise
to suffer a shameful and most detestable end.”
And this, which honest old Heywood is willing to commend because done by
an emperor, is in fact, _parvis componere magna_, the exact parallel to
the incident already mentioned—the rat-killing in the pantomime of
_Whittington and his Cat_. It is parallel also, in a certain degree, to
one of Mr Phelps’s early extravagances, who, in his determination to
adhere to the text of Shakespeare, actually ended _Macbeth_ by the
exhibition of the traitor’s head—“Reenter Macduff, with Macbeth’s head
on a pole.” One is inclined to believe that had he not been himself the
Macbeth of the evening, he would have made arrangements to exhibit the
veritable head of the actor who performed the part.
But while it is impossible to deny the existence of such a baneful
realism, is this all? and does there not predominate at the same time a
far more healthy tendency? Are not Mr Charles Kean’s revivals of _King
John_ and _Macbeth_—are not Mr Phelps’s revivals, notwithstanding his
early vagary—of this kind? Is not, for example, the historic fidelity
with which _Macbeth_ is represented in the Princess’s Theatre, something
entirely different in kind from that species of realism which in the
soliloquy,
“Is this a dagger which I see before me,
The handle towards my hand?”
actually exhibited a dagger hanging in the air? There can be very little
doubt of it; and it may be said generally that the realism displayed is
most frequently of the earnest and healthy sort. If any misgiving should
arise with regard to this in the case of the drama, one has a right to
refer to the realism manifested at the very same time in the kindred art
of painting, and if not entirely to interpret the one by the other,
still to regard the analogy as of great importance. There are many of us
who cannot admire pre-Raphaelitism, with all its extravagance and
presumption, but at all events we do not regard its faults as the
results of mental paralysis. They are the faults of youth, not of age—of
the pleasant springtime which the pre-Raphaelites love to paint, when
the leaves come forth in all their delicacy, almost diaphonous against
the light, so that we trace the tender veins and fibres in all their
minute windings—not of the yellowing autumn, when again all nature comes
before us with excessive minuteness of detail, but the detail of faded
leaves and the curious reticulation of their skeletons.
Right or wrong, it is at least more pleasant to look thus hopefully on
the future of the drama than to fold one’s hands, shrug one’s shoulders,
and give up all as lost. The drama! they say—fiddlesticks! the drama has
all gone to the opera. Very well: and why should not the drama go to the
opera? the music will do it no harm—on the contrary, a great deal of
good. It is quite true that the opera, or, to speak more generally, the
musical tendencies of the present time, act to the hurt of the existing
theatres; but pity the man who ventures to dream that the fortunes of
the British drama are to be identified with the fortunes of the present
theatres, as at present conducted. On the contrary, it would probably be
no great misfortune to the British drama, if, with one or two
exceptions, they were all burnt to the ground; and however adverse to
the drama the present musical taste may appear to be, it is not so
really, but full of promise, if the dramatists would only see and use
the opportunity. What is the use of running down illustration, dioramas,
and concerts? Would it not be better for the dramatists to write up to
them? The British drama has at the present moment two special haunts—the
theatre and the concert-hall. It is needless for the dramatic authors to
complain that their pieces are damned. Who cares for their pieces? All
they have to say has no relation to our present habitudes and thoughts.
If they will write for the theatres, let them write something worthy of
illustration, and be as realistic in their writing as Mr Kean is in his
acting, and in his stage appointments. And let them invade the
concert-halls, where a new drama is springing up for the amusement of
those who cannot away with the theatre.
Their position in the theatre at present is not good, is not creditable
to them as a body, although we are far from looking on it with despair,
and are far from saying that Othello’s occupation is gone. It may be
worth our while to recognise clearly the position which the drama has
always occupied in this country.
“Shikspur? Shikspur? who wrote it?” says Kitty, in _High Life below
Stairs_, when the worshipful Lady Bab asks her if she had never read
Shikspur. There are perhaps not many Mrs Kitties of the present day who
would give a similar answer. But although the name of the great
dramatist has become a household word amongst us, and his works are
perhaps better known than those of any other writer in the language, he
is known rather as an author to be read than as a dramatist whose plays
are to be witnessed. It is not to be denied that upon the great majority
of the British people, and especially of the middle classes, the theatre
has had little or no influence. It is utterly ignored by them. From the
days of Elizabeth and James, when the mayor and aldermen of London did
what they could to discountenance the drama, and to oust Shakespeare and
Burbage from the Blackfriars’ Theatre, up to this present hour, the
playhouses, frequented by the aristocracy of birth and the aristocracy
of education, and the players honoured as “His Majesty’s Servants,” or,
“The Lord Chamberlain’s Company,” have been regarded with suspicion by
the sober citizens of the middle class. When the theatres rose into
importance, the Puritans rose into importance, and the former have never
recovered from the denunciations of the latter. These denunciations, it
is true, were often most intemperate, and based on the most ridiculous
grounds (as when Gosson denounced the acting of women’s parts by boys as
the sin which brought the fiery judgment of heaven upon Sodom and
Gomorrah), yet when in so many of the plays of the period, and still
more of the profligate reign of the second Charles, we find profanity,
obscenity, and hardness of heart presented as the most brilliant of
qualities, it is nothing wonderful that the commonalty should have been
estranged. From the memory of those impurities the theatre has never
entirely recovered, and there are multitudes among us nowadays who
regard it as little better than a lazaretto. It has indeed been very
much altered, so that in every respectable theatre he must be nearly as
squeamish as those Americans who are said by Sam Slick to have put
trousers on the legs of their pianofortes, who is offended with what he
sees or hears: and yet still the old repugnance remains; as if, like the
man who had the devil cast out of him, the people regard it as a house
swept and garnished only to receive seven other devils worse than
before. The fact is, that it is not enough to introduce a negative
morality into the theatres: it is not enough that the old devil should
have been smoked out, and the house swept and garnished, if we find no
positive substitute. It is a genuine and noble substitute that is
wanted, not electroplate, nor nickel silver. The most offensive part of
stage morality at present is its hypocrisy. We should infinitely prefer
seeing the downright licentiousness of Etherege and Sedley to the sham
sentiment and the canting virtues that sometimes take the place of it on
the modern stage—we mean especially in the afterpieces. The former is an
open enemy, the other a disguised one. And until we have true poetry in
the sentiment, and true chivalry in the action, and that reverence which
is implied in poetry and chivalry, it is not likely that the English
people, as a whole, will ever look to the theatres. At present, the
greater number of dramatic writers seem to expend their energies in the
most ephemeral manner. The burlesques and pantomimes, we have said, are
about the best things produced on the British stage. They are often very
amusing, and display a strange prodigality of power—but power all run to
seed. The wit consists of punning; the humour consists of practical
jokes, horrible grimace, and elaborate buffoonery; the dialogue is in
the vernacular of the London taverns and caves of harmony;[14] the plot
is not simply improbable, it is impossible and incomprehensible; the
characters are little better than marionettes, and their sentiments the
sentiments of puppets. Of course there are exceptions, and brilliant
ones they are. Bulwer Lytton, Sheridan Knowles, Douglas Jerrold, Charles
Reade, and a few others, have shown what they can do in a more serious
vein. But, as a whole, the dramatic literature of the day is, as it has
ever been since the Restoration, more remarkable for quantity than
quality. Few persons out of London, and not many even in London, are
well acquainted with that literature, the extent of its surface, the
multiplicity of its currents, its utter shallowness, and the incredible
mud that lies at the bottom of it; and were we to attempt a very slight
analysis of its contents, run up a few statistics, give one or two
extracts, and, in a word, describe it in its proper colours, a tale
would probably be unfolded which would not only somewhat astonish those
who, living in the provinces, seldom or never enter a theatre, and are
thus blessedly ignorant of the carrion fare on which metropolitan
playgoers fatten at half-price, but would also make some of those who
frequent the dramatic temple not a little ashamed that afterpieces which
are unreadable for their insipidity,[15] disgusting for their bad taste,
and still worse, contemptible, although not so much for their
licentiousness as for the cant and tremendous humbug of their
hypocritical moralities, should have power, in the hands of a clever
actor, to charm the purer sensibilities of their nature to sleep, so
that, as if glamour had been cast in their eyes, trickery and tinsel
pass for reality, falsehood appears to be true, evil good, and ugliness
beautiful. In such a state of things it is not likely that the theatre
should achieve a popularity which it has never enjoyed; and certainly
its entire spirit must be revolutionised ere it can find a large welcome
in the heart of the nation. Read the modern novelists and read the
modern dramatists, and observe the difference of tone. There is in the
common run of modern dramas—whether tragedy, comedy, or farce—such an
utter absence of noble purpose, that not a whole army of claqueurs could
ever succeed in establishing their popularity.
The fact is, the Muse of the British drama seems at this moment inclined
to vacate the theatres, and to take up her abode in the halls and
concert-rooms. Like the old fairies of the story-books, who, disgusted
with the treatment they receive in one family, go and bestow their
favours on the household next door, the dramatic Muse—a very old fairy
indeed—is tired of the position assigned to her in the theatres. What is
that? On the ceiling, gracefully gyrating round the gaselier, are the
four lightly-draped muses of the theatre, with dagger, and mask, and
harp, and castanets in hand, while certain naked amorini carry festoons
of flowers before them, and from every jutty, frieze, and coign of
vantage on the cornice, horned satyrs and ivy-crowned bacchantes leer
out with astonishment. The Muse of the British drama is tired of dancing
over the gaselier, dancing over our heads, and wishes to come down to
our hearts, and so she enters the music-halls and concert-rooms, where
she patronises two distinct classes of entertainments, the one more
strictly lyrical, the other more strictly dramatic.
With regard to the more musical kind of entertainment, it must have been
observed, that while songs and ballads, and instrumentation have a large
sphere assigned to them, the operatic airs are day by day assuming more
and more importance. It is quite true that a cavatina sung in a
concert-room is very different from the same cavatina sung on the stage.
The singing in a concert-room is like the singing of statues—so
expressionless. We would rather not look at a concert-singer—one who is
merely a concert-singer. Goethe makes the same remark with respect to
singers generally. They remind one of the ludicrous story which the
monks report of St Benedict,—that he was heard singing psalms two or
three weeks before he was born, and saw the light of day. You hear these
singers singing long before their faces are born, long before they
attain the life of expression. Exceptions of course there are
occasionally, and chiefly when a duet, a trio, or a quartette is to be
sung. And it requires only an operatic singer, whose reputation as prima
donna or primo tenore will excuse such a liberty, to throw a truly
dramatic expression into the solos, for the practice to become general.
Why should not some attempt be made by those who can, to escape from the
starched formality of the concert-room—to forget that they are in dress
boots and white gloves—and to impart somewhat of the animation of the
theatre into the pieces of music which they hold so affectionately in
their hands, because it saves their hands from even the inclination to
gesticulate? And with glee and madrigal unions in every town, why do not
the dramatists see their opportunity, and infuse somewhat more of the
dramatic element into those part songs, out of which in time a little
drama might arise? Everything has its insignificant beginnings, and,
discreetly managed, the incoherence of our concerts might gradually be
developed into the organic unity of the drama. It is coming to this, in
fact. The music-halls are becoming theatres under a new and
unobjectionable name.
With regard to the more dramatic entertainments that are so popular in
those public halls, the new life is still more apparent. We do not
simply refer to dramatic readings, although these too have a vast
influence—an influence as superior to that of the Elgin marbles in the
British Museum, to which we once heard the plays of Shakespeare
irreverently compared, as the spell of the Ladye of Branksome, who could
raise the spirits to her bidding, was to the power of William of
Deloraine, who lifted the massy tombstone, and fetched the mystic book
from the coffin of the departed wizard; an influence, too, as superior
to that of the rhapsodists who travelled through the cities of Greece
reciting the lays of Homer (for they recited these lays in detached
fragments), as the palace of Aladdin, built in a night, is superior to
the single brick that Scholasticos carried about with him as a specimen
of the house which he wanted to sell. It is needless to dwell, however,
upon this influence, important and ennobling though it be, because its
tendency is to keep alive the memory of the past; and we wish rather to
indicate the new life that is stirring. Albert Smith’s Ascent of Mont
Blanc is the best specimen of a class of entertainments that are now
very popular—perhaps the most popular of all, and which, when further
and duly developed, promise to rival the present theatres. Mr Albert
Smith goes to Mont Blanc, returns, gets Mr Beverley to paint the scenes
through which he travelled, and enlivens those scenes by the description
and impersonation of what he saw and heard. We have no doubt that Mr
Smith’s entertainment is far more amusing, far more intellectual, and
ten thousand times more artistic, than anything of the kind which
England could furnish in the thirteenth or fourteenth century; and he
will not resent the comparison if we say that he reminds us of the holy
palmers and pilgrims who, in those crusading centuries, returned from
Palestine, and with the aid of rude pictures—“the city of Jerusalem,
with towers and pinnacles,—Old Tobye’s House,—A Fyrmament with a fyry
cloud, and a double cloud,”—attempted in miracle plays and mysteries to
convey an idea of the scenes they themselves had witnessed in the Holy
Land, or of the events which in the olden time had been enacted there,
and so laid the foundations of a theatre that ultimately grew into the
fair proportions of the Elizabethan drama, as the rude earthwork which
Romulus in the Palilia founded on the Palatine, grew in greatness and in
pride, until it embraced the seven hills, a city of palaces and the
marble mistress of the world. We might have run the comparison still
more closely, if we had not forgotten for the moment Mr Smith’s Eastern
Travels and Overland Route. No matter. In these entertainments we find a
certain resemblance to the miracle plays out of which the modern drama
was developed; and do we not also find a certain nineteenth century
likeness of the ancient moralities, in these life-dramas, death-dramas,
and devil-dramas, in which our young poets delight to sow their wild
oats; giving us all manner of caprices for imagination, hysterics for
passion, revolting descriptions for the sublime, soliloquy for dialogue,
and dialogue for action? Yea, verily, and out of all these elements we
are not without hope that a drama may yet arise more worthy of fame than
that which at present exists. But again, we repeat, no more
Shakespearean imitations, and legitimate suicide; let the dramatists be
wise in their generation, accept the tendencies of the time, and think
the thoughts and wear the dress of this year 1856.
LESSONS FROM THE WAR.
The glimpse of peace just afforded us is almost as startling as the news
of battle, so general has been the impression that the war must
inevitably continue. Peace on such satisfactory grounds as are probable
will descend on the heated nation like dew. Those who, after sending
forth their sons, brothers, lovers, to the war, have been steeling
themselves in the Spartan school, scarcely daring to hope again to see
their soldier alive and unwounded, trying to believe that if they see
him no more they will lament for him only with the chastened grief due
to him who falls in arms, will have all their sternness melted in their
breasts to warm soft hope. The soldier himself, shivering on those
desolate Crimean plains before an invisible foe, and casting many a
prolonged mental glance to the homes of England, will see the red
glories of the anticipated campaign contrasted vividly with the cool
fresh tints of peace—peace, a word to him suggestive hitherto of dim and
dubious delights, once his, but perhaps to be his no more, and only to
be dwelt on for a few short moments when some echo from England had
quenched the ever-present din of arms. And, to touch on lower though yet
more wide-spreading interests, there are many to whom the sordid
thought, that they will no more be called on to contribute the share of
expense which, in one form or another, was exacted from them by the war,
will bring more pleasure than any accession of glory to England. For
ourselves, peace on the basis of unconditional acceptance by Russia of
the terms dictated by Austria, will leave us nothing to regret. But,
turning for a space from this newer topic, let us glance at the position
in which these chances of peace have found us, and speak, as it is still
sound policy to speak, as though there were certain to be war in the
coming year.
Like one who struggles in a fog through a quagmire, England has passed
through the late campaign. Advancing a few paces, plunging waist deep,
pausing in bewilderment, tenfold increased by the clamour of the
volunteer guides who throng officiously to the brink, and, if often
supported, yet also sometimes encumbered, by the companion-hand linked
in hers, she has attained a temporary halting-place. Myriad-voiced
instructions, mostly resolving themselves into the simple and valuable
injunction to “go in and win,” were, up to Russia’s acceptance of the
proposals, still echoing from all points of the compass—many a lantern,
trustworthy as an _ignis fatuus_, glimmered through the surrounding
mist. Disregarding for a time the well-meant attentions of these
numerous advisers, we may attempt to throw on the devious track of the
past some light uncoloured by the tints of party-spirit or of popular
feeling, and so try to obtain some guidance for the future.
Glancing at the past year, we see the British army in new and strange
alliance with its foe of centuries. Its leaders were either untried men,
or men from whom, as previous trial had shown, nothing very remarkable
was to be expected. Under such circumstances, the army was required to
satisfy the expectations, not merely of a sovereign or a government, but
a people. Accepting it as inevitable that the people will, in the
absence of a strong government, virtually charge themselves with the
conduct of the war, let us at least attempt to infuse into the
collective wisdom of the nation the elements of deliberation, wholesome
doubt, and self-restraint. To speak either of the pity or the scorn with
which the more thoughtful and comprehensive order of spirits view a
whole people, who claim to be the heirs of vast experience and
civilisation, blindly clamouring after some blind leader at every turn
of affairs, might answer no other purpose than to excite popular
hostility. Yet to know that many of those to whom the nation cannot
refuse its respect view with contempt, regret, or compassion the
ordinary expression of popular opinion—to know that its most positive
enunciations are held as akin to the sagacity of Dogberry and Verges—to
know that the angels may well be deemed to weep at the consequences of
its fantasies—might excite, even in the most determined advocate of the
might, majesty, and power of the people, some obscure sensation of
self-distrust and shame.
After for many years regarding their army either with indifference or
dislike, and systematically confining it within the narrowest limits
possible, the English people, at the outbreak of the war, dismissed
their troops to the scene of action with such boastful applause as would
have been unbecoming if offered by a nation which had made military
glory its chief aim, to a veteran army habituated to victory.
Anticipations were raised which it would be nearly impossible to
realise, and to fall short of which would be disgrace. Forty years
before, a small English army, composed of marvellous troops led by a
marvellous man, had stemmed the progress of Napoleon, achieving exploits
which, though meeting at the time with much detraction, eventually
raised our soldiers to the first rank in the estimation of the world.
Since then, public attention had been turned to totally different
matters with great success; and we had distinguished ourselves by so
many achievements in science and art, and had become so accustomed to
lead the way in the pursuits of peace, that for any power to presume to
dispute our supremacy was regarded as an impertinence calling for a
chastisement, the promptness and weight of which it would be absurd to
doubt.
Hitherto our object had been to attain a military establishment which
should offer no shadow of offence to the most enthusiastic admirer of
liberty, or the most ardent votary of progress. When with this object it
was found desirable to combine the totally different one of possessing
an irresistible force in war, some error was apparent in the result of
the process; and the first impulse of our philosophic and reasoning
nation was anger—at first directed on no one in particular, but after a
time on all concerned in the conduct of the war, without any other
distinction of persons than that arising from the respective shares
borne in its administration, and consequent amount of presumed
criminality. By some unknown process of logic, it was concluded that a
sweeping change in the conductors of the war would restore our credit as
a military power, and that a general and minister or two officially
buried would be as the dragon’s teeth, from whence heroes would spring.
Accordingly, some were dismissed, and some abused, _pour encourager les
autres_.
Public attention was now riveted closely on the war, to the absolute
exclusion of all other topics. Intelligence of all kinds was eagerly
demanded; and those whose business it is to supply the want, could, with
all their efforts, scarcely write up to the demand. Private
correspondence from the seat of war was eagerly sought and extensively
published, and columns set apart for “Letters from the Camp;” the
special correspondence of the daily press was copied into other
journals; leading articles in periodicals daily, weekly, and monthly,
were founded on the information thus received, and the exaggerated
statements were sometimes coloured still more highly; and popular
opinion, thus originated and formed, began to exercise so powerful a
pressure on the Parliament and the Government, that a glance at its
sources becomes especially important.
It is useless to argue the question of whether it is on the whole more
advantageous to publish or to suppress intelligence of the projected
operations, or the state of the army, since the public curiosity on
these heads will continue to be gratified at all hazards. The best means
were adopted for obtaining intelligence, and conveying it in a pleasant
form. The special correspondents of the newspapers are of course men of
great ability. No expense or trouble would be spared to secure writers
capable of satisfying the high requirements of the daily press; and
their letters from the camp display great literary power. As pictures of
life in the field, their correspondence is of the greatest value; as a
guide to public opinion on the progress of the war, we may, without
offence, consider it far less satisfactory. No one pretends that these
gentlemen possessed either any exclusive means of obtaining information,
or any aptitude for judging of the nature, progress, and success of the
operations they witnessed, beyond that which any intelligent spectator
might claim. The language in which they talk of the operations of the
campaign is rather a military slang than the technical expression of
military art, and resembles the latter only as the work of a poetaster
resembles that of a poet. Nothing would be easier than to make a
collection of leading articles founded on the information thus derived,
and show them to be a mere jumble of absurdity. Yet this was the kind of
writing which, by appealing to a circle of readers sufficiently large to
constitute the public, exercised an important effect on the
administration of the war. Very different was the style of an article
which appeared in the _Moniteur_, descriptive of the conduct of the
campaign, the facts of which were supplied apparently from public
documents, and which was evidently written by a man of military
attainments.
It would be scarcely fair to criticise closely the letters of officers,
which, intended only for the perusal of their friends at home, were
often, by the indiscretion of those friends, and to the annoyance of the
writers, made public. It is a very common and excusable weakness for a
man to avail himself, perhaps unconsciously, of a little exaggeration in
the incidents he describes, when by so doing he may become a greater
hero to the domestic circle; an exaltation which, far from doing harm to
any one, forms one of the cases where it is delightful to be imposed on.
Each family that has a member serving with the army, sees but one figure
in the foreground of every scene of the campaign. In success the figure
is a hero, in time of suffering a martyr. Every one likes to appear in
the former character; but there were some who, during the most trying
period of the campaign, too solicitous for sympathy, gave vent to
lamentations which, if fortitude under privation be a virtue, must be
considered unsoldierlike and unmanly.
Upon such correspondence were founded the lucubrations of those writers
at home who undertook to instruct us on the war; and if military science
be necessary to a right understanding of military affairs, they must be
admitted to be deficient in an important element. We put the case
hypothetically, because, if military science be necessary to a right
understanding of military affairs, many of our self-constituted teachers
must be convicted of presumptuous absurdity. Men who would never think
of interfering with the most obscure country doctor in his treatment of
their sick friend—who would trust blindly to their legal adviser in a
question threatening character or property—who employ architects to plan
their houses, and masons to build them, and, if the structure do not
answer their expectations, never think of insinuating that they could
have done it better themselves, are all ready to originate or amend the
plan of a campaign, to censure those intrusted with its conduct, and to
interfere in its most technical particulars. Clergymen, whose warfare
has hitherto been waged only with the enemy of mankind, expatiate
largely on the best mode of annoying our material foe; doctors abandon
the study of the nervous for that of the military system; and Satan’s
occupation of finding mischief for idle hands is for the present gone;
for every idler thinks himself competent to discuss and advise in a
military question. Modest men, diffident of giving opinions even on
subjects open to general discussion, may be heard in all companies,
praising and condemning with the confidence of the most accomplished
critics. All are ready to quote in support of their views the opinions
of the most celebrated generals; yet, while mentioning them with the
greatest respect, seem to think that excellence in the profession in
which they earned their reputation is attainable by the lowest capacity.
A certain degree of reserve is generally practised by those who
undertake to instruct the public on topics of popular interest, but no
man seems to doubt the genuineness of his inspiration on any present,
past, or future phase of the war; and in pamphlet, letter, or leader, he
hastens to impart his light.
While regarding the pretensions of these tacticians and strategists as
about as respectable as those of barber-surgeons in pharmacy, inspired
cobblers in religion, or gypsies in divination, we do not think that any
amount of study or previous training renders a man’s opinions really
valuable, unless he has personally visited the scene of war, and is
acquainted with the topographical features of the theatre of operations.
Such an acquaintance as we speak of, neither descriptions nor maps can
adequately afford. We have known instances where military men of great
ability or experience, whose attention had been closely riveted on the
conduct of the war, entertained ideas respecting the feasibility of
certain operations, which an hour’s glance at the ground would at once
have convinced them were erroneous, and which they relinquished after
conversing with officers from the Crimea.
Having thus glanced at the unsatisfactory nature of the grounds on which
the public form opinions on the war, we may point out some of the errors
most strongly persisted in. Up to the present time, referring to the
Russian attack on the Turkish outposts before Balaklava, it is
constantly asserted that the loss of the Woronzoff road, which the
presence of the Russians on the neighbouring ridge of hills rendered too
precarious for the transport of convoys, was a principal cause of the
subsequent disasters and sufferings of the army. Now the Woronzoff road
is nowhere less distant than between three or four miles from Balaklava;
and the intervening space is as badly adapted for the construction of a
road as any part of the plains or heights,—worse indeed than most; so
that, until it is shown that we possessed the means of uniting Balaklava
with the Woronzoff road by a practicable road, we cannot be proved to
have suffered materially by the presence of the Russians there.
Liprandi’s movement, in occupying these hills, is generally regarded as
a stroke of generalship, creditable to him, and damaging to the Allies;
but it would be difficult to point to any commensurate effect resulting
from his movement; while many officers—General Bosquet, we believe,
among the rest—considered he had laid himself open to a defeat; and on a
subsequent view of the ground, at the reconnaissance made by Omer Pasha
in April, regrets were loudly expressed by both French and English that
Liprandi should have been permitted to decamp unmolested.[16]
Another delusion which took complete possession of the public was, that
Balaklava was constantly in peril, and that the Russians could easily
attack it. The map showed a road from thence along the coast towards
Yalta, and it was supposed the enemy could approach it in that
direction. But this road, narrow, stony, and broken, was naturally very
difficult even for field-artillery, and was easily to be rendered
totally impracticable; while the right of the intrenchments surrounding
Balaklava, crossing this road, with two advanced stockades looking upon
a deep and narrow glen on one side, and the sea-cliffs on the other,
along which the path wound precariously, rendered a successful attack
impossible. Thus Balaklava could only be attacked in front directly down
the valley; on entering which, supposing the intrenchments to be won,
the enemy would have found themselves in a defile, with steep rocky
sides; in their front the harbour, and in their rear the plain
stretching to the Tchernaya, across which the Allies, descending in
superior force from the plateau, might throw themselves, and so enclose
the assailants.
More lately, the public has been persuaded that a direct advance against
the Russian position was practicable; and that, if it were deemed
unadvisable so to attack the position, it might easily be turned.
Consequently, the advance of the French to the Belbek, after the
conclusion of the siege, was watched with extreme interest at home, and
great disappointment was felt when no result was attained. Yet those on
the spot who had viewed the ground could have entertained no expectation
of any success—must rather, indeed, have felt satisfaction that the
French right, after being so extended, was withdrawn without disaster
within the range surrounding the valley of Baidar. For if the reader,
taking his map, will trace the line of heights extending from Inkermann
by Mackenzie’s Farm to the Belbek, and will then imagine them to
terminate at top in a steep perpendicular wall of chalky cliff,
supporting the large plateau extending all round to the Belbek valley,
on which the Russians were encamped—and will also observe that the one
path up the plateau is guarded by the enemy, and the few narrow defiles
which penetrate the heights are also held by them—he will have no
difficulty in perceiving that to extend the Allied right was to give the
enemy an opportunity, instantly perceived from their exalted point of
view, of concentrating at the required point a superior force, marching
through the defiles, and cutting off, or directly attacking, the French
corps operating in advance.
These errors, although mortifying, and rendering the public unreasonably
dissatisfied, produced no other ill consequences. But there have been
other delusions, as obstinately maintained, the unfortunate results of
which are but too visible. Such is the constant comparison to our
disadvantage drawn between ourselves and the French. This is obviously a
delicate subject to deal with, when an endeavour to be just to ourselves
must almost necessarily offend our allies, whose own tact and good
feeling have prevented them from adopting even the faintest echo of the
depreciatory clamour raised by our countrymen, and would be ill repaid
by invidious remarks. Yet surely we may be allowed to remind our readers
that, in all the actions in the field during the earlier stage of the
campaign, the English bore the brunt of the battle. Without offence,
too, we may point to the records of the siege to prove that the French
suffered repulses, on more than one occasion, no less sanguinary and
discouraging than ours from the Redan: such, for instance, as the attack
on the hills known afterwards as the White Works, east of Careening Bay,
where our allies were defeated with slaughter, and did not renew the
attack. Nor do we see any impolicy in asking what would have been the
feeling in England, judging from its expression since, if it had been
our batteries, instead of those of the French, which were silenced after
a few hours’ fire at the commencement of the siege on the 17th of
October? What indignation! what sarcasm! what abuse of our generals,
engineers, and artillery! what glowing caustic eulogies of our gallant
allies, depicted as maintaining the contest single-handed, and
generously continuing their own fire to save their crushed and
discomfited coadjutors from total ruin, though the ammunition, so scarce
then in the trenches, and so painfully accumulated, was thereby expended
without hope of success! Had the reverse of this picture at that time
been drawn, it would have been highly impolitic, but perfectly true. And
let us also allude to the report, which we believe to be an arrant
falsehood, of English soldiers being protected from the first rigours of
winter by French uniforms—and to the utter and apparently systematic
disregard of all aid conferred by us on our allies—to show the important
nature of which, we need only remind our readers of the number of
powerful guns, and the vast quantities of ammunition, with which we, at
various periods of the siege, furnished the French batteries. Too little
stress has also been laid on the superiority we may venture to claim for
the fire of our artillery throughout the siege: a superiority always
apparent to those who watched the practice of the batteries from
commanding points. That the services of our siege-artillery were
appreciated by the French, is evident from the published despatch of Sir
Richard Dacres, where it is stated that the assistance rendered by our
fire was often warmly acknowledged by the French commanders. But where,
in press or people, are we to expect the echoes of applause?
Again, to pass from particular instances to a wider field, let us
inquire into the grounds of the preference so invariably and strenuously
shown for the French military system, as having proved itself very
superior to our own. Where, we would ask, is the evidence of this
superiority? Has it appeared in the production of great generals? We
really believe the French army would be as much puzzled as the English
to select a man, young, enterprising, experienced, scientific, and
sagacious, to be to it a tower of strength, and an assurance of victory.
We know the English regimental officers to be younger than the French,
whose system entails the existence of old subalterns and venerable
captains: we know that ours are no less gallant than theirs: nor can an
instance be pointed out where our discipline has appeared to
disadvantage beside theirs. Let us at once record our opinion that no
troops in Europe are more subordinate, better disciplined, or better
led, than ours—and we will not do the gallant gentlemen who lead them
the wrong to suppose that a different education, or a larger infusion
from the ranks, would tend to exalt the valour or the morale of our
army.
While we at once grant that our commanders have failed to display any
great genius in the war, we think the treatment of them by the public
altogether unreasonable. Gentlemen stricken in years, who have never in
their lives been distinguished for anything in particular, and who have
spent half a century in the world without impressing their nearest
relations or most intimate friends with the idea that they possess
remarkable capacity, far less genius, are suddenly placed in a position
demanding a rare union of high qualities. This sudden elevation of
course fails to elicit what they never claimed to possess—and men who
would have passed most respectably through the more sequestered walks of
life, are suddenly covered with obloquy, because they do not exhibit, on
their giddy eminence, that mastery over men and circumstances of which
few examples are vouchsafed to the world in a century.
To point out how the public has been as indiscriminate and unreasonable
in its praise as its censure, would be a more invidious task. But it has
frequently happened, that the eulogies showered on some fortunate
individual have not been endorsed by the opinion of the army.
Reputations, beginning nobody knows how, have taken shape and substance.
The mischief of this is, that these will be the men selected for trust
in a future emergency. Where there is so little opportunity for
individuals to distinguish themselves, chance confers a small prominence
on some who, thus lifted from the level of the crowd, become marked
men—and to be marked where there is so little competition is to be
famous. To us who note this, all history grows a chapter of accidents:
we have an uneasy doubt whether Horatius really did keep the bridge, or
Leonidas the pass—how much of his fame Coriolanus may owe to
aristocratic connection, Scipio to his relation with a forgotten
war-minister, or Alcibiades to private interest at the Athenian Horse
Guards. Still, it is well to find that the public, with all its
disposition to censure, retains the desire to praise; and we are the
less disposed to except against its encomiums, because we should be
puzzled to show how they might be better directed. The campaign has been
singularly barren of opportunity for showing capacity. In most cases
some divisions of an invading army possess a certain independence of
movement, and their commanders have a field for showing their powers.
Advanced guards from these and from the main body are commanded by
officers of lower rank, who, in the attack or defence of a farm or a
village, in the passage of a difficult stream, in the surprise of a
convoy, or the collection of information, have an opportunity of
displaying their qualities. But in the advance from Old Fort, the army
marched entire across wide open plains, seeing only the retiring
skirmishers of the enemy, entering abandoned villages, and passing the
different natural obstacles unmolested, except at the Alma. None of the
sense of enterprise, and of being engaged in scientific operations,
which lends such glow and interest to civilised warfare, animated the
troops traversing these desolate regions. Extensive plains, vast fields
of coppice, or tumbled masses of hills, unbrightened by spots of culture
or signs of human habitation, almost destitute even of roads, spread
round the army, which dwindled to insignificance in the large sweep of
the monotonous horizon. Then came the eleven months’ siege, when the
prescribed daily duty of the trenches left no field open for invention,
resource, or sagacity. In such circumstances, military genius remained
latent in the army. That it exists we have no doubt; and we should
expect in the course of another campaign to see brows, now perchance
obscure, wreathed with merited laurels; but whether any truly great
general, such as Wellington, Marlborough, or Napoleon is to be found in
either army, is a point of which we may well doubt, when we remember how
rare such beings are—how happy must be the combination of circumstances
which lifts them to the point where they are recognised, and that we
live, moreover, in an age when those pre-eminent spirits, which become
landmarks for time, seem almost to have ceased their visits to earth.
Meantime it is curious to observe how the nation, uneasy at being
baulked of its desire for a leader, proposes to make good the
deficiency. Besides the somewhat arbitrary and unpromising plan already
alluded to, of seizing upon ordinary men and commanding them to become
great by virtue of their position and responsibility, other methods are
proposed for eliciting the sparks of genius. The most favourite scheme
at present is the education of our officers. Masters are appointed to
examine candidates for commissions in different branches of science and
literature; and, from the specimens we have seen of the examination
papers, we may expect, supposing a reasonable proportion of the
questions to be answered, shortly to see some very erudite men in the
army, for it appears to us that the heart of the Admirable Crichton
would have broke before he had got through a tithe of them. What shadow
of a chance would the most accomplished Russian officer have, if opposed
to a man who could, offhand, “write a short life of Milton, with dates,”
“perform the eudiometric analysis of atmospheric air,” “tell what smoky
quartz is,” “give a summary of Cousin’s argument against the philosophy
of Locke,” and “draw a map of Britain in the time of the Roman
occupation:” which are a few of the achievements demanded of the
candidates in August 1855. “What is the origin of Roman satire?” is
asked of the military aspirant by the Rev. G. Butler, one of the
examiners, who, we should think, possibly became, on the occasion, the
origin of some English satire. “Compose,” says another of them, the Rev.
C. Trench, “an essay which shall not exceed thirty lines, on the
following subject: In what way may England hope to avoid such a conflict
with her colonies as led to the American War of Independence?” We hope
Mr Labouchere will at once see the propriety of resigning his post to
the author of the prize essay on this subject, whose faculty of
compendiously settling such knotty points, in thirty lines, would be
invaluable in the colonial, or any other department of State. “What is
the object,” asks J. D. Morell, Esq., “which Kant proposed to himself in
writing the _Critick of Pure Reason_?” to point out which might possibly
have been acceptable to Kant himself. The Rev. R. W. Browne, after
demanding an explanation of the terms, “Rhapsodist,” and “Cyclian Poet,”
asks, “What are the conditions most favourable to the growth of epic
poetry?” the best answer to which we shall be happy to accept as an
article for the Magazine, as also the reply to the demand of A. H.
Clough, Esq., for “a history of translations into English,” which we
will publish in parts. Under these new conditions we are certainly
likely to get commanders such as the world never saw before. Fancy the
bewilderment of poor old Jomini, prince of strategists, at being
required to tell the Rev. G. Butler what he knew “of the military
organisation of the Samnites,”—or the perplexity of the Duke of
Wellington, when requested by the Rev. Mr Browne to “illustrate from
Homer the respect paid to the rites of hospitality.”
The fact is, we do not anticipate from the educational plan, the happy
results which seem to be generally looked for, the reasons for which
have been given fully in the well-considered article “On the State of
the British Army,” in our last Number. We fear that the best of the
candidates might still be a poor creature or a prig, perfectly
inoffensive, but no more capable of infusing confidence into an army
than his grandmother. The spell which is to evoke the coming leader has
not yet been framed—he will appear, as heretofore, when time and the
hour shall bring him. While we are seeking him with spectacles and
lantern, now in this corner, now in that, grasping what we think to be
him, but which turns out to be a post, we shall hear in the distance his
strong clear voice, dispelling doubt. And O that he were come! What
order out of chaos, what confidence out of confusion, what reverential
silence out of senseless clamour, what strength, hope, and trust, would
attend his victorious steps! Now we know what gratitude is due to him
who can wield firmly and gloriously the might of England,—now we know
that dukedoms, Strathfieldsayes, garters, and uncounted honours, are all
too little to acknowledge our debt to the bold sagacious spirit which
can animate and direct our powers, else blind, diffused, and enervate.
We choose this juncture to attempt to instil into the public mind some
doubt of its own cherished convictions, because those convictions may at
present lead to consequences we would gladly avert. There is an idea
abroad that the past campaign leaves us failures to be retrieved, glory
to be recovered, and influence to be restored, and that another is
necessary to set us once more on our accustomed pinnacle. In vain have
we written, if it be not clear that we cannot share the popular feeling
of discontent, either at the course of the war, or the prospects of
peace. While Russia was stubborn, haughty, and repellant, none raised
their voices more loudly than we, for prompt, vigorous, and sustained
efforts against the foe. Now that she is willing to treat on bases which
will insure to the Allies all the objects they took up arms to attain,
we should be false to our own policy and convictions did we desire to
continue the war upon the new ground, that fresh victory is necessary to
our reputation. There is a vile savour of defeat about the sentiment,
ill becoming a nation which has just borne its share in a great and
successful feat of arms; and we repudiate it the more scornfully,
because we can trace so clearly any loss of prestige we may have
sustained, to the false and self-depreciatory outcries of our own
ill-informed and ill-judging countrymen.
The plans of that coming campaign, if haply it is still to be, are now
being settled by the council sitting in Paris. On the alternatives which
present themselves to that council we have cast many an attentive and
eager glance. First, with regard to the present theatre of operations,
we have long considered an advance from our present position before
Sebastopol impossible, partly for reasons already given in speaking of
the expectations raised after the capture of the town. To advance from
Eupatoria in great force is also probably impracticable, from the want
of water in supply sufficiently frequent and copious to satisfy the
requirements of a large army. There remains, then, only the Kertch
peninsula as a base of operations, to which we must shift the mass of
our army. That a campaign from thence would result in the conquest of
the Crimean peninsula, we do not doubt. But two considerations arise:
First, supposing the Crimea in the hands of the Allies, will not its
disposal be a source of embarrassment, far from compensated for by the
advantage of possessing it? Secondly, with Sebastopol wrested from her,
her fleet destroyed, and her coasts blockaded, is not the Crimea already
virtually lost to Russia? As to the first question, often discussed as
we have heard it, we have never yet caught even a glimpse of a
satisfactory solution. Joint occupation, possession granted to any one
of the different powers, all expedients that present themselves, contain
difficulties which would render any advantage accruing to us from its
being so held, small in the balance. And what would that advantage be,
beyond what the footing we have there already gives us? We can maintain
a force as easily at Kamiesch as at Perekop, thus preventing Russia from
re-occupying the great prize of the campaign, the “standing menace to
Turkey;” and as to the loss to our enemy in being deprived of the
Crimea, we have frequently expressed our opinion that, in holding
territory so distant and difficult of access, she incurs loss far
heavier than that of the prestige or dominion which would fall from her
with the peninsula. The vast and ruinous efforts which she made before
the fall of the city were indeed justified rather by the importance
which the possession of Sebastopol had obtained in the negotiations than
by its real value; those efforts may have had no small effect in
inducing her present concessions; and to continue them would, in our
view, be a draining and exhaustive policy.
The war in Asia offers a more alluring field of enterprise and
achievement. None of those difficulties beset us at the outset which
render the Crimean campaign such an uphill game. To recover Kars, to
match our troops against the enemy in the open field, and to force them
struggling back upon the Caucasus, forms a brilliant and attractive
programme. But has France a sufficient interest in a campaign in Asia to
induce her to join in it? Will she not say that British interests are
mainly at stake here, and that, to her, Russian progress in Asia is
comparatively a matter of indifference? And, if she takes this view,
will it suit her to sit idly by, while the British army engrosses all
the interest and glory which have such powerful allurements for the
soldiers and people of France? But, whether our allies join us in such a
campaign, or permit us to prosecute it alone, it is worth while to
consider whether the advantages to be gained, either in the shape of
positive successes or losses suffered by our adversary, are such as to
compensate for the drain our army will suffer in a year of the most
favourable and triumphant warfare in Asia.
The third important point open to attack is the fortress of Nicolaieff,
the great naval arsenal and dockyard of Russia in the Black Sea. And if
we had a voice in the Allied councils, on no point should we speak with
more confidence and decision than in positively objecting to another
great siege, jointly undertaken. In the first place, the French will
always so far outnumber us as to be able to lay claim, and to establish
their claim, to a far greater share of the weight, the conduct, and the
glory of the enterprise. Then, as before, the English people, growing
impatient, probably, at the necessarily slow progress of siege
operations, filled, with the wildest expectations, and often doomed to
find them disappointed, will once more give vent to their chagrin, by
depreciating the exertions of their army; and they will again be
suicidally successful in lowering their own military prestige, which
this second campaign was to restore.
Having thus reviewed the possible theatres of operation, and weighed the
successes to be gained against the sacrifices in achieving them, we have
acquired the conviction that there is a method by which we shall more
damage our adversary with less injury to ourselves than by any of these
enterprises. Leaving an Allied garrison within the lines of Kamiesch,
watching and harassing the coasts of the Euxine and the Sea of Azoff
with a squadron of light vessels, and aiding the Turks with a large
contingent, we would gladly see the Allied powers agreeing to withdraw
their forces simultaneously from that distant and now unsatisfactory
scene of operations, and to convert the war into a blockade. Deprived of
all exercise for her military strength, which would then become to her
an encumbrance, debarred from commerce, and incapable of injuring her
adversaries, Russia would lie like a huge corpse rotting on the face of
Europe—or a Titan chained to a rock, unable to scare away the assailant
that rent his vitals.
Already we are beginning to lose sight of the objects with which we
commenced the war: not for territorial aggrandisement, not for glory,
not for augmentation of influence or prestige, not even for that which
seems now to be so generally regarded as desirable, the ruin or deep
injury of Russia, but for the security of Turkey against an act of
oppression. Surely a war may be carried on fully in earnest without
desiring the utter destruction of the foe; and there has been nothing in
the course of hostilities to justify such deadly exasperation. Our
object, always plain and direct, is not to destroy, but to coerce
Russia. If she is now ready to make the required concessions, we can see
no just or politic reason for continuing the war; if she be not ready to
do so, we think the course we have pointed out the best and safest for
obliging her to submit. In either case, we should welcome with joy the
gallant army of the Crimea. With such a force ready in these islands for
defence or aggression, what power would then dare to act on the
presumption that England’s prestige has diminished? Come what come may,
though fear of change should perplex the monarchs of Europe, and the
elements of discord be loosed, our power would be founded as the rock.
Girt by such a fleet as never before floated, and guarded by the best
appointed army we ever possessed, we might bid defiance to the world in
arms.
And in either case, also, we trust the sharp and heavy lessons of the
war will not be lost upon us. To speak at present with due contempt of
those advocates of peace and utility, once so loud and confident, now so
downcast and bedraggled, would be like painting the lily, or heaping
ridicule on Pantaloon. Yet let the present fever once pass, and we fear,
unless stimulants are applied, the old lethargy will return. And
therefore we say, whether there be peace, or war to obtain peace, let
our military power be not only maintained, but augmented. Let us not
again be caught asleep, and with our quiver empty. Let those who so
strongly insist on placing our army in depreciatory comparison with that
of France, study the comparative circumstances of the two armies before
the war began. They will find among our neighbours no skeleton of an
army, no weak sketch or outline of what should be a cavalry, no
neglected or half-equipped artillery, no insufficient medical staff, and
no defunct commissariat. Let men who cheerfully pay the premium of fire
insurance, to secure themselves against the chance of conflagration,
learn to regard as equally thrifty the maintenance of a safeguard
against the explosive elements so rife in Europe. Let our army be so
modelled and provided in peace, that it may readily assume the
proportions of war. And, above all, let us devise some means, more
efficient than any we now possess, for recruiting our regiments, and
rendering military service more alluring to our population.
Let us also, when peace returns, think and speak of our national
achievements during the war, in a tone equally removed from the
vainglorious outcry which heralded imaginary successes, and the sullen
whimperings which are now heard for a presumed discomfiture. “We may
find in these achievements ample reason for congratulation. That the
army was few and ill-provided, only augments the glories of Alma and
Inkermann. At three thousand miles from home we landed that army on the
territory of the greatest military power in Europe, and laid siege to
his naval stronghold. Amid the snows of winter and the heats of summer
the siege advanced: not for a day, since the army landed, have our guns
been silent; not for a day have the waters of the enemy’s coasts been
unfurrowed by our keels, bearing ammunition to the batteries and
supplies to our troops. On a spot separated from us by the Atlantic, the
Mediterranean, and the Euxine, we have maintained our army, more than
supplied its losses, poured into the country the largest ordnance and
projectiles in steady and enormous profusion. And when these had done
their work, when the town for which the Czar disputed with desperate and
exhaustive efforts was abandoned in ruins and ashes, a larger force than
England ever before possessed, rested for the winter amid those distant
regions in comfort and plenty. Such, broadly stated, are among the
marvellous exploits which England has achieved in the war.
RELIGION IN COMMON LIFE.[17]
There are few things more difficult to understand and acknowledge than
the essentially one and indivisible nature of that puzzling personage,
Man, with all his diverse occupations. An ingenious process of mental
anatomy, carefully distributing to every pursuit its little bundle of
faculties—his head to his business, his heart to his home, and to his
religion a vague ethereal principle, which, for want of a better title,
we call his soul—seems always to have been a more agreeable idea to the
philosophic and speculative, than that bolder presentment of one whole
indivisible being, which calls the man to love his Maker “with all his
heart, with all his soul, with all his strength, and with all his mind.”
We prefer, with instinctive subtilty—for human nature has wiles in its
weakness—the easier morality of division; and a hundred distinctions
straightway start up for the confusion of the one poor individual
creature, who indeed is little able to bear, in any of his occupations,
the subtraction of any of his powers. But the issue is that we cheat the
world when we only mean to cheat God, and lose the genial and joyous
privilege to “do all things heartily,” while we calculate with trembling
how much belongs to Religion, and how much to Common Life.
Not to say that Common Life has always borne somewhat of a contemptible
aspect to the philosophy of men: asceticism is more than a Romish
error—it is a natural delusion as universal as the race; and however
dubious we may be about the hermit’s cell and its mortifications, a
dainty oratory, calm and secluded, a little world of Thought or of Art,
commends itself much to the imagination of the “superior classes” even
in these progressive times. Our modern prophets appeal to a select and
refined audience, and have nothing to say to the crowd. We have abundant
missions to the _poor_, but few loving assaults upon the _common_.
Strange enough, we are all best satisfied to go out of our way in the
service of God and our neighbour—and tasks _outré_ and self-imposed are
more pleasant to our perversity at all times than those that lie direct
in our path.
Among all the vague big utterances of the day, professing so much and
profiting so little, it is pleasant to fall upon anything so manful and
truth-telling as the little book whose name stands at the head of our
page. And it startles us with a grateful and pleasant surprise to see
those magical words of authority upon the homely brown cover of Mr
Caird’s sermon, which, doubtless, despite all our independence, have
given it entrance to many a house and table where sermons are not
generally favoured reading. What is it which has been honoured by “Her
Majesty’s Command?” It is not anything addressed by special compliment
to Her Majesty; indeed—all honour to the faithful preacher and his royal
auditors—one has to turn to that same brown cover before one has the
least idea that such a rare and exceptional personage as a Queen was
seated among the Aberdeenshire lairds and peasants while Mr Caird
expounded the common way of life. A throne is the most singular and
isolated of all human positions. To us low down here in life’s protected
levels, there is no comprehending that strange, lonely, lofty, imperial
existence, which knows no superior, nor within its reach any equal; and
when the Sovereign, shut out from lesser friendships, elects into one
great friend the vast crowd of her people, one cannot refuse to be moved
by the noble simplicity of the expedient. Other monarchs have done it
before Queen Victoria, but very few with equal, and none with greater
success; and this sermon is a singular present from a Prince to a
Nation. A condescending interest in our welfare, and a certain
solicitude for public morality, are matter-of-course virtues pertaining
to the throne, whoever may be its occupant; but a very different and far
deeper sentiment lies in the heart of this distinct reference to _our_
understandings and sympathies, which is the highest testimony of
satisfaction that the Queen and her royal husband can give to an address
which moved and impressed themselves. We are sufficiently accustomed to
the pure and dignified example of our liege lady—sufficiently acquainted
with the wise exertions of the Prince for the common weal—to receive
both without much demonstration; but there is something in the quiet
humility and kindness of this united action which touches the heart of
the country.
We honour the preacher, too much absorbed with his greater errand to
take advantage of so good an opportunity of paying court to his
Sovereign; and it is still more honourable to the royal pair who
listened, that it was no disquisition upon their own exalted office—no
enthusiastic voice of loyalty, urgent upon the honours due to the
crown—nor indeed any discussion whatever of the particular relationship
between monarch and people—which moved them to this marked and emphatic
satisfaction. The Queen presents to us earnestly, an address in which
herself is not distinguished even by a complimentary inference—a lesson
unsoftened by the remotest breath of flattery, and without even a
“special application.” God save the Queen! We take our princely friend
at her word, acknowledging with what a noble honesty she shares with us,
bearing her own full part of all the daily duties of common life.
Mr Caird’s sermon strikes at the very heart and root of all our
living—it is not a recommendation of good things or good books, or any
exclusive manner of existence, but a simple laying open of that great
secret which is the very atmosphere and breath of religion. “Neither on
this mountain nor at Jerusalem, but in spirit and in truth.” This
preacher is not content that anything which God has cleansed should be
called common or unclean—he will not consent that a tithe of our
faculties and emotions, like a tithe of our lands or our riches, should
be reserved for God, making careful separation between the profane and
the holy. He is willing, as Paul was, that we should have full use of
all our powers, which, Heaven knows, are small enough for all that has
to be borne and done in this laborious world. Strange argument to
quicken those dull toils which even good men call secular and
worldly!—strange charm to speed the plough, to guide the ship, to hasten
every day’s triumphant labours through its full tale of animated hours!
“Whatsoever you do, do it heartily, as unto the Lord, and not unto men.”
It is on this great principle of life and labour that the author of this
able exposition founds his reasonings, as he shows us how well we may
reconcile diligence in business with fervour of spirit, and brighten
ordinary occupations with the full force and radiance of godliness. The
lesson comes with especial force in these days, when we are beguiled by
the most sweet voices of the Ritualist and the Mystic on either side of
us, and are much persuaded to a vulgar disparagement of the honest
necessary work of this earth. How it may become holy work—and how we
ourselves, surrounded by its cares, vexations, and trials, are in
reality placed in the most advantageous position for proving and
glorifying our Lord and Leader, who had share of all these labours
before us, is the burden of this message; and we do not doubt it will
show to many men, how much nearer than they suspected, even in their
very hands and households, if they will but do it, lies the work of the
Lord.
Preachers and religious writers, as a general principle, are strangely
timid of permitting to the Church any intercourse, more than necessity
compels, with the world; and we fear our good ministers would be sadly
disconcerted were they compelled to consider with Paul what it would be
right to do, “if any of them that believe not, bid you to a feast, and
ye be disposed to go”—a hypothesis which, however, does not much alarm
the Apostle. But Mr Caird, with a singular boldness, takes the very
“world itself—the coarse, profane, common world, with its cares and
temptations, its rivalries and competitions,” as the true “school for
learning the art” of religious living; and is no advocate for
theoretical and self-secluding Christianity. “No man,” he says, “can be
a thorough proficient in navigation who has never been at sea, though he
may learn the theory of it at home. No man can become a soldier by
studying books on military tactics in his closet; he must in actual
service acquire those habits of coolness, courage, discipline, address,
rapid combination, without which the most learned in the theory of
strategy or engineering will be but a schoolboy soldier after all....
Tell us not, then, that the man of business, the bustling tradesman, the
toil-worn labourer, has little or no time to attend to religion. As well
tell us that the pilot, amid the winds and storms, has no leisure to
attend to navigation—or the general on the field of battle to the art of
war. When _will_ he attend to it? Religion is not a perpetual moping
over good books—religion is not even prayer, praise, holy ordinances:
these are necessary to religion—no man can be religious without them.
But religion, I repeat, is mainly and chiefly the glorifying God amid
the duties and trials of the world—the guiding our course amid the
adverse winds and currents of temptation by the starlight of duty and
the compass of Divine truth—the bearing us manfully, wisely,
courageously, for the honour of Christ, our great Leader, in the
conflict of life.”
Wise doctrine, bold as it is wise; but how strange is the popular
impression which makes cowardice, by some strange magic, a Christian
virtue, and holds “he who fights and runs away,” for the spiritual hero.
In everything else our hearts rise and swell to trace the brave man’s
progress through deaths and perils; but here we count it his best policy
to retreat into a corner, to thrust ambitions, powers, and pleasures,
tremulously away from him, and “to be religious.” To be religious!—the
word itself speaks eloquently of its true meaning—a spirit potent,
sweet, and all-pervasive, and not a thing or series of things,—yet
notwithstanding how eager we are to _do_ instead of to _be_, in this
most momentous matter. Mr Caird has finely discriminated this life and
soul of religion, and the influence which true faith exercises upon
everything around it, in his description of how the mind acts on
_latent_ principles—how an unexpressed remembrance or anticipation runs
through actions and thoughts which have no direct connection with it;
and how hopes, of which we were not even thinking, sway and move us,
invisible and silent agents in our commonest ways. We recommend this
portion of his sermon to all thoughtful readers.
It is not a very usual fortune for sermons in this day—but this one has
flashed into the heart of several vexed questions, and surprised many
minds into involuntary unanimity—and when we are told that we must fight
our battles with our religion, and not for our religion’s sake extend
the conflict, it is a great cheer and encouragement to us, heavily
labouring in the common road, and unable to choose a more exalted way.
Surely Christianity, of all things, has least need to be timid; yet we
fear that much pious and well-intentioned training has had the effect of
conferring an additional charm upon the world’s blandishments—the charm
of forbidden pleasure—rather than of encouraging the neophyte manfully
to pass them by. We have been half saddened, half amused, many a time,
by a preacher’s terrified denunciation of the irresistible attractions
of some theatre or assembly, which in truth was the dullest sham of
pleasure-making that ever wearied man; and it is sad to see often an
incompleteness and contraction in that life of unmistakable piety which
ought to be the broadest, the most genial, and the most fully furnished
of all the states of man.
Yes, we are all too apt, unconsciously and by implication—despite its
being impracticable under present circumstances, Popery having made it
dangerous—to take the life of the eremite, self-contained and
contemplative, as the true type of the religious life; and it is strange
to hear that we ourselves, astray among the noise of cities, or bearing
the burdens of the soil, should be more fit exemplars of God’s service
than any soul secluded in church or temple, and safe from the vulgar
dangers of the world. Yet no one will be bold enough to say that Mr
Caird has not established his position, and few serious minds can refuse
to respond to this serious and powerful call upon them.
This sermon is admirably clear and simple in its diction, as well as
weighty in its matter; there is little of the passion and vehemence of
oratory, but a great deal of power, subdued and held within control; and
the grave plain language of the preacher is luminous and dignified,
worthy of the theme. We are indebted to Mr Caird for a manly exposition
of what is possible to common people in everyday existence—triumphs of
faith and principle beyond the reach of those who fly from the combat
and the agony,—and grateful to his Royal hearers for sending to us all a
lesson which makes no distinctions among us, either of wise and unwise,
or of great and small.
_Printed by William Blackwood and Sons, Edinburgh._
-----
Footnote 1:
_Labour: its Rights, Difficulties, Dignity, and Consolations._ An
Address delivered to the Mechanics’ Institute at Hull. By SAMUEL
WARREN, D.C.L., Q.C., Recorder of Hull.
Footnote 2:
The law of France takes a different view of such labour-contracts for
life, prohibiting them on the ground that they are in reality not
conducive to, but subversive of personal liberty.
Footnote 3:
“One of those combinations,” says Mr Warren, “was bound together by
this oath (so atrocious that were it not on record in the authentic
‘debates’ of the day, I would not cite it):—‘I, A. B., do voluntarily
swear, in the awful presence of Almighty God, and before these
witnesses, that I will execute with zeal and sincerity, as far as in
me lies, every task and injunction which the majority of my brethren
shall impose on me, in furtherance of our common welfare; as,—the
chastisement of nobs, _the assassination of oppressive and tyrannical
masters_, or the demolition of shops that shall be deemed
incorrigible: and also that I will cheerfully contribute to the
support of such of my brethren as shall lose their work in consequence
of their exertions against tyranny, or shall renounce work in
resistance to a reduction of wages.’”
Footnote 4:
“To make her clergy fit ministrants of that priestcraft which is its
certain fruit, the Romish system draws after it the enforced celibacy
of their order, and so their separation from all the purifying and
humanising influences which God’s holy ordinance of marriage sheds
over a married priesthood; and, lastly, through the ever-encroaching
presence, amidst the sanctities of family life, of one thus invested
with a character of supernatural holiness, whom all are bound to make
the official depositary of every secret, and who is cognisant of every
real or suspected infirmity of his devotee, and so (unavoidably) of
those who have shared with him in the sins he has from time to time
confessed, it dissolves the most sacred ties by which God has bound
society together,—introducing another, and how often an adverse
counsel between father and child, between the mother and her daughter,
between the husband and the wife of his bosom.”—_Bishop of Oxford’s
Sermon on the 5th of November 1855._
Footnote 5:
_Numismata Hellenica._ A Catalogue of Greek Coins, collected by
WILLIAM MARTIN LEAKE, F.R.S., one of the Vice-Presidents of the Royal
Society of Literature. With Notes, a Map, and Index. London, 1854.
Footnote 6:
A peasant, driving an ass, met Octavianus as he came out of his tent
at daybreak; and being asked his name, he replied, “Eutyches”—And your
ass’s name?—“_Nicon_.”
Footnote 7:
_Childe Harold_, ii. 45.
Footnote 8:
_Irene_, Act i. scene 1.
Footnote 9:
LEAKE’S _Northern Greece_, iv. 46.
Footnote 10:
Admiral Smyth, in his _Cabinet of Roman Imperial Medals_.
Footnote 11:
_Iliad_, ii. 739.
Footnote 12:
“An Old Contributor at the Sea-side,” Nos. CCCCLXXX. and CCCCLXXXI.
Footnote 13:
Here, by the way, let us cite in a foot-note a description of statuary
from the _Golden Ass of Apuleius_. It illustrates the mode of
regarding sculpture in a very realistic period. It is a description of
the entrance-hall to Byrrhœna’s house. “Conversing in this way, we had
proceeded but a few paces ere we arrived at Byrrhœna’s house. The hall
was most beautiful, and had statues of the Goddess of Victory, raised
on pillars which stood at the four corners. The wings of the figures
were expanded; their dewy feet seemed to brush the surface of a
rolling sphere, although it moved not; and they looked not as if they
were attached to it, but hovered in the air. A statue of Diana, in
Parian marble, occupied a level space in the middle of the enclosure.
The figure was singularly beautiful: the garments of the goddess were
blown back by the wind; she seemed in the act of running directly
towards you as you entered, and awed you by the majesty of her godlike
form. Dogs supported the goddess on either side, and these too were of
marble. Their eyes were fierce and threatening, their ears erect,
their nostrils open, their jaws agape to devour; _and had any barking
been heard in the neighbourhood, you would have thought it proceeded
from their marble throats_. A thing, also, in which the excellent
sculptor had given proof of the most consummate art, was this, that
the fore-feet of the dogs, uplifted to their chests, were in the act
of running, while the hind feet pressed the ground. At the back of the
goddess stood a rock wrought to resemble a grotto, overgrown with
moss, grass, leaves, and brushwood, with vines and shrubs here and
there; and the reflection of the statue gleamed from the polished
marble within the grotto. Over the extreme edge of the rock hung
apples and grapes, most exquisitely wrought, and in which art,
rivalling nature, _had so counterfeited their originals that you would
have thought they might be gathered for eating, when fragrant autumn
had breathed upon them the tints of maturity_. And if, leaning
forward, you had beheld the streamlets, which gently rippled as they
ran beneath the feet of the goddess, you would have thought that, like
clusters of grapes which hang from the vine, _they too resembled real
life in the faculty of motion_.
Footnote 14:
It is curious to see the amount of fun which these writers extract
from every little peculiarity of Cockney speech. There is an insane
use of the relative pronoun, which is of immense service. We cannot
remember a good quotation from the play-writers, but here is one from
Thackeray:—
“Gallant gents and lovely ladies,
List a tail vich late befel,
_Vich_ I heard it, bein on duty
At the Pleace Hoffice, Clerkenwell.
Praps you know the Fondling Chapel,
Vere the little children sings:
(Lor! I likes to hear on Sundies
Them there pooty little things!)
In the street there lived a housemaid,
If you particklarly ask me where—
Vy it vas at four-and-twenty,
Guilford Street, by Brunswick Square.
_Vich_ her name was Eliza Davis,
And she went to fetch the beer:
In the street she met a party
As was quite surprised to see her.
_Vich_ he was a British sailor
For to judge him by his look:
Tarry jacket, canvass trowsies
Ha-la Mr T. P. Cooke.”
Footnote 15:
_The Corsican Brothers_ is not an afterpiece, but to show what kind of
writing is allowed to pass in even so successful a melodrama, let me
quote a single speech: “At all events, you heard what I said to my
servants; the house _as_ well _as_ they is at your command; use it,
then, _as_ if it were your own, and consider yourself _as_ sincerely
welcomed by the mother _as_ you will be by the son _as_ soon _as_ he
comes in.”
Footnote 16:
In proof that such an impression existed, we may quote an extract from
a private letter of our correspondent, Lieutenant-Colonel Hamley, to
ourselves, dated Camp, _7th December 1854_:—“I think Liprandi’s army
might have been not merely routed, but annihilated, any time during
the last month till the bad weather set in, having placed itself in a
perilous position; and of the two attacks on the fortress the French
is, or ought to be, the true one—ours merely auxiliary; but it would
be indiscreet to say so. But the campaign once finished, all such
subjects will be open to discussion.”—ED.
Footnote 17:
_Religion in Common Life: a Sermon, preached in Crathie Church, before
Her Majesty the Queen and Prince Albert._ By the Rev. JOHN CAIRD, of
Errol. Published by Her Majesty’s Command.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
1. Typos fixed; non-standard spelling and dialect retained.
2. Used numbers for footnotes, placing them all at the end of the last
chapter.
3. Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.
4. Used a caret (^) to indicate superscripts, including single
characters like M^r or entire phrases like M^{ister}.
*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 79, No. 484, February, 1856" ***
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