1833
THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA
by Charles Lamb
Electronically Enhanced Text (c) Copyright 1996, World Library(R)
CONTENTS
-
Preface, by a Friend of the late Elia
Blakesmoor in H__shire
Poor Relations
Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading
Stage Illusion
To the Shad of Elliston
Ellistoniana
The Old Margate Hoy
The Convalescent
Sanity of True Genius
Captian Jackson
The Superannuated Man
The Genteel Style in Writing
Barbara S__
The Tombs in the Abbey
Amicus Redivivus
Some Sonnets of Sir Philip Sydney
Newspapers Thrity-Five Years Ago
Barrenness of the Imaginative Faculty
in the Productions of Modern Art
The Wedding
Rejoicings upon the New Year's Coming of Age
Old China
The Child Angel; A Dream
Confessions of a Drunkard
Popular Fallacies
PREFACE
BY A FRIEND OF THE LATE ELIA
-
THIS poor gentleman, who for some months past had been in a
declining way, hath at length paid his final tribute to nature.
To say truth, it is time he were gone. The humour of the thing,
if ever there was much in it, was pretty well exhausted; and a two
years' and a half existence has been a tolerable duration for a
phantom.
I am now at liberty to confess, that much which I have heard
objected to my late friend's writings was well-founded. Crude they
are, I grant you- a sort of unlicked, incondite things- villainously
pranked in an affected array of antique modes and phrases. They had
not been his, if they had been other than such; and better it is,
that a writer should be natural in a self-pleasing quaintness, than to
affect a naturalness (so called) that should be strange to him.
Egotistical they have been pronounced by some who did not know, that
what he tells us, as of himself, was often true only (historically) of
another; as in a former Essay (to save many instances)- where under
the first person (his favourite figure) he shadows forth the forlorn
estate of a country-boy placed at a London school, far from his
friends and connections- in direct opposition to his own early
history. If it be egotism to imply and twine with his own identity the
griefs and affections of another- making himself many, or reducing
many unto himself- then is the skilful novelist, who all along
brings in his hero or heroine, speaking of themselves, the greatest
egotist of all; who yet has never, therefore, been accused of that
narrowness. And how shall the intenser dramatist escape being
faulty, who, doubtless, under cover of passion uttered by another,
oftentimes gives blameless vent to his most inward feelings, and
expresses his own story modestly?
My late friend was in many respects a singular character. Those who
did not like him, hated him; and some, who once liked him,
afterwards became his bitterest haters. The truth is, he gave
himself too little concern what he uttered, and in whose presence.
He observed neither time nor place, and would e'en out with what
came uppermost. With the severe religionist he would pass for a
free-thinker; while the other faction set him down for a bigot, or
persuaded themselves that he belied his sentiments. Few understood
him; and I am not certain that at all times he quite understood
himself. He too much affected that dangerous figure- irony. He sowed
doubtful speeches, and reaped plain, unequivocal hatred.- He would
interrupt the gravest discussion with some light jest; and yet,
perhaps, not quite irrelevant in ears that could understand it. Your
long and much talkers hated him. The informal habit of his mind,
joined to an inveterate impediment of speech, forbade him to be an
orator; and he seemed determined that no one else should play that
part when he was present. He was petit and ordinary in his person
and appearance. I have seen him sometimes in what is called good
company, but where he has been a stranger, sit silent, and be
suspected for an odd fellow; till some unlucky occasion provoking
it, he would stutter out some senseless pun (not altogether
senseless perhaps, if rightly taken), which has stamped his
character for the evening. It was hit or miss with him; but nine times
out of ten, he contrived by this device to send away a whole company
his enemies. His conceptions rose kindlier than his utterance, and his
happiest impromptus had the appearance of effort. He has been
accused of trying to be witty, when in truth he was but struggling
to give his poor thoughts articulation. He chose his companions for
some individuality of character which they manifested.- Hence, not
many persons of science, and few professed literati, were of his
councils. They were, for the most part, persons of an uncertain
fortune; and, as to such people commonly nothing is more obnoxious
than a gentleman of settled (though moderate) income, he passed with
most of them for a great miser. To my knowledge this was a mistake.
His intimados, to confess a truth, were in the world's eye a
ragged regiment. He found them floating on the surface of society; and
the colour, or something else, in the weed pleased him. The burrs
stuck to him- but they were good and loving burrs for all that. He
never greatly cared for the society of what are called good people. If
any of these were scandalised (and offences were sure to arise) he
could not help it. When he has been remonstrated with for not making
more concessions to the feelings of good people, he would retort by
asking, what one point did these good people ever concede to him? He
was temperate in his meals and diversions, but always kept a little on
this side of abstemiousness. Only in the use of the Indian weed he
might be thought a little excessive. He took it, he would say, as a
solvent of speech. Marry- as the friendly vapour ascended, how his
prattle would curl up sometimes with it! the ligaments which
tongue-tied him, were loosened, and the stammerer proceeded a statist!
I do not know whether I ought to bemoan or rejoice that my old
friend is departed. His jests were beginning to grow obsolete, and his
stories to be found out. He felt the approaches of age; and while he
pretended to cling to life, you saw how slender were the ties left
to bind him. Discoursing with him latterly on this subject, he
expressed himself with a pettishness, which I thought unworthy of him.
In our walks about his suburban retreat (as he called it) at
Shacklewell, some children belonging to a school of industry had met
us, and bowed and curtseyed, as be thought, in an especial manner to
him. "They take me for a visiting governor," he muttered
earnestly. He had a horror, which he carried to a foible, of looking
like anything important and parochial. He thought that he approached
nearer to that stamp daily. He had a general aversion from being
treated like a grave or respectable character, and kept a wary eye
upon the advances of age that should so entitle him. He herded always,
while it was possible, with people younger than himself. He did not
conform to the march of time, but was dragged along in the procession.
His manners lagged behind his years. He was too much of the boy-man.
The toga virilis never sate gracefully on his shoulders. The
impressions of infancy had burnt into him, and he resented the
impertinence of manhood. These were weaknesses; but such as they were,
they are a key to explicate some of his writings.
BLAKESMOOR IN H__SHIRE
-
I do not know a pleasure more affecting than to range at will
over the deserted apartments of some fine old family mansion. The
traces of extinct grandeur admit of a better passion than envy: and
contemplations on the great and good, whom we fancy in succession to
have been its inhabitants, weave for us illusions, incompatible with
the bustle of modern occupancy, and vanities of foolish present
aristocracy. The same difference of feeling, I think, attends us
between entering an empty and a crowded church. In the latter it is
chance but some present human frailty- an act of inattention on the
part of some of the auditory- or a trait of affectation, or worse,
vainglory on that of the preacher- puts us by our best thoughts,
disharmonising the place and the occasion. But wouldst thou know the
beauty of holiness?- go alone on some week-day, borrowing the keys
of good Master Sexton, traverse the cool aisles of some country
church: think of the piety that has kneeled there- the
congregations, old and young, that have found consolation there- the
meek pastor- the docile parishioner. With no disturbing emotions, no
cross conflicting comparisons, drink in the tranquillity of the place,
till thou thyself become as fixed and motionless as the marble
effigies that kneel and weep around thee.
Journeying northward lately, I could not resist going some few
miles out of my road to look upon the remains of an old great house
with which I had been impressed in this way in infancy. I was apprised
that the owner of it had lately pulled it down; still I had a vague
notion that it could not all have perished, that so much solidity with
magnificence could not have been crushed all at once into the mere
dust and rubbish which I found it.
The work of ruin had proceeded with a swift hand indeed, and the
demolition of a few weeks had reduced it to- an antiquity.
I was astonished at the indistinction of everything. Where had
stood the great gates? What bounded the court-yard? Whereabout did the
out-houses commence? A few bricks only lay as representatives of
that which was so stately and so spacious.
Death does not shrink up his human victim at this rate. The burnt
ashes of a man weigh more in their proportion.
Had I seen these brick-and-mortar knaves at their process of
destruction, at the plucking of every panel I should have felt the
varlets at my heart. I should have cried out to them to spare a
plank at least out of the cheerful store-room, in whose hot
window-seat I used to sit and read Cowley, with the grass-plot before,
and the hum and flappings of that one solitary wasp that ever
haunted it about me- it is in mine ears now, as oft as summer returns;
or a panel of the yellow-room.
Why, every plank and panel of that house for me had magic in it.
The tapestried bedrooms- tapestry so much better than painting- not
adorning merely, but peopling the wainscots- at which childhood ever
and anon would steal a look, shifting its coverlid (replaced as
quickly) to exercise its tender courage in a momentary eye-encounter
with those stern bright visages, staring reciprocally- all Ovid on the
walls, in colours vivider than his descriptions. Actaeon in mid
sprout, with the unappeasable prudery of Diana; and the still more
provoking, and almost culinary coolness of Dan Phoebus, eel-fashion,
deliberately divesting of Marsyas.
Then, that haunted room- in which old Mrs. Battle died- whereinto I
have crept, but always in the daytime, with a passion of fear; and a
sneaking curiosity, terror-tainted, to hold communication with the
past.- How shall they build it up again?
It was an old deserted place, yet not so long deserted but that
traces of the splendour of past inmates were everywhere apparent.
Its furniture was still standing- even to the tarnished gilt leather
battledores, and crumbling feathers of shuttlecocks in the nursery,
which told that children had once played there. But I was a lonely
child, and had the range at will of every apartment, knew every nook
and corner, wondered and worshipped everywhere.
The solitude of childhood is not so much the mother of thought,
as it is the feeder of love, and silence, and admiration. So strange a
passion for the place possessed me in those years, that, though
there lay- I shame to say how few roods distant from the mansion- half
hid by trees what I judged some romantic lake, such was the spell
which bound me to the house, and such my carefulness not to pass its
strict and proper precincts, that the idle waters lay unexplored for
me; and not till late in life, curiosity prevailing over elder
devotion, I found, to my astonishment, a pretty brawling brook had
been the Lacus Incognitus of my infancy. Variegated views, extensive
prospects- and those at no great distance from the house- I was told
of such- what were they to me, being out of the boundaries of my
Eden?- So far from a wish to roam, I would have drawn, methought,
still closer the fences of my chosen prison; and have been hemmed in
by a yet securer cincture of those excluding garden walls. I could
have exclaimed with that garden-loving poet-
-
Bind me, ye woodbines, in your twines;
Curl me about, ye gadding vines;
And oh so dose your circles lace,
That I may never leave this place;
But, lest your fetters prove too weak,
Ere I your silken bondage break,
Do you, O brambles, chain me too,
And, courteous briars, nail me through.
-
I was here as in a lonely temple. Snug fire-sides- the low-built
roof- parlours ten feet by ten- frugal boards, and all the
homeliness of home- these were the condition of my birth- the
wholesome soil which I was planted in. Yet, without impeachment to
their tenderest lessons, I am not sorry to have had glances at
something beyond; and to have taken, if but a peep, in childhood, at
the contrasting accidents of a great fortune.
To have the feeling of gentility, it is not necessary to have
been born gentle. The pride of ancestry may be had on cheaper terms
than to be obliged to an importunate race of ancestors; and the
coatless antiquary in his unemblazoned cell, revolving the long line
of a Mowbray's or De Clifford's pedigree, at those sounding names
may warm himself into as gay a vanity as these who do inherit them.
The claims of birth are ideal merely, and what herald shall go about
to strip me of an idea? Is it trenchant to their swords? can it be
hacked off as a spur can? or torn away like a tarnished garter?
What else were the families of the great to us? what pleasure
should we take in their tedious genealogies, or their capitulatory
brass monuments? What to us the uninterrupted current of their bloods,
if our own did not answer within us to a cognate and correspondent
elevation.
Or wherefore else, O tattered and diminished 'Scutcheon that hung
upon the time-worn walls of thy princely stairs, BLAKESMOOR! have I in
childhood so oft stood poring upon the mystic characters- thy
emblematic supporters, with their prophetic "Resurgam"- till, every
dreg of peasantry purging off, I received into myself Very
Gentility? Thou wert first in my morning eyes; and of nights hast
detained my steps from bedward, till it was but a step from gazing
at thee to dreaming on thee.
This is the only true gentry by adoption; the veritable change of
blood, and not, as empirics have fabled, by transfusion.
Who it was by dying that had earned the splendid trophy, I know
not, I inquired not; but its fading rags, and colours
cobweb-stained, told that its subject was of two centuries back.
And what if my ancestor at that date was some Damoetas- feeding
flocks- not his own, upon the hills of Lincoln- did I in less
earnest vindicate to myself the family trappings of this once proud
Aegon? repaying by a backward triumph the insults he might possibly
have heaped in his life-time upon my poor pastoral progenitor.
If it were presumption so to speculate, the present owners of the
mansion had least reason to complain. They had long forsaken the old
house of their fathers for a newer trifle; and I was left to
appropriate to myself what images I could pick up, to raise my
fancy, or to soothe my vanity.
I was the true descendant of those old W__s; and not the present
family of that name, who had fled the old waste places.
Mine was that gallery of good old family portraits, which as I have
gone over, giving them in fancy my own family name, one- and then
another- would seem to smile, reaching forward from the canvas, to
recognise the new relationship; while the rest looked grave, as it
seemed, at the vacancy in their dwelling, and thoughts of fled
posterity.
The Beauty with the cool blue pastoral drapery, and a lamb- that
hung next the great bay window- with the bright yellow H__shire
hair, and eye of watchet hue- so like my Alice!- I am persuaded she
was a true Elia- Mildred Elia, I take it.
Mine, too, BLAKESMOOR, was thy noble Marble Hall, with its mosaic
pavements, and its Twelve Caesars- stately busts in marble-ranged
round; of whose countenances, young reader of faces as I was, the
frowning beauty of Nero, I remember, had most of my wonder: but the
mild Galba had my love. There they stood in the coldness of death, yet
freshness of immortality.
Mine, too, thy lofty Justice Hall, with its one chair of authority,
high-backed and wickered, once the terror of luckless poacher, or
self-forgetful maiden- so common since, that bats have roosted in it.
Mine, too,- whose else?- thy costly fruit-garden, with its
sun-baked southern wall; the ampler pleasure-garden, rising
backwards from the house in triple terraces, with flower-pots now of
palest lead, save that a, speck here and there, saved from the
elements, bespake their pristine state to have been gilt and
glittering; the verdant quarters backwarder still; and, stretching
still beyond, in old formality, thy firry wilderness, the haunt of the
squirrel, and the day-long murmuring wood-pigeon, with that antique
image in the centre, God or Goddess I wist not; but child of Athens or
old Rome paid never a sincerer worship to Pan or to Sylvanus in
their native groves, than I to that fragmental mystery.
Was it for this, that I kissed my childish hands too fervently in
your idol-worship, walks and windings of BLAKESMOOR! for this, or what
sin of mine, has the plough passed over your pleasant places? I
sometimes think that as men, when they die, do not die all, so of
their extinguished habitations there may be a hope- a germ to be
revivified.
POOR RELATIONS
-
A POOR RELATION- is the most irrelevant thing in nature,- a piece
of impertinent correspondency,- an odious approximation,- a haunting
conscience,- a preposterous shadow, lengthening in the noon-tide of
our prosperity,- an unwelcome remembrancer,- a perpetually recurring
mortification,- a drain on your purse, a more intolerable dun upon
your pride,- a drawback upon success,- a rebuke to your rising,- a
stain in your blood,- a blot on your 'scutcheon,- a rent in your
garment,- a death's-head at your banquet,- Agathocles' pot,- a
Mordecai in your gate, a Lazarus at your door,- a lion in your
path,- a frog in your chamber,- a fly in your ointment,- a mote in
your eye,- a triumph to your enemy, an apology to your friends,- the
one thing not needful,- the hail in harvest,- the ounce of sour in a
pound of sweet.
He is known by his knock. Your heart telleth you "That is Mr.__." A
rap, between familiarity and respect; that demands, and at the same
time seems to despair of, entertainment. He entereth smiling and-
embarrassed. He holdeth out his hand to you to shake, and- draweth
it back again. He casually looketh in about dinner-time- when the
table is full. He offereth to go away, seeing you have company- but is
induced to stay. He filleth a chair, and your visitor's two children
are accommodated at a side-table. He never cometh upon open days, when
your wife says, with some complacency, "My dear, perhaps Mr.__ will
drop in to-day." He remembereth birth-days- and professeth he is
fortunate to have stumbled upon one. He declareth against fish, the
turbot being small- yet suffereth himself to be importuned into a
slice, against his first resolution. He sticketh by the port- yet will
be prevailed upon to empty the remainder glass of claret, if a
stranger press it upon him. He is a puzzle to the servants, who are
fearful of being too obsequious, or not civil enough, to him. The
guests think "they have seen him before." Every one speculateth upon
his condition; and the most part take him to be- a tide-waiter. He
calleth you by your Christian name, to imply that his other is the
same with your own. He is too familiar by half, yet you wish he had
less diffidence. With half the familiarity, he might pass for a casual
dependant; with more boldness, he would be in no danger of being taken
for what he is. He is too humble for a friend; yet taketh on him
more state than befits a client. He is a worse guest than a country
tenant, inasmuch as he bringeth up no rent- yet 'tis odds, from his
garb and demeanour, that your guests take him for one. He is asked
to make one at the whist table; refuseth on the score of poverty, and-
resents being left out. When the company break up, he proffereth to go
for a coach- and lets the servant go. He recollects your
grandfather; and will thrust in some mean and quite unimportant
anecdote of the family. He knew it when it was not quite so
flourishing as "he is blest in seeing it now." He reviveth past
situations, to institute what he calleth- favourable comparisons. With
a reflecting sort of congratulation, he will inquire the price of your
furniture; and insults you with a special commendation of your
window-curtains. He is of opinion that the urn is the more elegant
shape, but, after all, there was something more comfortable about
the old tea-kettle- which you must remember. He dare say you must
find. a great convenience in having a carriage of your own, and
appealeth to your lady if it is not so. Inquireth if you have had your
arms done on vellum yet; and did not know, till lately, that
such-and-such had been the crest of the family. His memory is
unseasonable; his compliments perverse; his talk a trouble; his stay
pertinacious; and when he goeth away, you dismiss his chair into a
corner, as precipitately as possible, and feel fairly rid of two
nuisances.
There is a worse evil under the sun, and that is- a female Poor
Relation. You may do something with the other; you may pass him off
tolerably well; but your indigent she-relative is hopeless. "He is
an old humourist," you may say, "and affects to go threadbare. His
circumstances are better than folks would take them to be. You are
fond of having a Character at your table, and truly he is one." But in
the indications of female poverty there can be no disguise. No woman
dresses below herself from caprice. The truth must out without
shuffling. "She is plainly related to the L__s; or what does she at
their house?" She is, in all probability, your wife's cousin. Nine
times out of ten, at least, this is the case.- Her garb is something
between a gentlewoman and a beggar, yet the former evidently
predominates. She is most provokingly humble, and ostentatiously
sensible to her inferiority. He may require to be repressed sometimes-
aliquando sufflaminandus erat- but there is no raising her. You send
her soup at dinner, and she begs to be helped- after the gentlemen.
Mr.__ requests the honour of taking wine with her; she hesitates
between Port and Madeira, and chooses the former- because he does. She
calls the servant Sir; and insists on not troubling him to hold
her plate. The housekeeper patronises her. The children's governess
takes upon her to correct her, when she has mistaken the piano for
harpsichord.
Richard Amlet, Esq., in the play, is a notable instance of the
disadvantages to which this chimerical notion of affinity
constituting a claim to acquaintance, may subject the spirit of a
gentleman. A little foolish blood is all that is betwixt him and a
lady with a great estate. His stars are perpetually crossed by the
malignant maternity of an old woman, who persists in calling him
"her son Dick." But she has wherewithal in the end to recompense his
indignities, and float him again upon the brilliant surface, under
which it has been her seeming business and pleasure all along to
sink him. All men, besides, are not of Dick's temperament. I knew an
Amlet in real life, who, wanting Dick's buoyancy, sank indeed. Poor
W__ was of my own standing at Christ's, a fine classic, and a youth of
promise. If he had a blemish, it was too much pride; but its quality
was inoffensive; it was not of that sort which hardens the heart,
and serves to keep inferiors at a distance; it only sought to ward off
derogation from itself. It was the principle of self-respect carried
as far as it could go, without infringing upon that respect, which
he would have every one else equally maintain for himself. He would
have you to think alike with him on this topic. Many a quarrel have
I had with him, when we were rather older boys, and our tallness
made us more obnoxious to observation in the blue clothes, because I
would not thread the alleys and blind ways of the town with him to
elude notice, when we have been out together on a holiday in the
streets of this sneering and prying metropolis. W__ went, sore with
these notions, to Oxford, where the dignity and sweetness of a
scholar's life, meeting with the alloy of a humble introduction,
wrought in him a passionate devotion to the place, with a profound
aversion from the society. The servitor's gown (worse than his
school array) clung to him with Nessian venom. He thought himself
ridiculous in a garb, under which Latimer must have walked erect,
and in which Hooker, in his young days, possibly flaunted in a vein of
no discommendable vanity. In the depth of college shades, or in his
lonely chamber, the poor student shrunk from observation. He found
shelter among books, which insult not; and studies, that ask no
questions of a youth's finances. He was lord of his library, and
seldom cared for looking out beyond his domains. The healing influence
of studious pursuits was upon him, to soothe and to abstract. He was
almost a healthy man; when the waywardness of his fate broke out
against him with a second and worse malignity. The father of W__ had
hitherto exercised the humble profession of house-painter at N__, near
Oxford. A supposed interest with some of the heads of colleges had now
induced him to take up his abode in that city, with the hope of
being employed upon some public works which were talked of. From
that moment I read in the countenance of the young man the
determination which at length tore him from academical pursuits for
ever. To a person unacquainted with our universities, the distance
between the gownsmen and the townsmen, as they are called- the trading
part of the latter especially- is carried to an excess that would
appear harsh and incredible. The temperament of W__'s father was
diametrically the reverse of his own. Old W__ was a little, busy,
cringing tradesman, who, with his son upon his arm, would stand bowing
and scraping, cap in hand, to any thing that wore the semblance of a
gown- insensible to the winks and opener remonstrances of the young
man, to whose chamber-fellow, or equal in standing, perhaps, he was
thus obsequiously and gratuitously ducking. Such a state of things
could not last. W__ must change the air of Oxford, or be suffocated.
He chose the former; and let the sturdy moralist, who strains the
point of the filial duties as high as they can bear, censure the
dereliction; he cannot estimate the struggle. I stood with W__, the
last afternoon I ever saw him, under the eaves of his paternal
dwelling. It was in the fine lane leading from the High Street to
the back of **** college, where W__ kept his rooms. He seemed
thoughtful and more reconciled. I ventured to rally him- finding him
in a better mood- upon a representation of the Artist Evangelist,
which the old man, whose affairs were beginning to flourish, had
caused to be set up in a splendid sort of frame over his really
handsome shop, either as a token of prosperity or badge of gratitude
to his saint. W__ looked up at the Luke, and, like Satan, "knew his
mounted sign- and fled." A letter on his father's table, the next
morning, announced that he had accepted a commission in a regiment
about to embark for Portugal. He was among the first who perished
before the walls of St. Sebastian.
I do not know how, upon a subject which I began with treating
half seriously, I should have fallen upon a recital so eminently
painful; but this theme of poor relationship is replete with so much
matter for tragic as well as comic associations, that it is
difficult to keep the account distinct without blending. The
earliest impressions which I received on this matter, are certainly
not attended with anything painful, or very humiliating, in the
recalling. At my father's table (no very splendid one) was to be
found, every Saturday, the mysterious figure of an aged gentleman,
clothed in neat black, of a sad yet comely appearance. His
deportment was of the essence of gravity; his words few or none; and I
was not to make a noise in his presence. I had little inclination to
have done so- for my cue was to admire in silence. A particular
elbow-chair was appropriated to him, which was in no case to be
violated. A peculiar sort of sweet pudding, which appeared on no other
occasion, distinguished the days of his coming. I used to think him
a prodigiously rich man. All I could make out of him was, that he
and my father had been schoolfellows, a world ago, at Lincoln, and
that he came from the Mint. The Mint I knew to be a place where all
the money was coined- and I thought he was the owner of all that
money. Awful ideas of the Tower twined themselves about his
presence. He seemed above human infirmities and passions. A sort of
melancholy grandeur invested him. From some inexplicable doom I
fancied him obliged to go about in an eternal suit of mourning; a
captive- a stately being let out of the Tower on Saturdays. Often have
I wondered at the temerity of my father, who, in spite of an
habitual general respect which we all in common manifested towards
him, would venture now and then to stand up against him in some
argument, touching their youthful days. The houses of the ancient city
of Lincoln are divided (as most of my readers know) between the
dwellers on the hill and in the valley. This marked distinction formed
an obvious division between the boys who lived above (however
brought together in a common school) and the boys whose paternal
residence was on the plain; a sufficient cause of hostility in the
code of these young Grotiuses. My father had been a leading
Mountaineer; and would still maintain the general superiority, in
skill and hardihood, of the Above Boys (his own faction) over the
Below Boys (so were they called), of which party his contemporary
had been a chieftain. Many and hot were the skirmishes on this
topic- the only one upon which the old gentleman was ever brought out-
and bad blood bred; even sometimes almost to the recommencement (so
I expected) of actual hostilities. But my father, who scorned to
insist upon advantages, generally contrived to turn the conversation
upon some adroit by-commendation of the old Minster; in the general
preference of which, before all other cathedrals in the island, the
dweller on the hill, and the plain-born, could meet on a
conciliating level, and lay down their less important differences.
Once only I saw the old gentleman really ruffled, and I remembered
with anguish the thought that came over me: "Perhaps he will never
come here again." He had been pressed to take another plate of the
viand, which I have already mentioned as the indispensable concomitant
of his visits. He had refused with a resistance amounting to rigour,
when my aunt, an old Lincolnian, but who had something of this, in
common with my cousin Bridget, that she would sometimes press civility
out of season- uttered the following memorable application- "Do take
another slice, Mr. Billet, for you do not get pudding every day."
The old gentleman said nothing at the time- but he took occasion in
the course of the evening, when some argument had intervened between
them, to utter with an emphasis which chilled the company, and which
chills me now as I write it- "Woman, you are superannuated!" John
Billet did not survive long after the digesting of this affront; but
he survived long enough to assure me that peace was actually restored!
and, if I remember aright, another pudding was discreetly
substituted in the place of that which had occasioned the offence.
He died at the Mint (anno 1781), where he had long held, what he
accounted, a comfortable independence; and with five pounds,
fourteen shillings, and a penny, which were found in his escritoire
after his decease, left the world, blessing God that he had enough
to bury him, and that he had never been obliged to any man for a
sixpence. This was- a Poor Relation.
DETACHED THOUGHTS ON BOOKS AND READING
-
To mind the inside of a book is to entertain one's self with the
forced product of another man's brain. Now I think a man of quality
and breeding may be much amused with the natural sprouts of his own.
Lord Foppington, in the Relapse.
-
AN ingenious acquaintance of my own was so much struck with this
bright sally of his Lordship, that he has left off reading altogether,
to the great improvement of his originality. At the hazard of losing
some credit on this head, I must confess that I dedicate no
inconsiderable portion of my time to other people's thoughts. I
dream away my life in others' speculations. I love to lose myself in
other men's minds. When I am not walking, I am reading; I cannot sit
and think. Books think for me.
I have no repugnances. Shaftesbury is not too genteel for me, nor
Jonathan Wild too low. I can read anything which I call a book.
There are things in that shape which I cannot allow for such.
In this catalogue of books which are no books- biblia a-biblia- I
reckon Court Calendars, Directories, Pocket Books, Draught Boards,
bound and lettered on the back, Scientific Treatises, Almanacs,
Statutes at Large: the works of Hume, Gibbon, Robertson, Beattie,
Soame Jenyns, and generally, all those volumes which "no gentleman's
library should be without": the Histories of Flavius Josephus (that
learned Jew), and Paley's Moral Philosophy. With these exceptions, I
can read almost anything. I bless my stars for a taste so catholic, so
unexcluding.
I confess that it moves my spleen to see these things in books'
clothing perched upon shelves, like false saints, usurpers of true
shrines, intruders into the sanctuary, thrusting out the legitimate
occupants. To reach down a well-bound semblance of a volume, and
hope it some kind-hearted play-book, then, opening what "seem its
leaves," to come bolt upon a withering Population Essay. To expect a
Steele or a Farquhar, and find- Adam Smith. To view a well-arranged
assortment of block-headed Encyclopaedias (Anglicanas or
Metropolitanas) set out in an array of russia, or morocco, when a
tithe of that good leather would comfortably re-clothe my shivering
folios- would renovate Paracelsus himself, and enable old Raymund
Lully to look like himself again in the world. I never see these
impostors, but I long to strip them, to warm my ragged veterans in
their spoils.
To be strong-backed and neat-bound is the desideratum of a
volume. Magnificence comes after. This, when it can be afforded, is
not to be lavished upon all kinds of books indiscriminately. I would
not dress a set of Magazines, for instance, in full suit. The
dishabille, or half-binding (with russia backs ever) is our costume.
A Shakspeare or a Milton (unless the first editions), it were mere
foppery to trick out in gay apparel. The possession of them confers no
distinction. The exterior of them (the things themselves being so
common), strange to say, raises no sweet emotions, no tickling sense
of property in the owner. Thomson's Seasons, again, looks best (I
maintain it) a little torn and dog's-eared. How beautiful to a genuine
lover of reading are the sullied leaves, and worn-out appearance, nay,
the very odour (beyond russia), if we would not forget kind feelings
in fastidiousness, of an old "Circulating Library" Tom Jones, or Vicar
of Wakefield! How they speak of the thousand thumbs that have turned
over their pages with delight!- of the lone sempstress, whom they
may have cheered (milliner, or harder-working mantua-maker) after
her long day's needle-toil, running far into midnight, when she has
snatched an hour, ill spared from sleep, to steep her cares, as in
some Lethean cup, in spelling out their enchanting contents! Who would
have them a whit less soiled? What better condition could we desire to
see them in?
In some respects the better a book is, the less it demands from
binding. Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, and all that class of perpetually
self-reproductive volumes- Great Nature's Stereotypes- we see them
individually perish with less regret, because we know the copies of
them to be "eterne." But where a book is at once both good and rare-
where the individual is almost the species, and when that perishes,
-
We know not where is that Promethean torch
That can its light relumine,-
-
such a book, for instance, as the Life of the Duke of Newcastle, by
his Duchess- no casket is rich enough, no casing sufficiently durable,
to honour and keep safe such a jewel.
Not only rare volumes of this description, which seem hopeless ever
to be reprinted, but old editions of writers, such as Sir Phillip
Sydney, Bishop Taylor, Milton in his prose works, Fuller- of whom we
have reprints, yet the books themselves, though they go about, and
are talked of here and there, we know have not endenizened
themselves (nor possibly ever will) in the national heart, so as to
become stock books- it is good to possess these in durable and
costly covers. I do not care for a First Folio of Shakspeare. I rather
prefer the common editions of Rowe and Tonson, without notes, and with
plates, which, being so execrably bad, serve as maps or modest
remembrancers, to the text; and without pretending to any supposable
emulation with it, are so much better than the Shakspeare gallery
engravings, which did. I have a community of feeling with my
countrymen about his Plays, and I like those editions of him best
which have been oftenest tumbled about and handled.- On the
contrary, I cannot read Beaumont and Fletcher but in Folio. The Octavo
editions are painful to look at. I have no sympathy with them. If they
were as much read as the current editions of the other poet, I
should prefer them in that shape to the older one. I do not know a
more heartless sight than the reprint of the Anatomy of Melancholy.
What need was there of unearthing the bones of that fantastic old
great man, to expose them in a winding-sheet of the newest fashion
to modern censure? what hapless stationer could dream of Burton ever
becoming popular?- The wretched Malone could not do worse, when he
bribed the sexton of Stratford church to let him whitewash the painted
effigy of old Shakspeare, which stood there, in rude but lively
fashion depicted, to the very colour of the cheek, the eye, the
eyebrow, hair, the very dress he used to wear- the only authentic
testimony we had, however imperfect, of these curious parts and
parcels of him. They covered him over with a coat of white paint. By
__, if I had been a justice of peace for Warwickshire, I would have
clapt both commentator and sexton fast in the stocks, for a pair of
meddling sacrilegious varlets.
I think I see them at their work- these sapient trouble-tombs.
Shall I be thought fantastical if I confess that the names of
some of our poets sound sweeter, and have a finer relish to the ear-
to mine, at least- than that of Milton or of Shakspeare? It may be
that the latter are more staled and rung upon in common discourse. The
sweetest names, and which carry a perfume in the mention, are, Kit
Marlowe, Drayton, Drummond of Hawthornden, and Cowley.
Much depends upon when and where you read a book. In the five
or six impatient minutes, before the dinner is quite ready, who
would think of taking up the Faery Queen for a stop-gap, or a volume
of Bishop Andrewes' sermons?
Milton almost requires a solemn service of music to be played
before you enter upon him. But he brings his music, to which, who
listens, had need bring docile thoughts, and purged ears.
Winter evenings- the world shut out- with less of ceremony the
gentle Shakspeare enters. At such a season the Tempest, or his own
Winter's Tale-
These two poets you cannot avoid reading aloud- to yourself, or (as
it chances) to some single person listening. More than one- and it
degenerates into an audience.
Books of quick interest, that hurry on for incidents, are for the
eye to glide over only. It will not do to read them out. I could never
listen to even the better kind of modern novels without extreme
irksomeness.
A newspaper, read out, is intolerable. In some of the Bank
offices it is the custom (to save so much individual time) for one
of the clerks- who is the best scholar- to commence upon the
"Times," or the "Chronicle," and recite its entire contents aloud,
pro bono publico. With every advantage of lungs and elocution, the
effect is singularly vapid. In barbers shops and public-houses a
fellow will get up and spell out a paragraph, which he communicates as
some discovery. Another follows with his selection. So the entire
journal transpires at length by piecemeal. Seldom-readers are slow
readers, and, without this expedient, no one in the company would
probably ever travel through the contents of a whole paper.
Newspapers always excite curiosity. No one ever lays one down
without a feeling of disappointment.
What an eternal time that gentleman in black, at Nando's, keeps the
paper! I am sick of hearing the waiter bawling out incessantly, "The
'Chronicle' is in hand, Sir."
Coming into an inn at night- having ordered your supper- what can
be more delightful than to find lying in the window-seat, left there
time out of mind by the carelessness of some former guest- two or
three numbers of the old Town and Country Magazine, with its amusing
tete-a-tete pictures- "The Royal Lover and Lady G__"; "The Melting
Platonic and the old Beau,"- and such-like antiquated scandal? Would
you exchange it- at that time, and in that place- for a better book?
Poor Tobin, who latterly fell blind, did not regret it so much
for the weightier kinds of reading- the Paradise Lost, or Comus, he
could have read to him- but he missed the pleasure of skimming
over with his own eye a magazine, or a light pamphlet.
I should not care to be caught in the serious avenues of some
cathedral alone, and reading Candide.
I do not remember a more whimsical surprise than having been once
detected- by a familiar damsel- reclined at my ease upon the grass, on
Primrose Hill (her Cythera), reading- Pamela. There was nothing in
the book to make a man seriously ashamed at the exposure; but as she
seated herself down by me, and seemed determined to read in company, I
could have wished it had been- any other book. We read on very
sociably for a few pages;. and, not finding the author much to her
taste, she got up, and- went away. Gentle casuist, I leave it to
thee to conjecture, whether the blush (for there was one between us)
was the property of the nymph or the swain in this dilemma. From me
you shall never get the secret.
I am not much a friend to out-of-doors reading. I cannot settle
my spirits to it. I knew a Unitarian minister, who was generally to be
seen upon Snow Hill (as yet Skinner's Street was not), between the
hours of ten and eleven in the morning, studying a volume of
Lardner. I own this to have been a strain of abstraction beyond my
reach. I used to admire how he sidled along, keeping clear of
secular contacts. An illiterate encounter with a porter's knot, or a
bread-basket, would have quickly put to flight all the theology I am
master of, and have left me worse than indifferent to the five points.
There is a class of street-readers, whom I can never contemplate
without affection- the poor gentry, who, not having wherewithal to buy
or hire a book, filch a little learning at the open stalls- the owner,
with his hard eye, casting envious looks at them all the while, and
thinking when they will have done. Venturing tenderly, page after
page, expecting every moment when he shall interpose his interdict,
and yet unable to deny themselves the gratification, they "snatch a
fearful joy." Martin B__, in this way, by daily fragments, got through
two volumes of Clarissa, when the stall-keeper damped his laudable
ambition, by asking him (it was in his younger days) whether he
meant to purchase the work. M. declares, that under no circumstances
in his life did he ever peruse a book with half the satisfaction which
he took in those uneasy snatches. A quaint poetess of our day has
moralised upon this subject in two very touching but homely stanzas.
-
I saw a boy with eager eye
Open a book upon a stall,
And read, as he'd devour it all;
Which, when the stall-man did espy,
Soon to the boy I heard him call,
"You Sir, you never buy a book,
Therefore in one you shall not look."
The boy pass'd slowly on, and with a sigh
He wish'd he never had been taught to read,
Then of the old churl's books he should have
had no need.
-
Of sufferings the poor have many,
Which never can the rich annoy:
I soon perceived another boy,
Who look'd as if he had not any
Food, for that day at least- enjoy
The sight of cold meat in a tavern larder.
This boy's case, then thought I, is surely harder,
Thus hungry, longing, thus without a penny,
Beholding choice of dainty-dressed meat:
No wonder if he wish he ne'er had learn'd to eat.
STAGE ILLUSION
-
A PLAY is said to be well or ill acted, in proportion to the
scenical illusion produced. Whether such illusion can in any case be
perfect, is not the question. The nearest approach to it, we are told,
is, when the actor appears wholly unconscious of the presence of
spectators. In tragedy- in all which is to affect the feelings- this
undivided attention to his stage business seems indispensable. Yet
it is, in fact, dispensed with every day by our cleverest
tragedians; and while these references to an audience, in the shape of
rant or sentiment, are not too frequent or palpable, a sufficient
quantity of illusion for the purposes of dramatic interest may be said
to be produced in spite of them. But, tragedy apart, it may be
inquired whether, in certain characters in comedy, especially those
which are a little extravagant, or which involve some notion repugnant
to the moral sense, it is not a proof of the highest skill in the
comedian when, without absolutely appealing to an audience, he keeps
up a tacit understanding with them: and makes them, unconsciously to
themselves, a party in the scene. The utmost nicety is required in the
mode of doing this; but we speak only of the great artists in the
profession.
The most mortifying infirmity in human nature, to feel in
ourselves, or to contemplate in another, is, perhaps, cowardice. To
see a coward done to the life upon a stage would produce anything
but mirth. Yet we most of us remember Jack Bannister's cowards.
Could anything be more agreeable, more pleasant? We loved the
rogues. How was this effected but by the exquisite art of the actor in
a perpetual subinsinuation to us, the spectators, even in the
extremity of the shaking fit, that he was not half such a coward as we
took him for? We saw all the common symptoms of the malady upon him;
the quivering lip, the cowering knees, the teeth chattering; and could
have sworn "that man was frightened." But we forgot all the while-
or kept it almost a secret to ourselves- that he never once lost his
self-possession; that he let out, by a thousand droll looks and
gestures- meant at us, and not at all supposed to be visible to
his fellows in the scene, that his confidence in his own resources had
never once deserted him. Was this a genuine picture of a coward; or
not rather a likeness, which the clever artist contrived to palm
upon us instead of an original; while we secretly connived at the
delusion for the purpose of greater pleasure, than a more genuine
counterfeiting of the imbecility, helplessness, and utter
self-desertion, which we know to be concomitants of cowardice in
real life, could have given us?
Why are misers so hateful in the world, and so endurable on the
stage, but because the skilful actor, by a sort of sub-reference,
rather than direct appeal to us, disarms the character of a great deal
of its odiousness, by seeming to engage our compassion for the
insecure tenure by which he holds his money-bags and parchments? By
this subtle vent half of the hatefulness of the character- the
self-closeness with which in real life it coils itself up from the
sympathies of men- evaporates. The miser becomes sympathetic;
i.e., is no genuine miser. Here again a diverting likeness is
substituted for a very disagreeable reality.
Spleen, irritability- the pitiable infirmities of old men, which
produce only pain to behold in the realities, counterfeited upon a
stage, divert not altogether for the comic appendages to them, but
in part from an inner conviction that they are being acted before
us; that a likeness only is going on, and not the thing itself. They
please by being done under the life, or beside it; not to the
life. When Gattie acts an old man, is he angry indeed? or only a
pleasant counterfeit, just enough of a likeness to recognise,
without pressing upon us the uneasy sense of a reality?
Comedians, paradoxical as it may seem, may be too natural. It was
the case with a late actor. Nothing could be more earnest or true than
the manner of Mr. Emery; this told excellently in his Tyke, and
characters of a tragic cast. But when he carried the same rigid
exclusiveness of attention to the stage business, and wilful blindness
and oblivion of everything before the curtain into his comedy, it
produced a harsh and dissonant effect. He was out of keeping with
the rest of the Personae Dramatis. There was as little link
between him and them, as betwixt himself and the audience. He was a
third estate- dry, repulsive, and unsocial to all. Individually
considered, his execution was masterly. But comedy is not this
unbending thing; for this reason, that the same degree of
credibility is not required of it as to serious scenes. The degrees of
credibility demanded to the two things may be illustrated by the
different sort of truth which we expect when a man tells us a mournful
or a merry story. If we suspect the former of falsehood in any one
tittle, we reject it altogether. Our tears refuse to flow at a
suspected imposition. But the teller of a mirthful tale has latitude
allowed him. We are content with less than absolute truth. 'Tis the
same with dramatic illusion. We confess we love in comedy to see an
audience naturalised behind the scenes- taken into the interest of the
drama, welcomed as bystanders, however. There is something
ungracious in a comic actor holding himself aloof from all
participation or concern with those who are come to be diverted by
him. Macbeth must see the dagger, and no ear but his own be told of
it; but an old fool in farce may think he sees something, and by
conscious words and looks express it, as plainly as he can speak, to
pit, box, and gallery. When an impertinent in tragedy, an Osric, for
instance, breaks in upon the serious passions of the scene, we approve
of the contempt with which he is treated. But when the pleasant
impertinent of comedy, in a piece purely meant to give delight, and
raise mirth out of whimsical perplexities, worries the studious man
with taking up his leisure, or making his house his home, the same
sort of contempt expressed (however natural) would destroy the
balance of delight in the spectators. To make the intrusion comic, the
actor who plays the annoyed man must a little desert nature; he
must, in short, be thinking of the audience, and express only so
much dissatisfaction and peevishness as is consistent with the
pleasure of comedy. In other words, his perplexity must seem half
put on. If he repel the intruder with the sober set face of a man in
earnest, and more especially if he deliver his expostulations in a
tone which in the world must necessarily provoke a duel, his real-life
manner will destroy the whimsical and purely dramatic existence of the
other character (which to render it comic demands an antagonist
comicality on the part of the character opposed to it), and convert
what was meant for mirth, rather than belief, into a downright piece
of impertinence indeed, which would raise no diversion in us, but
rather stir pain, to see inflicted in earnest upon any unworthy
person. A very judicious actor (in most of his parts) seems to have
fallen into an error of this sort in his playing with Mr. Wrench in
the farce of Free and Easy.
Many instances would be tedious; these may suffice to show that
comic acting at least does not always demand from the performer that
strict abstraction from all reference to an audience which is
exacted of it; but that in some cases a sort of compromise may take
place, and all the purposes of dramatic delight be attained by a
judicious understanding, not too openly announced, between the
ladies and gentlemen- on both sides of the curtain.
TO THE SHADE OF ELLISTON
-
JOYOUSEST of once embodied spirits, whither at length hast thou
flown? to what genial region are we permitted to conjecture that
thou hast flitted?
Art thou sowing thy WILD OATS yet (the harvest time was still to
come with thee) upon casual sands of Avernus? or art thou enacting
ROVER (as we would gladlier think) by wandering Elysian streams?
This mortal frame, while thou didst play thy brief antics amongst
us, was in truth anything but a prison to thee, as the vain
Platonist dreams of this body to be no better than a county gaol,
forsooth, or some house of durance vile, whereof the five senses are
the fetters. Thou knewest better than to be in a hurry to cast off
those gyves; and had notice to quit, I fear, before thou wert quite
ready to abandon this fleshy tenement. It was thy Pleasure-House,
thy Palace of Dainty Devices: thy Louvre, or thy White-Hall.
What new mysterious lodgings dost thou tenant now? or when may we
expect thy aerial house-warming?
Tartarus we know, and we have read of the Blessed Shades; now
cannot I intelligibly fancy thee in either.
Is it too much to hazard a conjecture, that (as the schoolmen
admitted a receptacle apart for Patriarchs and un-chrisom babes) there
may exist- not far perchance from that store-house of all vanities,
which Milton saw in vision- a LIMBO somewhere for PLAYERS? and that
-
Up thither like aerial vapours fly
Both all Stage things, and all that in Stage things
Built their fond hopes of glory, or lasting fame?
All the unaccomplished works of Authors' hands,
Abortive, monstrous, or unkindly mixed,
Damn'd upon earth, fleet thither-
Play, Opera, Farce, with all their trumpery.-
-
There, by the neighbouring moon (by some not improperly supposed
thy Regent Planet upon earth), mayst thou not still be acting thy
managerial pranks, great disembodied Lessee? but Lessee still, and
still a manager.
In Green Rooms, impervious to mortal eye, the muse beholds thee
wielding posthumous empire.
Thin ghosts of Figurantes (never plump on earth) circle thee in
endlessly, and still their song is Fie on sinful Phantasy!
Magnificent were thy capriccios on this globe of earth, ROBERT
WILLIAM ELLISTON! for as yet we know not thy new name in heaven.
It irks me to think, that, stript of thy regalities, thou
shouldst ferry over, a poor forked shade, in crazy Stygian wherry.
Methinks- I hear the old boatman, paddling by the weedy wharf, with
raucid voice, bawling "SCULLS, SCULLS": to which, with waving hand,
and majestic action, thou deignest no reply, other than in two curt
monosyllables, "No: Oars."
But the laws of Pluto's kingdom know small difference between
king and cobbler; manager and call-boy; and, if haply your dates of
life were conterminant, you are quietly taking your passage, cheek
by cheek (O ignoble levelling of Death) with the shade of some
recently departed candle-snuffer.
But mercy! what strippings, what tearing off of histrionic robes,
and private vanities! what denudations to the bone, before the surly
Ferryman will admit you to set a foot within his battered lighter.
Crowns, sceptres; shield, sword, and truncheon; thy own
coronation robes (for thou hast brought the whole property-man's
wardrobe with thee, enough to sink a navy); the judge's ermine; the
coxcomb's wig; the snuff-box a la Foppington- all must overboard, he
positively. swears- and that Ancient Mariner brooks no denial; for,
since the tiresome monodrame of the old Thracian Harper, Charon, it is
to be believed, hath shown small taste for theatricals.
Ay, now 'tis done. You are just boat-weight; pura et puta anima.
But, bless me, how little you look!
So shall we all look- kings and keysars- stripped for the last
voyage.
But the murky rogue pushes off. Adieu, pleasant and thrice pleasant
shade! with my parting thanks for many a heavy hour of life
lightened by thy harmless extravaganzas, public or domestic.
Rhadamanthus, who tries the lighter causes below, leaving to his
two brethren the heavy calendars- honest Rhadamanth, always partial to
players, weighing their parti-coloured existence here upon earth,-
making account of the few foibles, that may have shaded thy real
life, as we call it (though substantially, scarcely less a vapour
than thy idlest vagaries upon the boards of Drury), as but of so
many echoes, natural repercussions, and results to be expected from
the assumed extravagancies of thy secondary or mock life,
nightly upon a stage- after a lenient castigation, with rods lighter
than of those Medusean ringlets, but just enough to "whip the
offending Adam out of thee," shall courteously dismiss thee at the
right-hand gate- the O. P. side of Hades- that conducts to masques and
merry-makings in the Theatre Royal of Proserpine.
-
PLAUDITO, ET VALETO
ELLISTONIANA
-
MY acquaintance with the pleasant creature, whose loss we all
deplore, was but slight.
My first introduction to E., which afterwards ripened into an
acquaintance a little on this side of intimacy, was over a counter
in the Leamington Spa Library, then newly entered upon by a branch
of his family. E., whom nothing misbecame- to auspicate, I suppose,
the filial concern, and set it a-going with a lustre- was serving in
person two damsels fair, who had come into the shop ostensibly to
inquire for some new publication, but in reality to have a sight of
the illustrious shopman, hoping some conference. With what an air
did he reach down the volume, dispassionately giving his opinion of
the worth of the work in question, and launching out into a
dissertation on its comparative merits with those of certain
publications of a similar stamp, its rivals! his enchanted customers
fairly hanging on his lips, subdued to their authoritative sentence.
So have I seen a gentleman in comedy acting the shopman. So Lovelace
sold his gloves in King Street. I admired the histrionic art, by which
he contrived to carry clean away every notion of disgrace, from the
occupation he had so generously submitted to; and from that hour I
judged him, with no after repentance, to be a person with whom it
would be a felicity to be more acquainted.
To descant upon his merits as a Comedian would be superfluous. With
his blended private and professional habits alone I have to do; that
harmonious fusion of the manners of the player into those of
everyday life, which brought the stage boards into streets, and
dining-parlours, and kept up the play when the play was ended.- "I
like Wrench," a friend was saying to him one day, "because he is the
same, natural, easy creature, on the stage, that he is off." "My
case exactly," retorted Elliston- with a charming forgetfulness,
that the converse of a proposition does not always lead to the same
conclusion- "I am the same person off the stage that I am on." The
inference, at first sight, seems identical; but examine it a little,
and it confesses only, that the one performer was never, and the other
always, acting.
And in truth this was the charm of Elliston's private deportment.
You had spirited performance always going on before your eyes, with
nothing to pay. As where a monarch takes up his casual abode for a
night, the poorest hovel which he honours by his sleeping in it,
becomes ipso facto for that time a palace; so wherever Ellison
walked, sate, or stood still, there was the theatre. He carried
about with him his pit, boxes, and galleries, and set up his
portable playhouse at corners of streets, and in the market-places.
Upon flintiest pavements he trod the boards still; and if his theme
chanced to be passionate, the green baize carpet of tragedy
spontaneously rose beneath his feet. Now this was hearty, and showed a
love for his art. So Apelles always painted- in thought. So G. D.
always poetises. I hate a luke-warm artist. I have known actors- and
some of them of Elliston's own stamp- who shall have agreeably been
amusing you in the part of a rake or a coxcomb, through the two or
three hours of their dramatic existence; but no sooner does the
curtain fall with its leaden clatter, but a spirit of lead seems to
seize on all their faculties. They emerge sour, morose persons,
intolerable to their families, servants, etc. Another shall have
been expanding your heart with generous deeds and sentiments, till
it even beats with yearnings of universal sympathy; you absolutely
long to go home and do some good action. The play seems tedious,
till you can get fairly out of the house, and realise your laudable
intentions. At length the final bell rings, and this cordial
representative of all that is amiable in human breasts steps forth-
a miser. Elliston was more of a piece. Did he play Ranger? and did
Ranger fill the general bosom of the town with satisfaction? why
should he not be Ranger, and diffuse the same cordial satisfaction
among his private circles? with his temperament, his animal
spirits, his good-nature, his follies perchance, could he do
better than identify himself with his impersonation? Are we to like
a pleasant rake, or coxcomb, on the stage, and give ourselves airs
of aversion for the identical character, presented to us in actual
life? or what would the performer have gained by divesting himself
of the impersonation? Could the man Elliston have been essentially
different from his part, even if he had avoided to reflect to us
studiously, in private circles, the airy briskness, the forwardness,
and 'scape-goat trickeries of his protoype?
"But there is something not natural in this everlasting acting;
we want the real man."
Are you quite sure that it is not the man himself, whom you cannot,
or will not see, under some adventitious trappings, which,
nevertheless, sit not at all inconsistently upon him? What if it is
the nature of some men to be highly artificial? The fault is least
reprehensible in players. Cibber was his own Foppington, with almost
as much wit as Vanbrugh could add to it.
"My conceit of his person,"- it is Ben Jonson speaking of Lord
Bacon,- "was never increased towards him by his place or
honours. But I have, and do reverence him for the greatness,
that was only proper to himself; in that he seemed to me ever one of
the greatest men, that had been in many ages. In his adversity I
ever prayed that Heaven would give him strength; for greatness he
could not want."
The quality here commended was scarcely less conspicuous in the
subject of these idle reminiscences than in my Lord Verulam. Those who
have imagined that an unexpected elevation to the direction of a great
London Theatre affected the consequence of Elliston, or at all changed
his nature, knew not the essential greatness of the man whom they
disparage. It was my fortune to encounter him near St. Dunstan's
Church (which, with its punctual giants, is now no more than dust
and a shadow), on the morning of his election to that high office.
Grasping my hand with a look of significance, he only uttered,-
"Have you heard the news?- then, with another look following up the
blow, he subjoined, "I am the future Manager of Drury Lane
Theatre."- Breathless as he saw me, he stayed not for congratulation
or reply, but mutely stalked away, leaving me to chew upon his
new-blown dignities at leisure. In fact, nothing could be said to
it. Expressive silence alone could muse his praise. This was in his
great style.
But was he less great (be witness, O ye Powers of Equanimity,
that supported in the ruins of Carthage the consular exile, and more
recently transmuted, for a more illustrious exile, the barren
constableship of Elba into an image of Imperial France), when, in
melancholy after-years, again, much near the same spot, I met him,
when that sceptre had been wrested from his hand, and his dominion was
curtailed to the petty managership, and part proprietorshop, of the
small Olympic, his Elba? He still played nightly upon the boards
of Drury, but in parts, alas! allotted to him, not magnificently
distributed by him. Waiving his great loss as nothing, and
magnificently sinking the sense of fallen material grandeur in the
more liberal resentment of depreciations done to his more lofty
intellectual pretensions, "Have you heard" (his customary exordium)-
"have you heard," said he, "how they treat me? they put me in
comedy." Thought I- but his finger on his lips forbade any verbal
interruption- "where could they have put you better?" Then, after a
pause- "Where I formerly played Romeo, I now play Mercutio,"- and so
again he stalked away, neither staying, nor caring for, responses.
O, it was a rich scene,- but Sir A__ C__, the best of story-tellers
and surgeons, who mends a lame narrative almost as well as he sets a
fracture, alone could do justice to it,- that I was a witness to, in
the tarnished room (that had once been green) of that same little
Olympic. There, after his deposition from Imperial Drury, he
substituted a throne. That Olympic Hill was his "highest heaven";
himself "Jove in his chair." There he sat in state, while before
him, on complaint of prompter, was brought for judgment- how shall I
describe her?- one of those little tawdry things that flirt at the
tails of choruses- a probationer for the town, in either of its
senses- the pertest little drab- a dirty fringe and appendage of the
lamp's smoke- who, it seems, on some disapprobation expressed by a
"highly respectable" audience,- had precipitately quitted her
station on the boards, and withdrawn her small talents in disgust.
"And how dare you," said her manager,- assuming a censorial
severity, which would have crushed the confidence of a Vestris, and
disarmed that beautiful Rebel herself of her professional caprices-
I verily believe, he thought her standing before him- "how dare you,
Madam, withdraw yourself, without a notice, from your theatrical
duties?" "I was hissed, Sir." "And you have the presumption to
decide upon the taste of the town?" "I don't know that, Sir, but I
will never stand to be hissed," was the subjoinder of young
Confidence- when gathering up his features into one significant mass
of wonder, pity, and expostulatory indignation- in a lesson never to
have been lost upon a creature less forward than she who stood
before him- his words were these: "They have hissed me."
'Twas the identical argument a fortiori, which the son of
Peleus uses to Lycaon trembling under his lance, to persuade him to
take his destiny with a good grace. "I too am mortal." And it is to be
believed that in both cases the rhetoric missed of its application,
for want of a proper understanding with the faculties of the
respective recipients.
"Quite an Opera pit," he said to me, as he was courteously
conducting me over the benches of his Surrey Theatre, the last
retreat, and recess, of his everyday waning grandeur.
Those who knew Elliston, will know the manner in which he
pronounced the latter sentence of the few words I am about to
record. One proud day to me he took his roast mutton with us in the
Temple, to which I had superadded a preliminary haddock. After a
rather plentiful partaking of the meagre banquet, not unrefreshed with
the humbler sort of liquors, I made a sort of apology for the humility
of the fare, observing that for my own part I never ate but one dish
at dinner. "I too never eat but one thing at dinner,"- was his
reply- then after a pause- "reckoning fish as nothing." The manner was
all. It was as if by one peremptory sentence he had decreed the
annihilation of all the savoury esculents, which the pleasant and
nutritious-food-giving Ocean pours forth upon poor humans from her
watery bosom. This was greatness, tempered with considerate
tenderness to the feelings of his scanty but welcoming entertainer.
Great wert thou in thy life, Robert William Elliston! and not
lessened in thy death, if report speak truly, which says that thou
didst direct that thy mortal remains should repose under no
inscription but one of pure Latinity. Classical was thy bringing up!
and beautiful was the feeling on thy last bed, which, connecting the
man with the boy, took thee back to thy latest exercise of
imagination, to the days when, undreaming of Theatres and
Managerships, thou wert a scholar, and an early ripe one, under the
roofs builded by the munificent and pious Colet. For thee the
Pauline Muses weep. In elegies, that shall silence this crude prose,
they shall celebrate thy praise.
THE OLD MARGATE HOY
-
I AM fond of passing my vacations (I believe I have said so before)
at one or other of the Universities. Next to these my choice would fix
me at some woody spot, such as the neighbourhood of Henley affords
in abundance, on the banks of my beloved Thames. But somehow or
other my cousin contrives to wheedle me, once in three or four
seasons, to a watering-place. Old attachments cling to her in spite of
experience. We have been dull at Worthing one summer, duller at
Brighton another, dullest at Eastbourn a third, and are at this moment
doing dreary penance at- Hastings!- and all because we were happy many
years ago for a brief week at Margate. That was our first sea-side
experiment, and many circumstances combined to make it the most
agreeable holiday of my life. We had neither of us seen the sea, and
we had never been from home so long together in company.
Can I forget thee, thou old Margate Hoy, with thy weather-beaten,
sun-burnt captain, and his rough accommodations- ill exchanged for the
foppery and fresh-water niceness of the modern steam-packet? To the
winds and waves thou committedst thy goodly freightage, and didst
ask no aid of magic fumes, and spells, and boiling caldrons. With
the gales of heaven thou wentest swimmingly; or, when it was their
pleasure, stoodest still with sailor-like patience. Thy course was
natural, not forced, as in a hot-bed; nor didst thou go poisoning
the breath of ocean with sulphureous smoke- a great sea chimera,
chimneying and furnacing the deep; or liker to that fire-god
parching up Scamander.
Can I forget thy honest, yet slender crew, with their coy reluctant
responses (yet to the suppression of anything like contempt) to the
raw questions, which we of the great city would be ever and anon
putting to them, as to the uses of this or that strange naval
implement? 'Specially can I forget thee, thou happy medium, thou shade
of refuge between us and them, conciliating interpreter of their skill
to our simplicity, comfortable ambassador between sea and land!- whose
sailor-trousers did not more convincingly assure thee to be an adopted
denizen of the former, than thy white cap, and whiter apron over them,
with thy neat-figured practice in thy culinary vocation, bespoke
thee to have been of inland nurture heretofore- a master cook of
Eastcheap? How busily didst thou ply thy multifarious occupation,
cook, mariner, attendant, chamberlain: here, there, like another
Ariel, flaming at once about all parts of the deck, yet with
kindlier ministrations- not to assist the tempest, but, as if
touched with a kindred sense of our infirmities, to soothe the
qualms which that untried motion might haply raise in our crude
land-fancies. And when the o'erwashing billows drove us below deck
(for it was far gone in October, and we had stiff and blowing
weather), how did thy officious ministerings, still catering for our
comfort, with cards, and cordials, and thy more cordial
conversation, alleviate the closeness and the confinement of thy
else (truth to say) not very savoury, nor very inviting, little cabin!
With these additaments to boot, we had on board a fellow-passenger,
whose discourse in verity might have beguiled a longer voyage than
we meditated, and have made mirth and wonder abound as far as the
Azores. He was a dark, Spanish-complexioned young man, remarkably
handsome, with an officer-like assurance and an insuppressible
volubility of assertion. He was, in fact, the greatest liar I had
met with then, or since. He was none of your hesitating,
half-story-tellers (a most painful description of mortals) who go on
sounding your belief, and only giving you as much as they see you
can swallow at a time- the nibbling pick-pockets of your patience- but
one who committed downright, daylight depredations upon his
neighbour's faith. He did not stand shivering upon the brink, but
was a hearty, thorough-paced liar, and plunged at once into the depths
of your credulity. I partly believe, he made pretty sure of his
company. Not many rich, not many wise, or learned, composed at that
time the common stowage of a Margate packet. We were, I am afraid, a
set of as unseasoned Londoners (let our enemies give it a worse
name) as Aldermanbury, or Watling Street, at that time of day could
have supplied. There might be an exception or two among us, but I
scorn to make any invidious distinctions among such a jolly,
companionable ship's company, as those were whom I sailed with.
Something too must be conceded to the Genius Loci. Had the confident
fellow told us half the legends on land which he favoured us with on
the other element, I flatter myself the good sense of most of us would
have revolted. But we were in a new world, with everything
unfamiliar about us, and the time and place disposed us to the
reception of any prodigious marvel whatsoever. Time has obliterated
from my memory much of his wild fablings; and the rest would appear
but dull, as written, and to be read on shore. He had been
Aide-de-camp (among other rare accidents and fortunes) to a Persian
Prince, and at one blow had stricken off the head of the King of
Carimania on horseback. He, of course, married the Prince's
daughter. I forget what unlucky turn in the politics of that court,
combining with the loss of his consort, was the reason of his quitting
Persia; but, with the rapidity of a magician, he transported
himself, along with his hearers, back to England, where we still found
him in the confidence of great ladies. There was some story of a
princess- Elizabeth, if I remember- having intrusted to his care an
extraordinary casket of jewels, upon some extraordinary occasion- but,
as I am not certain of the name or circumstance at this distance of
time, I must leave it to the Royal daughters of England to settle
the honour among themselves in private. I cannot call to mind half his
pleasant wonders; but I perfectly remember, that in the course of
his travels he had seen a phoenix; and he obligingly undeceived us
of the vulgar error, that there is but one of that species at a
time, assuring us that they were not uncommon in some parts of Upper
Egypt. Hitherto he had found the most implicit listeners. His dreaming
fancies had transported us beyond the "ignorant present." But when
(still hardying more and more in his triumphs over our simplicity)
he went on to affirm that he had actually sailed through the legs of
the Colossus at Rhodes, it really became necessary to make a stand.
And here I must do justice to the good sense and intrepidity of one of
our party, a youth, that had hitherto been one of his most deferential
auditors, who, from his recent reading, made bold to assure the
gentleman, that there must be some mistake, as "the Colossus in
question had been destroyed long since"; to whose opinion, delivered
with all modesty, our hero was obliging enough to concede thus much,
that "the figure was indeed a little damaged." This was the only
opposition he met with, and it did not at all seem to stagger him, for
he proceeded with his fables, which the same youth appeared to swallow
with still more complacency than ever,- confirmed, as it were, by
the extreme candour of that concession. With these prodigies he
wheedled us on till we came in sight of the Reculvers, which one of
our own company (having been the voyage before) immediately
recognising, and pointing out to us, was considered by us as no
ordinary seaman.
All this time sat upon the edge of the deck quite a different
character. It was a lad, apparently very poor, very infirm, and very
patient. His eye was ever on the sea, with a smile; and, if he
caught now and then some snatches of these wild legends, it was by
accident, and they seemed not to concern him. The waves to him
whispered more pleasant stories. He was as one, being with us. but not
of us. He heard the bell of dinner ring without stirring; and when
some of us pulled out our private stores- our cold meat and our
salads- he produced none, and seemed to want none. Only a solitary
biscuit he had laid in; provision for the one or two days and
nights, to which these vessels then were oftentimes obliged to prolong
their voyage. Upon a nearer acquaintance with him, which he seemed
neither to court nor decline, we learned that he was going to Margate,
with the hope of being admitted into the Infirmary there for
sea-bathing. His disease was a scrofula, which appeared to have
eaten all over him. He expressed great hopes of a cure; and when we
asked him, whether he had any friends where he was going, he replied
"he had no friends."
These pleasant, and some mournful passages, with the first sight of
the sea, co-operating with youth, and a sense of holidays, and
out-of-door adventure, to me that had been pent up in populous
cities for many months before,- have left upon my mind the fragrance
as of summer days gone by, bequeathing nothing but their remembrance
for cold and wintry hours to chew upon.
Will it be thought a digression (it may spare some unwelcome
comparisons), if I endeavour to account for the dissatisfaction
which I have heard so many persons confess to have felt (as I did
myself feel in part on this occasion), at the sight of the sea for
the first time? I think the reason usually given- referring to the
incapacity of actual objects for satisfying our preconceptions of
them- scarcely goes deep enough into the question. Let the same person
see a lion, an elephant, a mountain for the first time in his life,
and he shall perhaps feel himself a little mortified. The things do
not fill up that space which the idea of them seemed to take up in his
mind. But they have still a correspondency to his first notion, and in
time grow up to it, so as to produce a very similar impression:
enlarging themselves (if I may say so) upon familiarity. But the sea
remains a disappointment.- Is it not, that in the latter we had
expected to behold (absurdly, I grant, but, I am afraid, by the law of
imagination, unavoidably) not a definite object, as those wild beasts,
or that mountain compassable by the eye, but all the sea at once,
THE COMMENSURATE ANTAGONIST OF THE EARTH? I do not say we tell
ourselves so much, but the craving of the mind is to be satisfied with
nothing less. I will suppose the case of a young person of fifteen (as
I then was) knowing nothing of the sea, but from description. He comes
to it for the first time- all that he has been reading of it all his
life, and that the most enthusiastic part of life,- all he has
gathered from narratives of wandering seamen,- what he has gained from
true voyages, and what he cherishes as credulously from romance and
poetry,- crowding their images, and exacting strange tributes from
expectation.- He thinks of the great deep, and of those who go down
unto it; of its thousand isles, and of the vast continents it
washes; of its receiving the mighty Plate, or Orellana, into its
bosom, without disturbance, or sense of augmentation; of Biscay
swells, and the mariner
-
For many a day, and many a dreadful night,
Incessant labouring round the stormy Cape;
-
of fatal rocks, and the "still-vexed Bermoothes"; of great
whirlpools, and the water-spout; of sunken ships, and sumless
treasures swallowed up in the unrestoring depths; of fishes and quaint
monsters, to which all that is terrible on earth-
-
Be but as buggs to frighten babes withal,
Compared with the creatures in the sea's entral;
-
of naked savages, and Juan Fernandez; of pearls, and shells; of
coral beds, and of enchanted isles; of mermaids' grots-
I do not assert that in sober earnest he expects to be shown all
these wonders at once, but he is under the tyranny of a mighty
faculty, which haunts him with confused hints and shadows of all
these; and when the actual object opens first upon him, seen (in
tame weather, too, most likely) from our unromantic coasts- a speck, a
slip of sea-water, as it shows to him- what can it prove but a very
unsatisfying and even diminutive entertainment? Or if he has come to
it from the mouth of a river, was it much more than the river
widening? and, even out of sight of land, what had he but a flat
watery horizon about him, nothing comparable to the vast
o'er-curtaining sky, his familiar object, seen daily without dread
or amazement?- Who, in similar circumstances, has not been tempted
to exclaim with Charoba, in the poem of Gebir,
-
Is this the mighty ocean? is this all?
-
I love town or country; but this detestable Cinque Port is neither.
I hate these scrubbed shoots, thrusting out their starved foliage from
between the horrid fissures of dusty innutritious rocks; which the
amateur calls "verdure to the edge of the sea." I require woods, and
they show me stunted coppices. I cry out for the water-brooks, and
pant for fresh streams, and inland murmurs. I cannot stand all day
on the naked beach, watching the capricious hues of the sea,
shifting like the colours of a dying mullet. I am tired of looking out
at the windows of this island-prison. I would fain retire into the
interior of my cage. While I gaze upon the sea, I want to be on it,
over it, across it. It binds me in with chains, as of iron. My
thoughts are abroad. I should not so feel in Staffordshire. There is
no home for me here. There is no sense of home at Hastings. It is a
place of fugitive resort, an heterogeneous assemblage of sea-mews
and stock-brokers, Amphitrites of the town, and misses that coquet
with the Ocean. If it were what it was in its primitive shape, and
what it ought to have remained, a fair, honest fishing-town, and no
more, it were something- with a few straggling fishermen's huts
scattered about, artless as its cliffs, and with their materials
filched from them, it were something. I could abide to dwell with
Meshech; to assort with fisher-swains, and smugglers. There are, or
I dream there are, many of this latter occupation here. Their faces
become the place. I like a smuggler. He is the only honest thief. He
robs nothing but the revenue,- an abstraction I never greatly cared
about. I could go out with them in their mackerel boats, or about
their less ostensible business, with some satisfaction. I can even
tolerate those poor victims to monotony, who from day to day pace
along the beach, in endless progress and recurrence, to watch their
illicit countrymen- townsfolk or brethren perchance-, whistling to the
sheathing and unsheathing of their cutlasses (their only solace), who,
under the mild name of preventive service, keep up a legitimated civil
warfare in the deplorable absence of a foreign one, to show their
detestation of run hollands, and zeal for Old England. But it is the
visitants from town, that come here to say that they have been here,
with no more relish of the seat than a pond-perch or a dace might be
supposed to have, that are my aversion. I feel like a foolish dace
in these regions, and have as little toleration for myself here as for
them. What can they want here? if they had a true relish of the ocean,
why have they brought all this land luggage with them? or why pitch
their civilised tents in the desert? What mean these scanty
book-rooms- marine libraries as they entitle them- if the sea were, as
they would have us believe, a book "to read strange matter in"? what
are their foolish concert-rooms, if they come, as they would fain be
thought to do, to listen to the music of the waves? All is false and
hollow pretension. They come, because it is the fashion, and to
spoil the nature of the place. They are, mostly, as I have said,
stock-brokers; but I have watched the better sort of them- now and
then, an honest citizen (of the old stamp), in the simplicity of his
heart, shall bring down his wife and daughters, to taste the sea
breezes. I always know the date of their arrival. It is easy to see it
in their countenance. A day or two they go wandering on the
shingles, picking up cockle-shells, and thinking them great things;
but, in a poor week, imagination slackens: they begin to discover that
cockles produce no pearls, and then- O then!- if I could interpret for
the pretty creatures (I know they have not the courage to confess it
themselves) how gladly would they exchange their sea-side rambles
for a Sunday walk on the green-sward of their accustomed Twickenham
meadows!
I would ask of one of these sea-charmed emigrants, who think they
truly love the sea, with its wild usages, what would their feelings
be, if some of the unsophisticated aborigines of this place,
encouraged by their courteous questionings here, should venture, on
the faith of such assured sympathy between them, to return the
visit, and come up to see- London. I must imagine them with their
fishing-tackle on their back, as we carry our town necessaries. What a
sensation would it cause in Lothbury? What vehement laughter would
it not excite among
-
The daughters of Cheapside, and wives of Lombard Street!
-
I am sure that no town-bred or inland-born subjects can feel
their true and natural nourishment at these sea-places. Nature,
where she does not mean us for mariners and vagabonds, bids us stay at
home. The salt foam seems to nourish a spleen. I am not half so
good-natured as by the milder waters of my natural river. I would
exchange these sea-gulls for swans, and scud a swallow for ever
about the banks of Thamesis.
THE CONVALESCENT
-
A PRETTY severe fit of indisposition which, under the name of a
nervous fever, has made a prisoner of me for some weeks past, and is
but slowly leaving me, has reduced me to an incapacity of reflecting
upon any topic foreign to itself. Expect no healthy conclusions from
me this month, reader; I can offer you only sick men's dreams.
And truly the whole state of sickness is such; for what else is
it but a magnificent dream for a man to lie a-bed, and draw daylight
curtains about him; and, shutting out the sun, to induce a total
oblivion of all the works which are going on under it? To become
insensible to all the operations of life, except the beatings of one
feeble pulse?
If there be a regal solitude, it is a sick bed. How the patient
lords it there; what caprices he acts without control! how king-like
he sways his pillow- tumbling, and tossing, and shifting, and
lowering, and thumping, and flatting, and moulding it, to the
ever-varying requisitions of his throbbing temples.
He changes sides, oftener than a politician. Now he lies full
length, then half-length, obliquely, transversely, head and feet quite
across the bed; and none accuses him of tergiversation. Within the
four curtains he is absolute. They are his Mare Clausum.
How sickness enlarges the dimensions of a man's self to himself! he
is his own exclusive object. Supreme selfishness is inculcated upon
him as his only duty. 'Tis the Two Tables of the Law to him. He has
nothing to think of but how to get well. What passes out of doors,
or within them, so he hear not the jarring of them, affects him not.
A little while ago he was greatly concerned in the event of a
lawsuit, which was to be the making or the marring of his dearest
friend. He was to be seen trudging about upon this man's errand to
fifty quarters of the town at once, jogging this witness, refreshing
that solicitor. The cause was to come on yesterday. He is absolutely
as indifferent to the decision as if it were a question to be tried at
Pekin. Peradventure from some whispering, going on about the house,
not intended for his hearing, he picks up enough to make him
understand that things went cross-grained in the court yesterday,
and his friend is ruined. But the word "friend," and the word
"ruin," disturb him no more than so much jargon. He is not to think of
anything but how to get better.
What a world of foreign cares are merged in that absorbing
consideration!
He has put on the strong armour of sickness; he is wrapped in the
callous hide of suffering; he keeps his sympathy, like some curious
vintage, under trusty lock and key, for his own use only.
He lies pitying himself, honing and moaning to himself; he yearneth
over himself; his bowels are even melted within him, to think what
he suffers; he is not ashamed to weep over himself.
He is for ever plotting how to do some good to himself; studying
little stratagems and artificial alleviations.
He makes the most of himself; dividing himself, by an allowable
fiction, into as many distinct individuals, as he hath sore and
sorrowing members. Sometimes he meditates- as of a thing apart from
him- upon his poor aching head, and that dull pain which, dozing or
waking, lay in it all the past night like a log, or palpable substance
of pain, not to be removed without opening the very skull, as it
seemed, to take it thence. Or he pities his long, clammy, attenuated
fingers. He compassionates himself all over; and his bed is a very
discipline of humanity, and tender heart.
He is his own sympathiser; and instinctively feels that none can so
well perform that office for him. He cares for few spectators to his
tragedy. Only that punctual face of the old nurse pleases him, that
announces his broths and his cordials. He likes it because it is so
unmoved, and because he can pour forth his feverish ejaculations
before it as unreservedly as to his bed-post.
To the world's business he is dead. He understands not what the
callings and occupations of mortals are; only he has a glimmering
conceit of some such thing, when the doctor makes his daily call:
and even in the lines on that busy face he reads go multiplicity of
patients, but solely conceives of himself as the sick man. To what
other uneasy couch the good man is hastening, when he slips out of his
chamber, folding up his thin douceur so carefully, for fear of
rustling- is no speculation which he can at present entertain. He
thinks only of the regular return of the same phenomenon at the same
hour to-morrow.
Household rumours touch him not. Some faint murmur, indicative of
life going on within the house, soothes him, while he knows not
distinctly what it is. He is not to know anything, not to think of
anything. Servants gliding up or down the distant staircase,
treading as upon velvet, gently keep his ear awake, so long as he
troubles not himself further than with some feeble guess at their
errands. Exacter knowledge would be a burthen to him: he can just
endure the pressure of conjecture. He opens his eye faintly at the
dull stroke of the muffled knocker, and closes it again without asking
"Who was it?" He is flattered by a general notion that inquiries are
making after him, but he cares not to know the name of the inquirer.
In the general stillness, and awful hush of the house, he lies in
state, and feels his sovereignty.
To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives. Compare the silent
tread, and quiet ministry, almost by the eye only, with which he is
served- with the careless demeanour, the unceremonious goings in and
out (slapping of doors, or leaving them open) of the very same
attendants, when he is getting a little better- and you will
confess, that from the bed of sickness (throne let me rather call
it) to the elbow-chair of convalescence, is a fall from dignity,
amounting to a deposition.
How convalescence shrinks a man back to his pristine stature! where
is now the space, which he occupied so lately, in his own, in the
family's eye?
The scene of his regalities, his sick room, which was his
presence chamber, where he lay and acted his despotic fancies- how
is it reduced to a common bedroom! The trimness of the very bed has
something petty and unmeaning about it. It is made every day. How
unlike to that wavy, many-furrowed, oceanic surface, which it
presented so short a time since, when to make it was a service not
to be thought of at oftener than three or four day revolutions, when
the patient was with pain and grief to be lifted for a little while
out of it, to submit to the encroachments of unwelcome neatness, and
decencies which his shaken frame deprecated; then to be lifted into it
again, for another three or four days' respite, to flounder it out
of shape again, while every fresh furrow was an historical record of
some shifting posture, some uneasy turning, some seeking for a
little ease; and the shrunken skin scarce told a truer story than
the crumpled coverlid.
Hushed are those mysterious sighs- those groans- so much more
awful, while we knew not from what caverns of vast hidden suffering
they proceeded. The Lernean pangs are quenched. The riddle of sickness
is solved; and Philoctetes is become an ordinary personage.
Perhaps some relic of the sick man's dream of greatness survives in
the still lingering visitations of the medical attendant. But how is
he, too, changed with everything else! Can this be he- this man of
news- of chat- of anecdote- of everything but physic- can this be
he, who so lately came between the patient and his cruel enemy, as
on some solemn embassy from Nature, erecting herself into a high
mediating party?- Pshaw! 'tis some old woman.
Farewell with him all that made sickness pompous- the spell that
hushed the household- the desertlike stillness, felt throughout its
inmost chambers- the mute attendance- the inquiry by looks- the
still softer delicacies of self-attention- the sole and single eye
of distemper alonely fixed upon itself- world-thoughts excluded- the
man a world unto himself- his own theatre-
-
What a speck is he dwindled into!
-
In this flat swamp of convalescence, left by the ebb of sickness,
yet far enough from the terra firma of established health, your
note, dear Editor, reached me, requesting- an article. In Articulo
Mortis, thought I; but it is something hard- and the quibble, wretched
as it was, relieved me. The summons, unseasonable as it appeared,
seemed to link me on again to the petty businesses of life, which I
had lost sight of; a gentle call to activity, however trivial; a
wholesome meaning from that preposterous dream of self-absorption- the
puffy state of sickness- in which I confess to have lain so long,
insensible to the magazines and monarchies of the world alike; to
its laws, and to its literature. The hypochondriac flatus is
subsiding; the acres, which in imagination I had spread over- for
the sick man swells in the sole contemplation of his single
sufferings, till he becomes a Tityus to himself- are wasting to a
span; and for the giant of self-importance, which I was so lately, you
have me once again in my natural pretensions- the lean and meagre
figure of your insignificant Essayist.
SANITY OF TRUE GENIUS
-
SO far from the position holding true, that great wit (or genius,
in our modern way of speaking) has a necessary alliance with insanity,
the greatest wits, on the contrary, will ever be found to be the
sanest writers. It is impossible for the mind to conceive of a mad
Shakspeare. The greatness of wit, by which the poetic talent is here
chiefly to be understood, manifests itself in the admirable balance of
all the faculties. Madness is the disproportionate straining or excess
of any one of them. "So strong a wit," says Cowley, speaking of a
poetical friend,
-
"-did Nature to him frame,
As all things but his judgment overcame;
His judgment like the heavenly moon did show,
Tempering that mighty sea below."
-
The ground of the mistake is, that men, finding in the raptures
of the higher poetry a condition of exaltation, to which they have
no parallel in their own experience, besides the spurious
resemblance of it in dreams and fevers, impute a state of dreaminess
and fever to the poet. But the true poet dreams being awake. He is not
possessed by his subject, but has dominion over it. In the groves of
Eden he walks familiar as in his native paths. He ascends the empyrean
heaven, and is not intoxicated.- He treads the burning marl without
dismay; he wins his flight without self-loss through realms of chaos
"and old night." Or if, abandoning himself to that severer chaos of
a "human mind untuned," he is content awhile to be mad with Lear, or
to hate mankind (a sort of madness) with Timon, neither is that
madness, nor this misanthropy, so unchecked, but that,- never
letting the reins of reason wholly go, while most he seems to do
so,- he has his better genius still whispering at his ear, with the
good servant Kent suggesting saner counsels, or with the honest
steward Flavius recommending kindlier resolutions. Where he seems most
to recede from humanity, he will be found the truest to it. From
beyond the scope of Nature if he summon possible existences, he
subjugates them to the law of her consistency. He is beautifully loyal
to that sovereign directress, even when he appears most to betray
and desert her. His ideal tribes submit to policy; his very monsters
are tamed to his hand, even as that wild sea-brood, shepherded by
Proteus. He tames, and he clothes them with attributes of flesh and
blood, till they wonder at themselves, like Indian Islanders forced to
submit to European vesture. Caliban, the Witches, are as true to the
laws of their own nature (ours with a difference), as Othello, Hamlet,
and Macbeth. Herein the great and the little wits are differenced;
that if the latter wander ever so little from nature or actual
existence, they lose themselves and their readers. Their phantoms
are lawless; their visions nightmares. They do not create, which
implies shaping and consistency. Their imaginations are not active-
for to be active is to call something into act and form- but
passive, as men in sick dreams. For the super-natural, or something
super-added to what we know of nature, they give you the plainly
non-natural. And if this were all, and that these mental
hallucinations were discoverable only in the treatment of subjects out
of nature, or transcending it, the judgment might with some plea be
pardoned if it ran riot, and a little wantonised: but even in the
describing of real and everyday life, that which is before their eyes,
one of these lesser wits shall more deviate from natures- show more of
that inconsequence, which has a natural alliance with frenzy,- than
a great genius in his "maddest fits," as Withers somewhere calls them.
We appeal to any one that is acquainted with the common run of
Lane's novels,- as they existed some twenty or thirty years back,-
those scanty intellectual viands of the whole female reading public,
till a happier genius arose, and expelled for ever the innutritious
phantoms,- whether he has not found his brain more "betossed," his
memory more puzzled, his sense of when and where more confounded,
among the improbable events, the incoherent incidents, the
inconsistent characters, or no-characters, of some third-rate
love-intrigue- where the persons shall be a Lord Glendamour and a Miss
Rivers, and the scene only alternate between Bath and Bond Street- a
more bewildering dreaminess induced upon him, than he has felt
wandering over all the fairy-grounds of Spenser. In the productions we
refer to, nothing but names and places is familiar; the persons are
neither of this world nor of any other conceivable one; an endless
stream of activities without purpose, or purposes destitute of
motive:- we meet phantoms in our known walks; fantasques only
christened. In the poet we have names which announce fiction; and we
have absolutely no place at all, for the things and persons of the
Faery Queen prate not of their "whereabout." But in their inner
nature, and the law of their speech and actions, we are at home, and
upon acquainted ground. The one turns life into a dream; the other
to the wildest dreams gives the sobrieties of everyday occurrences. By
what subtle art of tracing the mental processes it is effected, we are
not philosophers enough to explain, but in that wonderful episode of
the cave of Mammon, in which the Money God appears first in the lowest
form of a miser, is then a worker of metals, and becomes the god of
all the treasures of the world; and has a daughter, Ambition, before
whom all the world kneels for favours- with the Hesperian fruit, the
waters of Tantalus, with Pilate washing his hands vainly, but not
impertinently, in the same stream- that we should be at one moment
in the cave of an old hoarder of treasures, at the next at the forge
of the Cyclops, in a palace and yet in hell, all at once, with the
shifting mutations of the most rambling dream, and our judgment yet
all the time awake, and neither able nor willing to detect the
fallacy,- is a proof of that hidden sanity which still guides the poet
in the wildest seeming aberrations.
It is not enough to say that the whole episode is a copy of the
mind's conceptions in sleep; it is, in some sort- but what a copy! Let
the most romantic of us, that has been entertained all night with
spectacle of some wild and magnificent vision, recombine it in the
morning, and try it by his waking judgment. That which appeared so
shifting, and yet so coherent, while that faculty was passive, when it
comes under cool examination shall appear so reasonless and so
unlinked, that we are ashamed to have been so deluded; and to have
taken, though but in sleep, a monster for a god. But the transitions
in this episode are every whit as violent as in the most extravagant
dream, and yet the waking judgment ratifies them.
CAPTAIN JACKSON
-
AMONG the deaths in our obituary for this month, I observe with
concern "At his cottage on the Bath road, Captain Jackson." The name
and attribution are common enough; but a feeling like reproach
persuades me, that this could have been no other in fact than my
dear old friend, who some five-and-twenty years ago rented a tenement,
which he was pleased to dignify with the appellation here used,
about a mile from Westbourn Green. Alack, how good men, and the good
turns they do us, slide out of memory, and are recalled but by the
surprise of some such sad memento as that which now lies before us!
He whom I mean was a retired half-pay officer, with a wife and
two grown-up daughters, whom he maintained with the port and notions
of gentlewomen upon that slender professional allowance. Comely
girls they were too.
And was I in danger of forgetting this man?- his cheerful
suppers- the noble tone of hospitality, when first you set your foot
in the cottage- the anxious ministerings about you, where little
or nothing (God knows) was to be ministered.- Althea's horn in a
poor platter- the power of self-enchantment, by which, in his
magnificent wishes to entertain you, he multiplied his means to
bounties.
You saw with your bodily eyes indeed what seemed a bare scrag, cold
savings from the foregone meal- remnant hardly sufficient to send a
mendicant from the door contented. But in the copious will- the
revelling imagination of your host- the "mind, the mind, Master
Shallow," whole beeves were spread before you- hecatombs- no end
appeared to the profusion.
It was the widow's cruse- the loaves and fishes; carving could
not lessen, nor helping diminish it- the stamina were left- the
elemental bone still flourished, divested of its accidents.
"Let us live while we can," methinks I hear the open-handed
creature exclaim; "while we have, let us not want," "here is plenty
left"; "want for nothing"- with many more such hospitable sayings, the
spurs of appetite, and old concomitants of smoking boards, and
feast-oppressed chargers. Then sliding a slender ratio of Single
Gloucester upon his wife's plate, or the daughters', he would convey
the remanent rind into his own, with a merry quirk of "the nearer
the bone," etc., and declaring that he universally preferred the
outside. For we had our table distinctions, you are to know, and
some of us in a manner sate above the salt. None but his guest or
guests dreamed of tasting flesh luxuries at night, the fragments
were vere hospitibus sacra. But of one thing or another there was
always enough, and leavings: only he would sometimes finish the
remainder crust, to show that he wished no savings.
Wine we had none; nor, except on very rare occasions, spirits;
but the sensation of wine was there. Some thin kind of ale I remember-
"British beverage," he would say! "Push about, my boys"; "Drink to
your sweethearts, girls." At every meagre draught a toast must
ensue, or a song. All the forms of good liquor were there, with none
of the effects wanting. Shut your eyes, and you would swear a
capacious bowl of punch was foaming in the centre, with beams of
generous Port or Madeira radiating to it from each of the table
corners. You got flustered, without knowing whence; tipsy upon
words; and reeled under the potency of his unperforming Bacchanalian
encouragements.
We had our songs- "Why, Soldiers, why,"- and the "British
Grenadiers"- in which last we were all obliged to bear chorus. Both
the daughters sang. Their proficiency was a nightly theme- the masters
he had given them- the "no-expense" which he spared to accomplish them
in a science "so necessary to young women." But then- they could not
sing "without the instrument."
Sacred, and, by me, never-to-be-violated, secrets of Poverty!
Should I disclose your honest aims at grandeur, your makeshift efforts
of magnificence? Sleep, sleep, with all thy broken keys, if one of the
bunch be extant; thrummed by a thousand ancestral thumbs; dear,
cracked spinnet of dearer Louisa! Without mention of mine, be dumb,
thou thin accompanier of her thinner warble! A veil be spread over the
dear delighted face of the well-deluded father, who now haply
listening to cherubic notes, scarce feels sincerer pleasure than
when she awakened thy time-shaken chords responsive to the twitterings
of that slender image of a voice.
We were not without our literary talk either. It did not extend
far, but as far as it went, it was good. It was bottomed well; had
good grounds to go upon. In the cottage was a room, which
tradition authenticated to have been the same in which Glover, in
his occasional retirements, had penned the greater part of his
Leonidas. This circumstance was nightly quoted, though none of the
present inmates, that I could discover, appeared ever to have met with
the poem in question. But that was no matter. Glover had written
there, and the anecdote was pressed into the account of the family
importance. It diffused a learned air through the apartment, the
little side casement of which (the poet's study window), opening
upon a superb view as far as the pretty spire of Harrow, over
domains and patrimonial acres, not a rood nor square yard whereof
our host could call his own, yet gave occasion to an immoderate
expansion of- vanity shall I call it?- in his bosom, as he showed them
in a glowing summer evening. It was all his, he took it all in, and
communicated rich portions of it to his guests. It was a part of his
largess, his hospitality; it was going over his grounds; he was lord
for the time of showing them, and you the implicit lookers-up to his
magnificence.
He was a juggler, who threw mists before your eyes- you had no time
to detect his fallacies. He would say, "Hand me the silver sugar
tongs"; and before you could discover it was a single spoon, and
that plated, he would disturb and captivate your imagination by a
misnomer of "the urn" for a tea-kettle; or by calling a homely bench a
sofa. Rich men direct you to their furniture, poor ones divert you
from it; he neither did one nor the other, but by simply assuming that
everything was handsome about him, you were positively at a demur what
you did, or did not see, at the cottage. With nothing t |
