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Title: Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 75, No. 460, February, 1854
Author: Various
Release date: April 21, 2024 [eBook #73438]
Language: English
Original publication: UK: William Blackwood & Sons, 1854
Credits: Richard Tonsing, Brendan OConnor, Jonathan Ingram, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BLACKWOOD'S EDINBURGH MAGAZINE, VOL. 75, NO. 460, FEBRUARY, 1854 ***
BLACKWOOD’S
EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.
NO. CCCCLX. FEBRUARY, 1854. VOL. LXXV.
CONTENTS.
ABYSSINIAN ABERRATIONS, 129
THE QUIET HEART.—PART III., 150
NATIONAL GALLERY, 167
A GLANCE AT TURKISH HISTORY, 184
MACAULAY’S SPEECHES, 193
FIFTY YEARS IN BOTH HEMISPHERES, 203
A SPORTING SETTLER IN CEYLON, 226
GRAY’S LETTERS, 242
EDINBURGH:
WILLIAM BLACKWOOD & SONS, 45 GEORGE STREET,
AND 37 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON;
_To whom all communications (post paid) must be addressed._
SOLD BY ALL THE BOOKSELLERS IN THE UNITED KINGDOM.
PRINTED BY WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS, EDINBURGH.
BLACKWOOD’S
EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.
NO. CCCCLX. FEBRUARY, 1854. VOL. LXXV.
ABYSSINIAN ABERRATIONS.[1]
Locomotion, profitless and often aimless, is, in the opinion of
Continentals, a condition of an Englishman’s existence. Provided with a
dressing-case that would contain a Frenchman’s entire wardrobe, and with
a hat-box full of pills “to be taken at bedtime,” every son of Albion is
supposed to perform, at some period of his life, a distant journey, with
the sole apparent object of acquiring a right to say that he has been
“there and back again.” An Englishman, in the opinion of Europe, would
be a miserable being, had he not continually present to his mind the
recollection or the anticipation of a journey to the uttermost parts of
the earth—to the North Pole or the South Seas, to the feverish heart of
Africa or the scarcely less perilous wastes of Tartary. That opinion
will be strongly confirmed by the peregrinations of Mansfield Parkyns.
There can be no reasonable doubt that when the handsome volumes, full of
amusing letter-press and neat sketches, and externally decorated with a
chubby and Oriental St George spearing a golden dragon, with bossy
shields and carved scimitars, and lion’s mane and tail, which Mr Murray
has just published, shall have been as generally read as they deserve to
be, the tide of enterprising travel will set strongly in the direction
of Abyssinia. Everybody will take wing for the land of the Shohos and
Boghos; African outfits will be in perpetual demand; sanguine railway
projectors will discuss the feasibility of a “Grand Cairo and Addy Abo
Direct” line. Mr Parkyns tells us, in his preliminary pages, that he
shall estimate the success of his book, not by his friends’ flatteries
or his reviewers’ verdict, but by its sale. Sale!—why, it will sell by
thousands, in an abridged form, with a red cover, as the “Handbook for
Abyssinia.” Persons starting for those parts will ask for Parkyns’
Handbook, just as tenderer tourists, who content themselves with an
amble through Andalusia, inquire for Ford’s. That many such starts will
be made, we cannot doubt, after reading the book in which are so vividly
described the charms of the pleasant land of Tigrè, the delights of the
journey thither, and of the abode there. Never was anything so tempting.
The mere introduction makes us impatient to be off. Mr Parkyns is
resolved to lure his readers, in his very first chapter, not only to
read his book, but to roam in his footsteps. Werne’s _Campaign in Taka_
gave us some idea of the advantages enjoyed by those privileged mortals
to whom it is given to ramble between the Blue Nile and the Red Sea; but
the German’s narrative, which we thought striking and startling enough
when we read it, is thrown into the shade by the vivid and lively
delineations of the friend and comrade of Prince Shetou. The sanitary,
dietetic, and surgical instructions, with which, for the benefit of
future travellers in Abyssinia, he preludes his subject, would alone
suffice to inspire us with an ardent longing to pass a season in the
delightful regions where they are applicable. The preservation of
health, he justly observes, should be every traveller’s chief care,
since, without it, pleasure or profit from the journey is alike
impossible. Then he proceeds to point out the chief dangers to health in
Abyssinia, and the means of warding them off. The highlands, he tells
us, are highly salubrious, but unfortunately one cannot always abide
upon the hills; and down in the valleys malaria prevails, engendering
terrible inflammatory fevers, to which four patients out of five
succumb, the fifth having his constitution impaired for life, or at
least for many years. Parkyns points out a preservative. Light two large
fires and sleep between them. They must be so close together that you
are obliged to cover yourself with a piece of hide to avoid ignition of
your clothes. “Not very agreeable till you are used to it,” says the
cool Parkyns, “but a capital preventive of disease. Another plan, always
adopted by the natives, is not, I think, a bad one:—Roll your head
completely up in your cloth, which then acts as a respirator. You may
often see a nigger lying asleep with the whole of his body uncovered,
but his head and face completely concealed in many folds”;—a _sort of
woodcocking_ which may be pleasant, but can hardly be considered
picturesque. Tobacco is indispensable; in that country you must smoke
abundantly. On the White Nile no negro is ever without his pipe, which
sometimes holds a pound of tobacco. “The largest I now possess,” says
Parkyns, somewhat dolefully, “would not contain much more than a quarter
of that quantity.” The sun, generally considered formidable to
travellers in Africa, is disregarded by him to whom we now give ear. “I
never retired into the shade to avoid the noonday heat; and for four
years I never wore any covering to my head except the rather scanty
allowance of hair with which nature has supplied me, with the addition
occasionally of a little butter. During the whole of that time I never
had a headache”;—an immunity we are disposed to attribute less to the
sun’s forbearance than to some peculiar solidity in the cranium of
Parkyns. “In these climates,” he next informs us, “a man cannot eat
much, or, even if he could, he ought not.” This probably applies
exclusively to foreigners, for we are afterwards introduced to native
dinners, where the gormandising surpassed belief, and yet none of the
guests were a pin the worse. Indeed, in the course of the book, the
Abyssinians are invariably represented as enormous feeders, capable of
demolishing four or five pounds of meat, more or less, raw, as one day’s
ration, and without ill effects. As long as you are moderate in
quantity, the quality of what you eat is evidently unimportant in a
sanitary point of view. “A man who cares a straw about what he eats
should never attempt to travel in Africa. It is not sufficient to say,
‘I can eat anything that is clean and wholesome.’ You will often have to
eat things that are far from being either, especially the former. I have
eaten of almost every living thing that walketh, flyeth, or
creepeth—lion, leopard, wolf, cat, hawk, crocodile, snake, lizard,
locust, &c.; and I should be sorry to say what dirty messes I have at
times been obliged to put up with.” As general rules for the
preservation of health, we are instructed to avoid bad localities—the
valleys, especially after the rainy season, when the sun pumps up
malaria from stagnant pools and decayed vegetable matter—to be
abstemious in all respects, and to follow the native customs with
respect to food, injunctions which appear difficult to reconcile. Should
all precautions prove ineffectual, and fever or other ills assail us,
kind, considerate Parkyns, who himself, he tells us, has some knowledge
of the healing art, instructs us what to do. “Local bleedings, such as
the natives practise, are often highly advantageous; and firing with a
hot iron may also be adopted at their recommendation. For severe
inflammation of the bowels, when you cannot bear to be touched on the
part, _some boiling water poured on it_ will be a ready and effective
blister,—a wet rag being wrapped round in a ring to confine the water
within the intended limits. For bad snake-bites or scorpion stings, bind
above the part as tightly as possible, and _cut away with a knife_; then
apply the end of an iron ramrod, _heated to white heat_. This, of
course, I mean supposing you to be in the backwoods, out of the reach of
medicines. Aquafortis is, I have heard, better than the hot iron, _as it
eats farther in_.” Actual cautery, boiling-water blisters, and “cutting
away” really compose a very pretty basis for a surgical system.
Professor Parkyns gives but few prescriptions, supposing, he says, that
few of his readers would care to have more, or be likely to profit by
them. Judging from the above sample, we are inclined to coincide in his
supposition.
Mr Mansfield Parkyns is an amateur barbarian. Leaving England when a
very young man, he plunged, after some previous rambling in Europe and
Asia Minor, into the heart of Abyssinia, and adopted savage life with an
earnestness and gusto sufficiently proved by his book, and by the regret
with which he still, after three years’ return to what poor Ruxton
called “civilised fixings,” speaks of his abode in the wigwams of
Ethiopia, and of his hankerings—not after the flesh-pots of Egypt,
but—after the ghee-pots and uncooked beef he so long throve upon in the
dominions of the great Oubi, Viceroy of Tigrè. Fancy a civilised
Englishman, gently nurtured and educated, pitching his tent for three
years amongst filthy savages, adopting their dress and usages, rubbing
his head with butter, sleeping with the but of his rifle for a
pillow—the grease from his plaited locks being “beneficially employed in
toughening the wood”—having himself partially tattooed, eating raw beef,
substituting raw sheep’s liver soused in vinegar for oysters, discarding
hats and shoes, and going bareheaded and barefoot under the broiling sun
and over the roadless wastes of Abyssinia, burning and gashing his flesh
in order to produce peculiar scars and protuberances, deemed ornamental
by the people amongst whom he dwelt, and, upon his return home (to
England, we mean to say, for the home of his predilection is amongst the
savoury savages he so reluctantly left, and amongst whom he evidently
considers himself naturalised), coolly writing down and publishing his
confessions—in most amusing style, we freely admit, but not without a
slight dash of self-complacency, as if he would say, See what a fine
fellow I am to have thus converted myself into a greasy, shoeless,
raw-beef-eating savage for a term of years! We have nothing in the
world, however, to do with Mr Parkyns’ peculiar predilections. This is a
free country—as the Yankee observed when flogging his nigger—whose
natives have a perfect right to exhibit themselves in any character they
please, from an Objibbeway to an alabaster statue, so long as they do
not outrage decency, or otherwise transgress the law. For our part, we
should have been sincerely sorry if Mr Parkyns had not en-cannibaled
himself, and told us how he did it. We should have been deprived of two
of the most extraordinary, original, and amusing volumes through which
we ever passed our paper-knife. We accept the book, and are grateful for
it. With the author’s tastes, depraved though we cannot but consider
them, we purpose not to meddle. Men of his stamp should be prized, like
black diamonds, by reason of their rarity. We are much mistaken, or Mr
Parkyns will be the cynosure of all eyes during the approaching
spring—particularly if he condescends occasionally to exhibit his
tattooed arm, and to bolt a raw beef-steak. Gordon Cumming, on his
return from his South-African slaughterings, was the lion of the London
season; Mansfield Parkyns will receive much less than his due if he be
not made its hippopotamus.
Mr Parkyns started from Smyrna for a tour of the Nile, in company with
the poetical member for Pontefract, Mr Monckton Milnes, then pondering
his “Palm Leaves.” Of the Nile tour, so repeatedly made and so well
described by others, he abstains from speaking, in order the sooner to
get to Abyssinia. After an agreeable boat voyage of two months’
duration, he parted from his companion at Cairo. Mr Milnes must surely
have regretted quitting so lively and intrepid a fellow-traveller, and
Mr Parkyns, we cannot doubt, equally deplored their separation. The cool
of the evening would have been so pleasant in the desert. But
parliamentary duties summoned one of the travellers northwards; the
_Wander-trieb_, the vagabond instinct, impelled the other southwards,
and so they parted. A double-barrelled gun, a single rifle, a brace of
double pistols, and a bowie-knife, composed Mr Parkyns’ travelling
arsenal; he also took with him three pair of common pistols, a dozen
light cavalry sword-blades, some red cloth, white muslin, and Turkey
rugs, as presents for Abyssinian chiefs, and in March 1843 he sailed
from Suez for Jedda, on board a miserable Arab boat, loaded with empty
rice-bags and a hundred passengers. The throng was too great to be
agreeable, but Mr Parkyns, who has evidently a happy temper and a knack
at making himself popular amongst all manner of queer people, was soon
on most friendly terms with the Turks, Bedouins, Egyptians, Negroes, and
others who composed the living freight of the clumsy lateen-rigged
craft. The voyage from Suez to Jedda varies from nine days to three
months. Mr Parkyns was so fortunate as to accomplish it in little more
than three weeks. We pass over its incidents, which amused us when we
first read them, but which have lost their piquancy now that we recur to
them with the highly-spiced flavour of the Abyssinian adventures hot
upon our palate, and we go on at once to Massawa Island, on the
Abyssinian coast, whose climate may be estimated from the remark made by
an officer of the Indian navy to Mr Parkyns, to the effect that he
thought Pondicherry the hottest place in India, but that Pondicherry was
nothing to Aden, and Aden a mere trifle to Massawa. “Towards the latter
end of May I have known the thermometer rise to about 120° Fahrenheit in
the shade, and in July and August it ranges much higher.” Indoors, the
natives, men and women, wear nothing but striped cotton napkins round
their loins. Most Europeans suffer severely from the heat of the place.
Mr Parkyns, who is first cousin to a salamander, suffered not at all,
but ran about catching insects, or otherwise actively employing himself,
whilst his servants lay in the shade, the perspiration streaming off
them. He is clearly the very man for the tropics. After ten days at
Massawa, he started for the interior, previously getting rid of his
heavy baggage, to an extent we should really have thought rather
improvident, but which, if he had already made up his mind to content
himself with the comforts, and conform to the customs of the people he
was going amongst, was doubtless extremely wise. We have enumerated his
stock of arms, and his assortment of presents for the natives. The list
of his wardrobe, after he had given away his European toggery—partly at
Cairo, and partly to Angelo, a Massawa Jew, who made himself useful and
agreeable—is very soon made out. When he landed on the mainland,
opposite Massawa, it consisted of “three Turkish shirts, three pair of
drawers, one suit of Turkish clothes for best occasions, a pair of
sandals, and a red cap. From the day I left Suez (25th March 1843), till
about the same time in the year 1849, I never wore any article of
European dress, nor indeed ever slept in a bed of any sort—not even a
mattress; the utmost extent of luxury I enjoyed, even when all but dying
of a pestilential fever, that kept me five months on my beam-ends at
Khartoum, was a coverlet under a rug. The red cap I wore on leaving
Massawa was soon _borrowed_ of me, and the sandals, after a month, were
given up; and so, as I have before said in the Introduction, for more
than three years (that is, till I reached Khartoum), I wore no covering
to my head, except a little butter, when I could get it, nor to my feet,
except the horny sole which a few months’ rough usage placed under
them.” The sole in question had scarce put its print upon Ethiopian soil
when it was near meeting with an accident that would have necessitated
the use of the sharp knife and white-hot ramrod. On his way to the house
of Hussein Effendi, a government scribe, at the sea-coast village of
Moncullou, Mr Parkyns put his bare foot near an object that in the
twilight had the appearance of a bit of stick or stone. “I was startled
by feeling something cold glide over it, and, turning, saw a small snake
wriggling off as quickly as possible. From what little I could
distinguish of its form and colour, it seemed to answer the description
I had heard of the cerastes, or horned viper, which is about a foot and
a half long, rather thick for its length, and of a dirty, dusty colour,
mottled. The horns are nearly over the eyes, and about the eighth of an
inch in length. This is considered one of the most venomous of the snake
tribe, and they are very numerous in this neighbourhood. I tried to kill
it, but without success.” He soon came to think very little of such
small deer as this. Snakes are as common as rats in those torrid
latitudes, and about as little heeded. On his way to the hot springs of
Ailat, a day’s journey from Massawa, he killed another horned viper, as
it was coolly wriggling across his carpet, “spread in a natural bower
formed by the boughs of a species of mimosa, from whose yellow flowers,
which emit a delicious fragrance, the Egyptians distil a perfume they
call ‘fitneh.’” After this he makes no mention of adventures with snakes
on account of their frequency, until he gets to his chapter on the
natural history of Abyssinia, towards the close of the second volume, to
which we shall hereafter refer. We are at present anxious to get up the
country, to the court of King Oubi, whose capital, Adoua, was Mr
Parkyns’ headquarters during his residence in Tigrè. There he had what
he calls his town-house, of which he presents us with a plan and
sketches. He remained for some weeks at Ailat, the Cheltenham of
Abyssinia, whose healing springs attract visitors from great distances.
There he lodged in the house of a sort of village chief, called Fakak,
and passed his time shooting. It was rather an amusing residence,
caravans of Bedouins and Shohos frequently passing through on their way
to and from Massawa, and he had excellent sport. The evening before
starting for Kiaguor, three days’ journey on the road to Adoua,
“I went out to procure a supper for myself and numerous friends and
attendants; and, to tantalise my English sporting readers, I will tell
them what bag I brought home in little more than an hour. My first
shot brought down four guinea-fowl; my second, five ditto; third, a
female of the little Ben Israel gazelle; fourth, her male companion;
and, fifth, a brace of grouse; so that in five shots I had as good a
bag as in England one would get in an average day’s shooting, and
after expending half a pound of powder, and a proportionate quantity
of shot, caps, and wads. But I feel it my duty to explain that _I
never shoot flying_, considering that unsportsmanlike. A true
sportsman shows his skill by getting up to his game unperceived, when,
putting the muzzle of his gun as close to the tail-feathers as he
possibly can, he blazes away into the thick of the covey, always
choosing the direction in which he sees three or four heads picking in
a row! At any rate, this is the only way you can shoot in a country
where, if you entirely expend your powder and shot, you must starve,
or else make more, as I have been obliged to do many a time. I cannot
understand how people in Europe can enjoy shooting, where one is
dependent on a crowd of keepers, beaters, dogs, sandwiches, grog,
&c.... My sole companion on ordinary occasions is a little boy, who
carries my rifle, whilst I carry my gun, and we do all the work
ourselves. His sharp eyes, better accustomed to the glare than my own,
serve me in every point as well as a setter’s nose. The country (about
Ailat) is sandy and covered with large bushes. Most of the trees are
thorny, being chiefly of the mimosa tribe, and their thorns are of a
very formidable description, some of them being about two inches and a
half in length, and as thick at the base as a large nail; while
another variety, called in Abyssinian the ‘Kantàff-tafa,’ have thin
short-curved thorns placed on the shoots two and two together. These
catch you like the claws of a hawk, and if they enter your clothes you
had better cut off the sprig at once, and carry it with you till you
have leisure to liberate yourself, otherwise you will never succeed;
for as fast as you loosen one thorn another catches hold.”
Some interesting sporting anecdotes follow (they abound in Mr Parkyns’
book), told in off-hand characteristic style—encounters with wild pigs,
rather dangerous animals to deal with—and then we take the road to
Kiaguor. A night’s rest there, and we are off to Adoua. Hereabouts Mr
Parkyns gives a sketch of “Abyssinian Travelling.” We presume that he
himself, somewhat tanned by the climate, is the gentleman mounted on a
jackass, with bare head and legs, and a parasol for protection from the
sun. Suppress the donkey and supply a parrot, and he might very well
pass for the late Mr R. Crusoe.
Vague ideas of columns and obelisks, Moorish architecture and the like,
floated in Mr Parkyns’ fancy as he drew near to the capital city of the
kingdom of Tigrè, one of the most powerful of all Ethiopia. He found a
straggling village of huts, most of them built of rough stones, and
thatched with straw. The customhouse—they possess that civilised
nuisance even in Abyssinia—gave him trouble about his baggage, which it
found exorbitant in quantity, and suspected him of smuggling in goods on
account of merchants. He explained that he had a supply of arms, powder,
lead, &c., for two or three years’ consumption, besides presents for the
prince, but the Tigrè _douaniers_ insisted on examining all his
packages. He would not submit, and set off to make an appeal to
Oubi—nominally the viceroy, but in reality the sovereign of the
country—who was then at a permanent camp, at a place entitled Howzayn.
During this part of his travels, Mr Parkyns was in company with Messrs
Plowden and Bell; and on reaching Howzayn, which they did in a heavy
shower of rain, they went at once to the habitation of Càfty, the
steward of Oubi’s household, who had been Mr Bell’s _balderàbba_ on a
former visit. “It is customary for every person, whether native or
foreigner, after his first audience with the prince, to ask for a
‘balderàbba,’ and one of his officers is usually named. He becomes a
sort of agent, and expects you to acknowledge, by presents, any service
he may render you—such as assisting you out of difficulties in which you
may be involved, or procuring for you admission to his master when you
may desire it. Càfty was absent on an expedition. His brother, Negousy,
was acting for him, and he volunteered to procure us an audience of the
prince without delay.” Meanwhile the travellers were not very
comfortable. Some poor fellows were turned out of their huts into the
rain to make room for them; but the huts let in water so freely, that
the new occupants were scarcely better off than those who had been
ejected. Only one hut, about 7 feet in diameter, and 5½ feet high, had a
water-tight roof. Imperfect shelter was but one of their annoyances, and
a minor one. It is a custom of that country for the king to send food to
travellers as soon as he hears of their arrival, and our three
Englishmen, aware of this, had brought no provisions. This was
unfortunate, for Oubi neglected to observe the hospitable custom, and
they were half starved. Instead of obtaining for them an immediate
interview with the prince, Negousy, who was fishing for presents, put
them off from day to day. They were obliged to send a servant round the
camp, crying out, “Who has got bread for money?” and offering an
exorbitant price; but even thus they could not obtain a tithe of what
they needed. To add to their vexations, Mr Parkyns’ servant, Barnabas, a
negro whom he had engaged at Adoua, was claimed as a slave by a man in
authority, to whose uncle he had formerly belonged. At last, on the
fourth evening after their arrival, Oubi sent them a supper. “It
consisted of forty thin cakes, thirty being of coarser quality for the
servants, and ten of white ‘teff’ for our own consumption. These were
accompanied by two pots of a sort of sauce, composed of common oil,
dried pease, and red pepper, but, it being fast time, there was neither
meat nor butter. To wash all down there was an enormous horn of honey
beer.” On the morning of the sixth day Oubi sent for them, and, escorted
by Negousy, they hastened to the Royal Hovel. They had to wait some time
for admission, amidst the comments of a crowd of soldiers—comments then
unintelligible to Mr Parkyns, but which he afterwards ascertained to be
far less complimentary to the personal appearance of himself and
companions than he at the time imagined—their eyes being compared to
those of cats, their hair to that of monkeys, and their skin, to which
the sun had given a bright capsicum hue, being greatly coveted for red
morocco sword-sheaths.
Oubi was reclining on a stretcher, in a circular earthen-floored hut,
thirty feet in diameter. Although it was the middle of August there was
a fire in the apartment, and Mr Parkyns was almost blinded by the wood
smoke. When he was able to see, he beheld “a rather good-looking,
slight-made man, of about forty-five years of age, with bushy hair,
which was fast turning grey. His physiognomy did not at all prepossess
me in his favour. It struck me as indicative of much cunning, pride, and
falsity; and I judged him to be a man of some talent, but with more of
the fox than the lion in his nature. Our presents were brought in,
covered with cloths, and carried by our servants. They consisted of a
Turkey rug, two European light-cavalry swords, four pieces of muslin for
turbans, and two or three yards of red cloth for a cloak. He examined
each article as it was presented to him, making on almost every one some
complimentary remark. After having inspected them all, he said, ‘God
return it to you,’ and ordered his steward to give us a cow.” The cow
proved to be what a Far West trapper would call very “poor bull”—a mere
bag of bones, which would never have fetched two dollars in the market
(the value of a fat cow in Abyssinia varies from 8s. to 12s. 6d.); but,
such as it was, the taste of meat was welcome to the hungry travellers,
who devoured the beast the same day they received it, so that by
nightfall not an eatable morsel was left. Oubi made a better
acknowledgment of their gifts by settling their difficulty with the
chief of the customhouse, and not long after this Mr Parkyns parted from
Messrs Bell and Plowden, their routes no longer lying together. “I
prepared for a journey into Addy Abo, a province on the northern
frontier of Tigrè, then so little known as not to be placed on any map.
My principal object in going there was the chase, and if possible to
learn something of the neighbouring Barea or Shangalla—a race totally
unknown, except by the reputation they have gained in many
throat-cutting visits paid to the Abyssinians.” When recording his
parting from his two friends, both of whom he believes to be still in
Abyssinia, he intimates his intention of revisiting that country. “It is
not improbable,” he says, “that we three may meet again, and do what we
have often done before—eat a raw beef-steak, and enjoy it for the sake
of good company.”
The road to Addy Abo took Mr Parkyns through Axum, the capital of that
part of Abyssinia until supplanted by Adoua. Axum contains a tolerably
well-built church, probably of Portuguese construction, and some
neatly-built huts, whilst broken columns and pedestals tell of the
civilisation of former ages. It possesses, moreover, a beautiful obelisk
and a very remarkable sycamore tree, “both of great height, the latter
remarkable for the extraordinary circumference of its trunk, and the
great spread of its branches, which cast their dark shade over a space
of ground sufficient for the camp of the largest caravan. The principal
obelisk is carved on the south side, as if to represent a door, windows,
cornices, &c.; whilst, under the protecting arms of the venerable tree,
stand five or six smaller ones, without ornament, most of which have
considerably deviated from the perpendicular. Altogether they form a
very interesting family party.” Judging from the present book,
antiquarian researches have not much interest for Mr Parkyns, whose
sympathies are with the living, his pleasures in the field and forest,
and who seems more of a sportsman than of a student. It would be unfair,
however, not to mention, that whilst enjoying himself in his own
peculiar ways (and some of his ways certainly were extremely peculiar),
he kept less selfish aims in view, and exerted himself to make
collections of objects of natural history, of costumes, arms, and other
curiosities, besides investigating the history and geography of the
country. His collections were on a very large scale: unfortunately some
went astray upon the road; others, left for years in warehouses, and ill
cared for by those to whom they were consigned, were plundered of their
most precious specimens. The latter was the case with his first great
shipment, of more than twelve hundred birds, sent to England by way of
Hamburg. Rats and moths destroyed the contents of another case, left by
mistake for four years at Aden; and another, containing arms,
silver-mounted ornaments, and zoological specimens, its owner supposes
to be either at Bombay, Calcutta, or in some warehouse of the Transit
Company in Egypt. These losses are the more to be deplored, that they
comprised that of many extremely rare specimens of birds and monkeys,
some of them from regions into which it is probable that no European
traveller ever before penetrated. To make sure of not losing his
collection made in Nubia and on the White Nile, Mr Parkyns himself went
out to fetch it, and never lost sight of it till he had it safe at home.
It consisted of six hundred birds, and of about a ton weight of negro
arms and implements. He was still more unfortunate in geographical than
in zoological matters, having lost the whole of the observations, maps,
&c. made during his long residence in Tigrè.
The Great Gondar road, along which Mr Parkyns travelled for some
distance after quitting Axum, bears about the same resemblance to a
civilised European highway that Oubi’s smoky cabin bears to the Louvre
or the Escurial. High-roads in Abyssinia are mere tracks worn by
passage. “The utmost labour bestowed on any road in that country is,
when some traveller, vexed with a thorn that may happen to scratch his
face, draws his sword and cuts off the spray. Even this is rarely done.
An Abyssinian’s maxim is, ‘I may not pass by this way for a year again;
why should I give myself trouble for other people’s convenience?’ The
road, however, here as in many parts of Tigrè, is abundantly watered by
several tolerably copious streams, which flow _all_ the year round.
These are most useful to the numerous merchants who pass constantly
between Gondar, Adoua, and the Red Sea, with large caravans of laden
animals, offering not only ready means for watering their cattle, but
often green food for them near the banks, when all the rest of the
country is parched up and dry, and a cool grassy bed for their own weary
limbs to repose upon.” Hereupon Mr Parkyns breaks out into rapturous
laudation of life in the wilderness, and advises his readers to shoulder
their rifles, abandon civilised diggings, and take a few months’
roughing and hardship in a hot climate. Only in such a life, he
maintains, is real happiness and enjoyment to be found. His arguments
are as original as his book. The principle that he goes upon is, that
one enjoys nothing thoroughly until one has suffered from privation of
it. Shade, a patch of grass, a stream of water, a cloud, are treasures
in Africa, whilst in England they are unheeded, because easily
obtainable. A draught of water in the desert, albeit dirty or
tar-flavoured, is more precious than the choicest Tokay in epicurean
_blasé_ Europe; a piece of scorched gazelle and an ill-baked loaf, made
by putting a red-hot stone into the middle of a lump of dough, form a
repast more luxurious, when hunger and exercise supply the sauce, than
ever was placed before royal _gourmet_ by the most renowned of France’s
cooks. There is not much fruit in Abyssinia—but, oh! for a good raw
onion for luncheon! Scenting some of those fragrant bulbs, greedy
Parkyns, during his residence in the “Happy Valley” of Rohabaita, once
ran two miles up a hill, in the heat of the day. How he enjoyed himself
in that pleasant province of Rohabaita, hard by the banks of the Mareb,
where he abode nine months, and to which he feels disposed to devote
many chapters! He had the good fortune, he says, during his long stay,
to become considered as one of the country, and to be offered the
government of that and another province by H.R.H. Dejatch Lemma, Oubi’s
eldest son, who held authority in the north-western districts of Tigrè,
but who had been unable to acquire much influence over the
Rohabaitese—rough border-men, particularly averse to tax-paying, and
who, when pressed for the impost, fled with their movables across the
frontier. For, in Abyssinia, inattention to the tax-gatherer’s claim is
terribly punished. In the first instance, the offender is subjected to a
sort of _dragonnade_; soldiers are sent to live upon him, waste his
substance, and treat him brutally; so that, if he cannot at once borrow
money to pay his debt, he is speedily ruined. Another means of extortion
is still more barbarous: the insolvent is cast into prison, and chained
by the arm. “The iron round his wrist is not clasped, but is merely a
strong hoop, opened by force to allow the hand to enter, and then
hammered tight between two stones. At first it is only made tight enough
to prevent any possibility of the prisoner’s escape. After some time,
however, if the sum required be not forthcoming, it is knocked a little
tighter, and so, by degrees, the hand dies, the nails drop out, and the
poor prisoner is at best maimed for life. Death sometimes ensues from
this treatment.” Rather savage work, Mr Parkyns is fain to admit, whilst
assuring us that this torture is not often practised, and that his
Tigrine friends, with all their faults, have many good qualities. Lofty
were the castles he built in Rohabaita (aërial ones, of course, castles
of more solid structure being rare in a land whose sovereign is lodged
as we have described) whilst waiting for Oubi’s permission, for which
Lemma was obliged to apply before installing the Englishman in his
government. Besides the payment of a tribute to Lemma, Mr Parkyns
undertook to keep in order the neighbouring tribe of the Bàza, whom he
more frequently speaks of as the Barea or slaves, that being the name
given to them in Abyssinia. He was very desirous to visit that brave and
hardy tribe of savages, and had made all his arrangements to do so, when
Oubi unfortunately determined on a _razzia_, in retaliation of numerous
recent murders and robberies perpetrated by them in his dominions. In
the last of their forays they had pillaged monasteries, and slain their
holy occupants, whose blood cried aloud for vengeance. His project of a
pacific ramble amongst the Barea being thus knocked on the head, Mr
Parkyns hoped that the campaign itself would give him opportunities of
obtaining an insight into their manners. He was disappointed. Little or
nothing was seen of the natives except at the sword’s point. They appear
to be bold and wary warriors, skilled in the stratagems of savage
warfare. Mr Parkyns, when at Rohabaita, received a visit and presents
from a friend of his, one Obsabius, a hospitable old cock, and man in
authority, whom, on his departure, he accompanied for some distance with
a small escort, Obsabius, when coming, having seen Barea sign upon the
road. He was convinced that the blacks were outlying, and that he had
escaped attack only by having joined a number of other travellers.
“Scarcely had we passed the brook of Mai-Chena when one of our men, a
hunter, declared that he saw the slaves. Being at that time
inexperienced in such matters, I could see nothing suspicious. He then
pointed out to me a dead tree standing on an eminence at a distance of
several hundred yards, and charred black by last year’s fire. To
explain this, I should remark that the rains cause to spring up a
thick jungle of grass, canes, and bushes, which cover the whole
surface of the country, growing to a height of several feet. When this
becomes dry, it is set fire to—in some places by the farmers, as the
readiest means of clearing the ground; in others by hunters, to enable
them to get at their game with greater facility; and often
accidentally.... However, all that I saw was a charred stump of a
tree, and a few blackened logs or stones lying at its foot. The hunter
declared that neither tree nor stones were there the last time he
passed, and that they were simply naked Barea, who had placed
themselves in that position to observe us, having no doubt seen us for
some time, and prepared themselves.... So confident was I of his
mistake, that, telling the rest to go on slowly, as if nothing had
been observed, I dropped into the long grass and stalked up towards
them. A shot from my rifle, at a long distance (I did not venture too
close), acted on the trees and stones as powerfully as the fiddle of
Orpheus, but with the contrary effect; for the tree disappeared, and
the stones and logs, instead of running after me, ran in the opposite
direction. I never was more astonished in my life; for so complete was
the deception, that even up to the time I fired, I could have declared
the objects before me were vegetable or mineral—anything, indeed, but
animal. The cunning rascals who represented stones were lying flat,
with their little round shields placed before them as screens.”
The presents brought by the obliging Obsabius were a supply of food—corn
and honey—for there was considerable hunger in the Happy Valley just
then, the chase being unproductive, and the natives having fled from the
apprehension of a tax-gathering visit from the troops of the
extortionate Oubi. Abstinence, however, is a good thing in that climate,
and Mr Parkyns never felt himself better than during this tolerably long
period of semi-starvation. He was never fatigued, and wounds of all
kinds healed with wonderful rapidity. He led a rough life in that
frontier country, and wounds were common enough. “Once, in running down
the stony and almost precipitous path leading to the Mareb, I struck my
bare foot against an edge of rock, which was as sharp as a razor, and a
bit of flesh, with the whole of the nail of my left foot little toe, was
cut off, leaving only the roots of the nail. This latter I suppose to
have been the case, for it has grown all right again. I could not stop
longer than to _polish off_ the bit which was hanging by a skin, for we
were in chase of a party of Barea, who had cut the throats of three of
Waddy Hil’s nephews the night before, but was obliged to go on running
for about twenty miles that afternoon, the greater part of the way up to
our ankles in burning sand. Whether this cured it, I know not, but I
scarcely suffered at all from it the next day, and forgot it the day
after.” Thorns in the feet—no trifling prickles, but three or four
inches long—were picked out by the half-dozen at a time; and such, says
Mr Parkyns, is the force of habit and the thickness of skin one
acquires, that such an operation is thought no more of than an English
sportsman would of kicking away a clod of clay clinging to his
shooting-shoes. But to return to the Barea. Oubi remained nearly two
months in their country, which he completely traversed—so completely,
indeed, as to have unintentionally (?) committed depredations on certain
tribes to the north, claimed as tributary by the Egyptians. Although
good fighting men, the Bàza have too little idea of united action, and
are too ignorant of modern improvements in the art of slaughter, to make
head against their Abyssinian enemies when these take the field in
force. Their idea of cavalry is very ludicrous. They imagine them to be
old or infirm men, carried by horses because they cannot keep up with
their comrades on foot! “So in their campaigns, whenever the Bàza are
met by cavalry, they amuse themselves at their expense by facetiously
plucking handfuls of grass and holding them towards the horses, and
calling them ‘Tish, Tish,’ &c. They appear never able to understand how
the firearms of their adversaries kill them. Occasionally it has been
noticed that when a man has fallen among them by a gun-shot wound, his
neighbours will assist him up, imagining him to have stumbled; should
life be extinct, they manifest their astonishment at finding him dead
from some unseen cause, and when, on examining his body, they discover
the small round hole made by the ball, they will stare at it, poke their
fingers into it, and absolutely laugh with surprise and wonder.”
Notwithstanding these artless ways, the Bàza are ugly customers in a
hand-to-hand tussle—one of them usually proving more than a match for
two Abyssinians, and Mr Parkyns relates several anecdotes illustrative
of their physical superiority. But we feel desirous to take a glance at
his town life, which has even greater novelty than his chapters of wild
adventure, and so we return with him to Adoua, whither he went to pass
the rainy season when he left Rohabaita. He waited several months for
Oubi’s consent to his installation as governor; but before it arrived he
received long-expected supplies from England, and abandoned his
ambitious and philanthropical schemes—unfortunately for the Rohabaitese,
to the improvement of whose physical and moral condition they tended,
and fortunately for the Barea, against whom he proposed to organise a
system of moss-trooping, to result in much profit in ivory and buffalo
hides.
The delay of remittances from Europe rendering it probable that Mr
Parkyns would be detained for some time in Abyssinia, he resolved
completely to domesticate himself with the natives, as the best way of
studying their habits and mode of life. This he seems to us to have done
from the very commencement; for, as he justly observes, “there is
nothing like a civil tongue, and quiet unpretending manners, to get one
on in those countries;” so, upon principle, he always showed himself
ready to answer questions, and to do the amiable, and even to put up
with savage familiarities and intrusions, which he would gladly have
dispensed with: as, for instance, during his stay at Addaro, a village
of Addy Abo, formerly an important market, but now decayed and almost
deserted. It was there that he first saw the snake-killing secretary
bird, called Farras Seytan, or the Devil’s Horse, from the astonishing
swiftness with which it runs. He was the first white man who had ever
entered the place, with the exception of two French medical men, who had
passed through some years previously on their way to the Mareb, and one
of whom was carried off by fever, and the other by a crocodile, “picked
out by the voracious animal from the colour of his skin, whilst swimming
between two guides.” So a white skin was a great curiosity in Addaro;
and here we come to a plate representing Mr Parkyns reclining on a
settle, receiving perpetual visitors, whilst he jots down in his journal
the following memoranda:—“Blessed with a swarm of bees that have lodged
in the house. They have stung me several times; but I can bear that,
especially as they have also stung some of my importunate visitors, who,
by this means, are kept away. In fact, the only method I have to rid
myself of my friends is to stir up the bees—to rid myself of the bees, I
am obliged to stir up the fire, which is kept burning all day for the
cooking; but, by the time the bees are gone, the hut is intolerable.
Fancy a roaring fire, and lots of smoke, at noon in one of the hottest
places in Abyssinia.” His visitors were of a mixed description, and not
all of agreeable aspect; and, upon the whole, they bothered him no
little with their interminable questionings, attempts to extort
presents, and squabbles amongst themselves; but it would have been
impolitic to turn them out, except by the indirect agency of the bees;
and, moreover, he seems to possess one of those even, _insouciant_
tempers, hard to ruffle, which we take to be a prime requisite for a man
who sojourns amongst savages, and without which he certainly would not
have been able to say, at the end of his second volume, that, during
nine years’ travel, he never met with a companion, of whatsoever colour,
station, or religion, who gave him a moment’s cause to quarrel with him,
or from whom he parted otherwise than with regret. Far be it from us to
doubt the word of Mr Parkyns; but we would ask him if he really grieved
at relinquishing the society of an elderly warrior—his “friend,” he
calls him—who sat close to him at Addaro, looking over him as he wrote,
and begging to be set down in his book? “His name is Welda Georgis. He
is naturally very ugly; nor is his appearance at all improved by the
want of his nose, which he says he lost in battle. He cannot speak at
all without stopping the holes with his fingers; hence his voice,
especially when he speaks loud, is, as may be judged, not the most
harmonious; and just now he is raising it to a considerable pitch, being
excited to wrath by one of his companions insinuating that he was never
but in one battle, and that then he ran away before a blow had been
struck.” An imputation not to be borne; and, accordingly, in the plate
we see Welda Georgis and the other gentleman engaged in single combat
upon the floor. Presently Mr Parkyns is disturbed in his writing by a
bang, by a scream from a woman who is boiling a pot (a child in a bag on
her back), and by a “Wa!” from Welda Georgis, who, ignorant of the
dangers of a little knowledge, has been retailing to his friends
instructions he had received the day before in the art of cocking
double-barrelled pistols. He had cocked both barrels, but had pulled the
left trigger whilst holding the right hammer. A gourdful of capsicum
paste and a corn-jar were mortally wounded, but no other damage was
done. Welda laid down the weapon, which he evidently suspected of foul
play, looked gravely at it, and apostrophised it as “a naughty devil!”
Easy-going Mr Parkyns took all these trifles with an excellent grace, as
became a man of strong nerves, who had gone out to rough it, and who had
no desire to leave his bones in Abyssinia, or to have his physical
integrity in any way deteriorated. He smilingly put up with intruders,
and even with spies. He could not go out for a walk without being
followed. There is a notion abroad in those parts that Europeans _make_
money. This was confirmed, in the case of Mr Parkyns, by his happening
to have a great many new dollars. When he put one in circulation, the
receiver would exclaim, “Wa! this is only just made; see how it shines!”
So somebody always accompanied him, when he strolled out with his gun,
under pretence of showing him game, but in reality to watch his motions,
thinking to catch him in the very act of coining. It does not appear
that these scouts took much by their curiosity. “I often retire to the
neighbouring hills” (thus runs one of the brief verbatim quotations from
his journal, occasionally given by Mr Parkyns) “when about to take an
observation, or for some other reason wishing to be undisturbed, and
seek out some snug little nook or corner amongst the rocks. Scarcely,
however, have I time to make my preliminary arrangements, when, looking
up, I find two or three heads curiously peering into my retreat, fully
persuaded that they are about to behold the entire process of extracting
dollars from the earth, ready stamped with the august head of her
Imperial Majesty. Sometimes they were most laughably disappointed in
their expectations.” All this was at an early period of Mr Parkyns’
abode in the country; the natives had not got used to him, and he had
not yet become a complete Abyssinian; and, as we have already seen,
Addaro is an out-of-the-way place, where whites are rare. To see him to
advantage, we must accompany him to Adoua, notwithstanding that he tells
us he was less happy there, and exerted himself less to write down what
he observed, than “in the more genial solitude of the backwoods;” the
reason being, that “Adoua is a capital (!), though a small one; and in
all capitals, whether great or small, I feel out of my element, losing
at once my health, spirits, and energy and disposition for work.” The
force of imagination, the magic of a name, can hardly farther go. Let us
see what were the employments and pursuits of this wild man of the woods
in the village metropolis of Tigrè, in which the houses of the wealthy
are square and flat-roofed, whilst those of the poorer classes have a
conical thatch of straw. They seem to have consisted in noting native
peculiarities, in taking part in native banquets and merry-makings, and
in setting the fashion to Young Abyssinia. It is time, by the by, that
we should say a word of his intimate friend, Shetou, a fine fellow and
daring soldier, but no favourite with his father, Oubi, who took every
opportunity of snubbing him, and showed a marked preference for his puny
elder brother, Lemma. “Shetou has rather a slang way of dressing, which
greatly offends his father. Sometimes he comes in with one leg of his
trousers drawn up in the proper manner above his calf, and the other
dangling down about his ankle. On such an occasion, it would not be at
all extraordinary should Oubi, after looking at him fixedly, and in his
usual quiet smiling manner, begin, in the presence of all assembled,
‘Well done, son of a Mahommedan mother! Pretty way of wearing your
breeches, isn’t it? Some new fashion of your own, eh?’ And, turning to
the _agafari_ (doorkeepers), ‘Turn him out! turn him out!’ The poor lad
is put out in the most neck-and-crop manner, and, returning to his tent,
he broods over this treatment, and vows vengeance on his brother, Lemma,
who, from being the favourite, is partly the cause of it.” A prince of
the blood-royal must naturally feel incensed at being ignominiously
ejected from the court of his despotic dad, for no greater offence than
the fanciful sit of his breeks. But whose fault is it? No one’s, if not
that of Mr Parkyns, the Brummel of that foreign court, the promoter of
all manner of sartorial extravagances and innovations. “This” (a
particular cut of trouser) “was considered so very ultra-fashionable
that, except Dejatch Shetou, myself, and one or two others, few dared
attempt it. It was I and my friend Shetou who first introduced the habit
of allowing the sword to swing perpendicularly from the side, instead of
its sticking out horizontally, like a dog’s tail; as well as of wearing
the belt over the hips, instead of round the waist, and up to the
armpits, as it was worn when I first arrived. These, with the increased
length of trousers, reaching, as we wore them, nearly to the ankle, and
so tight below that it took an hour to draw them over the heel, gave a
very ‘fast’ look.” Mr Parkyns has immortalised his name in Tigrè, and
will be spoken of with admiration by future generations, to whom his
fame will be handed down by the dandies to whom he set so bright an
example. The incompatibility of cleanliness and elegance in Abyssinia
rather shocks our European prejudices. The great “go,” we are told,
amongst the dandies in those parts, is “to appear in the morning with a
huge pot of butter (about two ounces) placed on the top of the head,
which, as it gradually melts in the sun, runs over the hair, down the
neck, over the forehead, and often into the eyes, thereby causing much
smarting.” The grease is wiped from the brow and eyes with _the quarry_
or cloth, a garment compared by Mr Parkyns to the Roman toga, and which
it is the fashion to wear dirty, a clean one being considered “slow.”
But the town life of the young fashionables of rank in the chief cities
of Abyssinia, may best be summed up and exhibited in an extract from Mr
Parkyns’ thirty-eighth chapter, where he shows himself to us in all his
glory as the D’Orsay of Adoua.
“I was leading,” he says, “the life of an Abyssinian gentleman ‘about
town,’ my hair well tressed, my pantaloons always of the newest,
frequently of an original cut; in dull weather setting fashions,
disputing and deciding on the merits and demerits of shields and
spears; in fine weather swelling about the town with a quarter of a
pound of butter melting on my head, face, neck, and clothes, and with
a tail of half a dozen well-got-up and equally greasy soldiers at my
heels; doing the great man, with my garment well over my nose, at
every festival and funeral worth attending; ‘hanging out’ extensively
when I had a few shillings to spend; sponging on my neighbours when,
as was oftener the case, I had nothing;—in fact, living a most
agreeable life on a very limited income. I cannot deny that I look
back to those times with a certain feeling of regret. It was the only
period of my life in which I ever felt myself a really great man. I
‘cry very small’ in England, with a much greater expenditure. The men
will not look after me with admiration, nor the girls make songs about
me here.”
Poor Parkyns! fallen from your high estate, dwindled from an
African savage into an English gentleman! We wretched, civilised
Europeans are rather in the _nil admirari_ vein, but we will
answer for your being “looked after” with curiosity and
wonderment, by all who have read your book, if you will but adopt
some distinguishing mark by which you may be recognised when you
walk abroad. As to the songs, whose absence you deplore, we can
only say that if you are not taken for the subject of romantic
ditties by the poetesses of England, as you were by those of
Tigrè, it will certainly not be because the theme is unsuggestive.
Innumerable incidents in your Abyssinian career deserve to be
commemorated in flowing metre, and sung by Ethiopian serenaders to
banjo accompaniment, and to the ancient and pathetic melody of
“The King of the Cannibal Islands.” And this reminds us to
accompany you to one of the festivals you above allude to—a dinner
party at Adoua—first advising ladies to have their salts at hand,
and permitting squeamish readers to pass over a page if it so
please them. Here are a score of Abyssinian gentlemen squatted,
sword in hand, on cut grass round a low table. It is perhaps
unnecessary to mention that the tablecloth has been forgotten, and
that napkins are absent, their place being supplied by cakes of
bread, on which the guests wipe their fingers after dipping them
in the dish or smearing them with the blood of the raw meat. The
cooked dishes are first brought in and their contents distributed
by waiters, who cut the meat or tear it with their fingers into
pieces of a convenient size. They also take a piece of bread from
before each person, sop it in the sauce, and return it to him.
“The guests take their bread and sauce and mix them together into
a sort of paste, of which they make balls, long and rounded like
small black puddings (black enough, we doubt not); these they
consider it polite to poke into their neighbours’ mouths; so that,
if you happen to be a distinguished character, or a stranger to
whom they wish to pay attention, which was often my case, you are
in a very disagreeable position; for your two neighbours, one on
each side, cram into your mouth these large and peppery proofs of
their esteem so quickly, one after the other, that, long before
you can chew and swallow the one, you are obliged to make room for
the next.” Surely these can hardly be included amongst the “happy
moments” Mr Parkyns so pathetically regrets, when recording,
towards the close of his work, his tearful parting from his Adoua
friends—the first time, he says, since his arrival in the country,
that he felt the want of a pocket-handkerchief. Let us, however,
proceed with our repast, after a glance at the accompanying plate
of the “Dinner Party,” where a favoured guest, with distended
jaws, is undergoing the cramming process. This first course, of
cooked dishes, is usually mutton; whilst it is being gobbled up, a
cow is killed and flayed outside, and as soon as the first course
is removed, in comes the raw meat—the _broundo_, as it is
called—brought in by servants in quivering lumps.
“There is usually a piece of meat to every five or six persons, among
whom arises some show of ceremony as to which of them shall first help
himself; this being at length decided, the person chosen takes hold of
the meat with his left hand, and with his sword or knife cuts a strip
a foot or fifteen inches long from the part which appears the nicest
and tenderest. The others then help themselves in like manner. If I
should fail in describing properly the scene which now follows, I must
request the aid of the reader’s imagination. Let him picture to
himself thirty or forty Abyssinians, stripped to their waists,
squatting round the low tables, each with his sword or knife or
‘shotel’ in his hand, some eating, some helping themselves, some
waiting their turn, but all bearing in their features the expression
of that fierce gluttony which one attributes more to the lion or
leopard than to the race of Adam. The imagination may be much assisted
by the idea of the lumps of raw pink-and-blue flesh they are gloating
over.”
Some still more full-flavoured details follow, which we abstain from
extracting, thinking we can fill up the space remaining to us better
than by their transcription, and referring those curious in such matters
to chapter xxvii., “Manners and Customs,” where they will see how the
pepperballs already spoken of are got rid of by those into whose mouths
they are thrust, how boys lie under the table and act as scavengers, and
how Mr Parkyns expresses his belief that raw meat, eaten whilst yet
warm, would be preferred to cooked meat by any man who from childhood
had been accustomed to it. In the chapter headed “Religion, &c.,” which
“&c.” comprises a variety of strange things, we are told of “a small
entertainment” he gave to a select party of friends on the occasion of
the great festival of Mascal or the Cross, a season celebrated, like
Christmas in England, by hospitality and good cheer. He sent out his
cards for an early hour, knowing that his guests would have several
other feeds to attend in the course of the day. But when he had done
this, his conscience smote him, for he reflected that, with half a dozen
other breakfasts and dinners in view, his friends would but take the
sharp edge off their appetites in his wigwam, and husband their
masticatory and digestive powers for the subsequent banquets. “My rather
savage feelings of hospitality,” he says, “were piqued at the idea of
their leaving me without being well filled. But truly I was agreeably
disappointed; for a fine fat cow, two large sheep, and many gallons of
mead, with a proportionate quantity of bread, disappeared like smoke
before the twelve or fourteen guests, leaving only a few pickings for
the servants.” Mr Parkyns met several of these hungry gentlemen at other
dinners in the course of the same day, and was utterly confounded to
observe that most of them played as good a knife and fork (we mean sabre
and fingers) at every ensuing repast as they had done at his. The
capacity of an Abyssinian stomach is evidently incalculable.
The 19th and 37th chapters of Mr Parkyns’ work are amongst those that
please us best. In the earlier of the two he is on his way from Axum to
Addàro, across a vast open plain, embellished with a great variety of
flowers; amongst them a kind of scarlet aloe, met with in most parts of
Tigrè, and flowering at all seasons, and countless mimosas, pink,
yellow, and white, some of them so fragrant as to scent the whole
neighbourhood, adding their perfume to that of a profusion of jessamine.
“There is also a beautiful parasitical creeper, growing, like the
mistletoe, from the bark of other trees. It has a bright dark-green
fleshy leaf, with brilliant scarlet flowers.” But Mr Parkyns is not much
of a botanist; zoology, and especially ornithology, are his favourite
pursuits, and, a capital shot, he bagged as many specimens as he chose.
“Rifle-shooting,” he modestly says, “was about the only thing in the
world I could do well.” The _was_ is to be deplored. It is thus
accounted for. Near Addàro, a hunter, either accidentally or
mischievously, set fire to the jungle. Mr Parkyns was then staying in a
hamlet, situated on a small hill. It consisted but of three compounds,
one of which he and his servants occupied; another was inhabited by a
farmer named Aito Hablo, with his wife and family; and in the third
dwelt a cast-off wife and children of the same Aito. Divorces are not
difficult to obtain in that country. One morning, all hands were roused
by the crackling of flames close at hand. The hillock was surrounded by
fire, gradually creeping up the slope. The huts were roofed with sticks
and straw, and the ground was covered with long dry grass. There was no
time to lose. Tearing down green boughs from the trees, the men, whilst
the women and children lit counterfires upon the plan usually adopted in
such cases, “made rushes at the flames, whenever a lull of the wind
allowed them to approach them, and, by beating them with the boughs, in
some measure impeded their progress till the space was cleared and the
huts were out of danger. I and one of my servants happened to rush at
the fire at an unlucky moment; for a breeze rising drove the flames
towards us just as we got near them, and we were badly scorched.”
Besides other injuries, the optic nerve of Mr Parkyns’ right eye was
damaged, and this spoiled his rifle-shooting. “Formerly,” he says, “I
managed occasionally to shoot from my left shoulder—a habit which I
found useful in stalking, as in some positions you must necessarily
expose yourself before you can bring your right shoulder forward. Now
that I am obliged to trust to my left alone, I find it a very poor
substitute for the right.” Even after this unlucky accident, however, we
find Mr Parkyns very dexterously picking off bird and beast, to supply
his table or enrich his collection. He tells some capital sporting
anecdotes, and others, equally good, of his queer pets, and of his
experience amongst the monkeys. About half-way across the mimosa-scented
plain, he came to a well-wooded ravine, the trees in which swarmed with
the “tota” or “waag,” a beautiful little greenish-grey monkey, with
black face and white whiskers, which allows men to approach very near to
it. But the cleverest of this class of animals met with in Abyssinia is
the Cynocephalus, or Dog-faced Baboon, a formidable animal, of
extraordinary sagacity, to which it is really difficult to refuse the
possession of reasoning powers. Mr Parkyns sketches these creatures on a
foray. “Arrived at the corn-fields, the scouts took their position on
the eminences all around, whilst the remainder of the tribe collect
provisions with the utmost expedition, filling their cheek-pouches as
full as they can hold, and then tucking the heads of corn under their
armpits. Now, unless there be a partition of the collected spoil, how do
the scouts feed? for I have watched them several times, and never
observed them to quit for a moment their post of duty till it was time
for the tribe to return, or till some indication of danger induced them
to take to flight.” Outlying one night on the frontier, Mr Parkyns was
roused by most awful noises, and started up in alarm, thinking the Barea
were upon him. It was but the baboons. A leopard had got amongst them.
They habitually dwell in lofty clefts of the rock, whither few animals
can follow them; but the leopard is a good climber, and sometimes
attacks them. The Abyssinians say that he seldom ventures to attack a
full-grown ape—and, judging from the formidable canine teeth displayed
in the skull sketched by Mr Parkyns, the leopard is in the right. Driven
to stand at bay, these baboons are dangerous opponents, but they have
not sufficient courage to act on the offensive. “Were their
combativeness proportioned to their physical powers, coming as they do
in bodies of two or three hundred, it would be impossible for the
natives to go out of the village except in parties, and armed; and,
instead of little boys, regiments of armed men would be required to
guard the corn-fields. I have, however, frequently seen them turn on
dogs, and have heard of their attacking women whom they have
accidentally met alone in the roads or woods. On one occasion I was told
of a woman who was so grievously maltreated by them, that, although she
was succoured by the opportune arrival of some passers-by, she died a
few days after, from the fright and ill-treatment she had endured.” We
are reminded of Sealsfield’s striking Mexican sketch of the _zambos_. Mr
Parkyns had a female dog-face as a pet. She was young when he got her;
and, from the first, her affection for him was ludicrously annoying. As
she grew older she was less dependent, and cared less about being left
alone. The master of a German brig who went up the country for a cargo
of animals, gave Mr Parkyns a copy of “Peter Simple.” Besides the Bible
and the “Nautical Almanack,” this, he says, was the first English book
he had seen for two years, and he sat down greedily to devour it.
“‘Lemdy’ was as usual seated beside me, at times looking quietly at me,
occasionally catching a fly, or jumping on my shoulder, endeavouring to
pick out the blue marks tattooed there.” The group is suggestive for a
sculptor; a thousand pities no Abyssinian Canova was at hand to model
it. Mr Parkyns went to light his pipe, imprudently leaving the book and
the monkey together. On his return he found the latter seated in his
place, and gravely turning over the leaves of Marryat’s novel; but, not
understanding English, she turned them too quickly, and had torn out
half the volume. “During my momentary absences she would take up my pipe
and hold it to her mouth till I came back, when she would restore it
with the utmost politeness.” At Khartoum, some time after the
termination of his Abyssinian wanderings, Mr Parkyns became very
intimate with three large monkeys of this intelligent species, and with
their showman—“so much so, that I travelled with them for some days,
acting as his assistant, my duty being to keep the ring, which I did by
gracefully swinging round me two wooden balls covered with red cloth,
and fastened, one at each end, to a rope similarly ornamented—and
occasionally to assist the monkeys in collecting coppers. I passed a
very agreeable time with him, and he told me many anecdotes of monkeys,
as well as the usual tales of ghouls, fire-worshippers, &c., for which
all Egyptians, especially of his erratic habits, are celebrated.” If
this be not a joke—and there is no reason to take it for one, since Mr
Parkyns, who is a sort of African Gil Blas (only more scrupulous in
certain respects than his Spanish prototype), was evidently, at that
time of his life, eccentric and adventurous enough to adopt on the
instant any wild freak that entered his head—we hope to have a more
detailed account of his association with the showman when he favours us
with the narrative of his post-Abyssinian travels, not forgetting the
anecdotes of monkeys (he tells two or three very good ones), and the
traditions of ghouls and fire-worshippers. We are sure that he must
there have materials for at least one long chapter; and we feel
particular curiosity about the traditions, because the supernatural
seems to partake, in tropical Africa, of the strange, fantastical,
exaggerated character of the animal and vegetable productions of the
country. Extraordinary stories are there current of tribes of monsters,
semi-human, dwelling in the unexplored parts of the country—such as the
Beni-Kelb or Dog-men (mentioned by Werne), “whose males are dogs, and
females beautiful women; and the Beni-Temsah (sons of the crocodile),
who have human bodies, but heads like those of their ancestor’s family.
I have heard of the former of these nations in almost every country I
have visited in Africa, from Egypt to the White Nile, including Kordofan
and Abyssinia, and even in Arabia, whither their fame has been carried,
doubtless, by pilgrims. They are, by most, believed to exist near the
Fertit country (south of Darfour), where there are copper-mines, and the
people of which file their teeth to points, saw-fashion.... There is no
tribe in this part of Africa, indeed scarcely an individual, but
believes in the existence of a race of men with tails. For my own part,
I have heard so much of them that I can scarcely help fancying there
must be some foundation for such very general belief.” Great diversity
of opinion exists as to the whereabouts of these tail-bearers, some
placing them to the north, others to the south of Bàza, and others in
the centre of Africa—convenient, because unexplored. A black Fàky or
priest, a speculative genius, whose acquaintance Mr Parkyns made in
Abyssinia, gave him some information about his future route across
Africa, and warned him against certain cannibal tribes south of Darfour,
by whom white meat, being a rarity, is much esteemed, as having a fat
delicate look. “He told me that a brown man, a Mahommedan priest, who
went there from his country, in the hope of converting the people to
Islamism, was—though protected from actual danger by his sanctity—a very
tempting object among them, so much so, that whenever he went out the
little children came about him, poking him with their fingers in the
ribs, feeling his arms and legs, and muttering to one another, ‘Wa-wa,
wa-wa!’ (meat, meat), with their mouths watering, and their features
expressive of the greatest possible inclination to taste him.” We will
back Mr Parkyns against the field for the humorous dressing-up of
extravagant stories of this kind, and for an occasional dash of dry
comical exaggeration, too obvious to mislead. His choice of pet animals
was rather of the strangest. For some time he kept a “tokla” (_Canis
venaticus_), which was as nearly tame as its wild vicious nature
admitted.
“In appearance Tokla was more curious than beautiful. He had a little
lean body, which no feeding could fatten, covered with a darkish
brindly-spotted coat not unlike a hyena’s, and supported by legs as
unlike those of any other animal as possible, being in colour white,
with dark leopard spots, the hind-legs remarkably long, and so doubled
under him that when walking, or rather prowling about, it was doubtful
if he touched the ground oftenest with his feet or _elbows_.... To
account for his perpetual thinness, it only requires to state his mode
of feeding. He would take a huge piece of meat or offal, and put it
into his stomach at once, seemingly entire, for he never appeared
aware that his wonderfully muscular jaws and double row of teeth were
at all available for mastication. Having thus bolted his dinner, his
belly became distended till it nearly touched the ground; then he
would go and lie down for twenty-four hours or more, according to the
quantity he had eaten; after which he would return to be fed, as empty
and starved-looking as ever.”
A useful, profitable, and agreeable inmate must the said Tokla have
been. Mr Parkyns’ regard for him seems to have arisen from a sort of
sympathetic feeling for the unflinching pluck and endurance displayed on
various occasions by the ill-conditioned little brute. A friend of his,
knowing his partiality to pet animals, made him a present of a young
jackal, which he had knocked over with a stick, when it was labouring
under the effects of a surfeit of locusts. Jackal was hospitably
received, and a bed of cotton wool made up for him.
“Rising early one morning, I found that he and Tokla had entered into
an alliance most offensive to the fowls, one of whom they had caught,
and were dragging about the yard—the one holding by a foot, the other
by a wing. The moment I appeared, Cobero (the jackal) let go the fowl
and limped back to his corner. Tokla, more determined, I had to beat
off, which I did with great difficulty, and not until the poor fowl
was so lacerated that I was constrained to kill it. Excited by its
death-struggles, he again laid hold; so I held up the fowl with him
dangling to its wing until I was tired, and then swung him round and
round, over and over, in hopes of his jaws tiring; but in this I was
disappointed, for he held on till the wing breaking off threw him
heavily on his back to a distance of several yards. Even in his fall
he was great, for he neither uttered a sound of pain nor loosened his
hold, but, getting up, stalked away quite proudly with the wing in his
mouth. I was so much pleased with him that I gave him the body and
all. In this, perhaps, I acted wrong, for we afterwards found that if
we didn’t kill all the poultry he would, and so I gave up ever keeping
any more. Poor little Tokla! I grew very fond of him, for, though
rough and ugly, he had such pretty winning ways—he seemed always
hungry, and would often bite people’s legs, occasionally my own, not
at all from vice, but sheer appetite.”
Upon the whole, life in Abyssinia bears much resemblance to life in a
menagerie, so familiar and intrusive are the wild beasts of the field.
Hyenas prowl about the villages, and enter houses in quest of a supper.
They are far from dainty in their diet, and will eat leathern bags and
wearing apparel. “It once occurred to me,” says Mr Parkyns, “as it has
often to people I have known, to be awakened by one of them endeavouring
to steal my leathern bed from under me.” They are too cowardly to attack
anything capable of defence, but occasionally they take a bite out of a
sleeper and run away—first scratching him with their paw (so the
Abyssinians assert) to be sure that he sleeps soundly, and then
snatching their mouthful. As for lions, they frequently prowled around
Mr Parkyns’ bivouacs, but were not aggressive, and it was not even
necessary to light fires to keep them off. The buffalo-hunters of
Rohabaita used, upon the contrary, to light their camp-fires in holes,
and conceal their glare with branches of trees, that the blaze might
neither scare the buffalo nor bring down the Barea.
“I never killed a lion during all my stay in Africa,” says Mr Parkyns,
with meritorious candour—seeing that he might, without fear of
contradiction, have set down to his own rifle any number of the kings
of the forest. “I perhaps should have done so, had I known what a fuss
is made about it at home; but in Abyssinia it is not an easy thing to
accomplish.... At night I have often watched for them, but generally
without success; and when they did come, it was next to impossible to
shoot them. Besides, it is an awkward thing for a man, armed only with
a single rifle of light calibre, to take a flying shot at a lion in
the dark, especially when he has no one to back him on whose courage
or shooting he can rely. You hear a lion roar in the distance;
presently a little nearer; then you start up at hearing a short bark
close by; and if there be a fire or moonlight, perhaps you may see a
light-coloured object gliding quickly past from one bush to another.
Before you are sure whether or no you saw anything, it is gone. You
sit watching for a moment, rifle in hand, expecting him to appear
again, when (how he got there you know not) his roar is heard at a
considerable distance off in an opposite direction; and thus you go on
for an hour or two, when, getting sleepy, you politely request him to
take himself off to a certain warm place, and, returning your rifle
between your legs, roll over and go to sleep.”
Long habit and strong reliance on the mansuetude of the Abyssinian lions
must, we should think, be indispensable to slumber under such
circumstances. We can hardly fancy a man’s being lulled to rest by a
lion’s roar, and sinking into one of the deep and heavy sleeps common in
that country, with the consciousness that when he awakes he may possibly
behold a hyena gallopping off with his cheek in its mouth,[2] or find a
few scorpions walking over his body, leisurely stinging him. “Scorpions
are abundant everywhere in the hot districts; no house but is full of
them. I have been stung several times by them, but without any serious
consequences, though I have heard of many instances which have ended
fatally.” Mr Parkyns, we presume, at once applied the keen blade and
actual cautery recommended in his Introduction. What with incidental
scars of this kind, his tattoo decorations, and the scars he voluntarily
made upon his arm by an Abyssinian process similar to the moxa of
European surgery, and which is done by those people partly as ornamental
and partly to show their fortitude under pain, his epidermis must have
rather a remarkable appearance when exposed by the scantiness of costume
in which he informs us that he sometimes travelled—_en cueros_, namely,
when on solitary roads, and with a piece of rag or hide round the loins
when in populous districts. We certainly never met with or heard of any
traveller who embraced savagery with such earnestness and hearty
goodwill as Mr Parkyns; and we sincerely congratulate him upon his
escape with trifling detriment from the perils and exposure he not only
encountered but enthusiastically sought.
Tigrè is rich in reptiles. Of the extent of this undesirable wealth, a
few lines, culled here and there from the chapter on Natural History,
will give a vivid idea. “The crocodile is plentiful in every brook or
hole where there is water enough to conceal him.” A poor German, who
attached himself for a time to Mr Parkyns, and tended him carefully when
he was laid up with a terrible attack of ophthalmia, imprudently walked
into a river to cool himself, and suddenly disappeared, either sucked in
by a whirlpool or carried off by a crocodile—the latter, Mr Parkyns
thought, most probably the case; notwithstanding which, we come, a few
pages afterwards, to a plate of the bold traveller crossing the same
rapid and dangerous stream, aided by half a dozen swimming blacks, and
apparently heedless of the fact that crocodiles, like the cannibals
south of Darfour, show a decided preference for white meat. “There are
many snakes, centipedes, and large venomous spiders, of the tarantula
kind, in the hot low districts. There is a great variety in the smaller
sort of snakes: the cerastes or horned viper, asp, a species of cobra,
the puff adder, and many others of all sizes and colours, from a pale
pink to the brightest emerald green, are met with in Abyssinia and the
adjacent countries. I was told of a horned serpent that was killed some
years ago, which appears to have been a monstrosity, either in reality
or in the imagination of my informants. They describe it as about seven
feet long, nearly two feet in circumference, with scarcely any
diminution towards the tail, and wearing a pair of horns three inches in
length. It is commonly reported that dragons, or rather flying lizards
of very venomous nature, are to be met with in Walkait.” A pleasant
country for pic-nics in the woods. Going one day to shoot at a mark in a
long narrow gully close to Rohabaita, where the village wells were, Mr
Parkyns had just paced off the distance, and was building a rough target
of stones, when his servant started back, and pulled him with him,
calling out, “Temen, temen!” (snake). There was a rustling in the jungle
that rose abruptly on either side of the watercourse, which was only a
few feet wide. Not knowing what _temen_ meant, but supposing it was some
wild animal, Mr Parkyns called loudly to his second attendant to bring
the gun. “All this passed in a moment’s time; and although only one
hundred and fifty yards off, long before the gun arrived I had seen two
magnificent boa-constrictors, one about ten yards from the other,
quietly leave their places, without attempting to molest us, and ascend
the hill, till they were lost in jungle, whither I never cared to pursue
them. The first thing I saw after the rustle was a head, which appeared
for a moment above the canes, then a body, nearly as thick as my thigh,
and then they disappeared, the movement of the canes alone marking the
direction they had taken.” What Mr Parkyns says he himself saw we duly
credit, whilst fully sharing his intimated incredulity with respect to
the winged dragons, and the apocryphal horned monster. Before believing
in them, we should like to see them—not, by any means, roaming at large
in the state of vigour promoted by their own burning climate, but
properly stuffed, or carefully wrapped in flannel and securely caged, in
the gardens of the Zoological Society.
Although it may with perfect truth be said that no chapter of Mr
Parkyns’ book is devoid of strong interest of one kind or other, all are
not equally attractive; and we have preferred dwelling at some length
upon the section of natural history to extracting any of the horrible
stories of Abyssinian cruelty which he relates under the head of
“Anecdotes of Character.” He himself seems to doubt whether they might
not have been as well omitted, but perhaps he was right in deciding to
give them, in order to supply data for a fair estimate of the national
character of that singular people, which he might otherwise have been
suspected of placing in too favourable a light. Persons to whom
narratives of murder, torture, barbarous mutilation, and savage cruelty
are odious and intolerable, have only to treat the pages 187 to 222 of
the second volume as the monkey treated those of “Peter Simple”—turn
without reading them, although we warn them that by so doing they will
miss some very characteristic and curious matter. Portions of the
chapter devoted to “Physical Constitution, Diseases, &c.,” may be trying
to delicate stomachs, but for such Mr Parkyns has not written—as may be
judged from one or two extracts already given. Amongst the traits of
character, &c., we find some remarkable anecdotes of Arab swordsmanship.
An Abyssinian having treacherously murdered one of the Arab allies of
the Tigrè chiefs (merely for the sake of gratifying the exorbitant
vanity inherent in all those people, by displaying the barbarous
trophies taken from his victim), the murdered man’s friends claimed the
assassin’s blood.
“The crime being proved against him, Oubi gave him over to their
tender mercies. His punishment was most summary. Before they had left
the presence of the prince, one of the relations of the deceased,
drawing his heavy two-edged broadsword, cut the culprit through with
one blow; and, turning to Oubi, said, in Arabic: ‘May God lengthen
your life, oh my master!’—just as he would have done had he received a
present from his hands; and then, picking up a wisp of grass from the
floor, walked away, wiping his blade with as much _sangfroid_ as if
nothing had occurred. Oubi is said to have expressed much admiration
at the manly off-hand way in which this was done, as well as at the
wonderful display of swordsmanship. I know, from very good authority,
that the facts of the Arab being murdered, and the subsequent
execution of the criminal, are true, though I was not present when it
occurred. I do not dispute the fact; I do not wish any of my readers,
who think such a feat impossible, to believe it in the present
instance. I have known for certain of the same feat being performed by
Turks with their crooked sabres, but never by an Arab with his
straight sword.”
Mr Parkyns subjoins a note relating to the campaign in Taka in which
Werne shared.[3] Some of the prisoners then made were, as recorded by
Werne, treated with great barbarity. We do not remember his mentioning
the exact circumstances now recorded; but he separated from the Egyptian
army before its return to Khartoum, in order to join the expedition up
the White Nile. Certain chiefs, Mr Parkyns tells us, being marched off
to be made examples of on the marketplace of Khartoum, paused on the
road and refused to proceed. “Suliman Cushif, who commanded the escort,
having orders that all such should be put to death on the spot, is said
to have practised his swordsmanship on them by cutting them through at
the waist as they stood. My friend, Moussa Bey, in the same expedition,
unintentionally cut a horse’s head clean off.... Seeing one of his men
turn his horse’s head and make for the jungle, he determined to check so
dangerous an example by summary means, and so gave chase to the
fugitive. Being better mounted, he soon came up with him; but the Arab,
not liking his appearance as he stood up in his stirrups with his nasty
little crooked olive-brown blade, ready for a back-stroke, threw his
horse suddenly back on his haunches, and dropped off; the horse’s head
went up just in time to receive the blow aimed at his master”—and
dropped off too, it would appear. Mr Parkyns knows, he says, plenty more
such anecdotes—and indeed such anecdotes are plentiful enough in other
countries than Africa—but nothing is more difficult than to sift the
inventions from the verities. Haydon the artist, who seems to have been
partial to such tales, and ready enough to credit them, relates some
astounding exploits collected from his model life-guardsmen—amongst
others a story of a cut received by a French dragoon at Waterloo, which
went through helmet and head, so that the severed portion dropped on the
shoulder like a slice of apple. We have not the volume at hand to refer
to, but this is the substance of the incident, told nearly in the same
words. Such cuts as that—like the flying dragons of Abyssinia—we must
see before believing in them. At the same time, a swordsman’s power
depends so much more upon the mode in which his cuts are delivered than
upon mere brute strength—upon skill than upon violence—that it becomes
difficult to assign exact limits to the possible effect of a good blade
in adroit and practised hands. The cutting through, at the waist, of a
slender Oriental, will hardly appear an impossibility to those who have
seen the now commonplace feat of severing a leg of mutton at a blow.
Moussa Bey’s “nasty little crooked olive-brown blade” must
unquestionably have been dexterously wielded to decapitate, at a single
blow, his fugitive follower’s charger, allowing even that the latter was
the slenderest and most ewe-necked of its race. Oubi’s admiration of the
sweeping blow of his Arab auxiliary was not surprising, since his own
subjects have difficulty in inflicting a serious wound with their clumsy
sickle-shaped falchions, of great length of blade, and with hilts of
such awkward and inconvenient construction as to paralyse the play of
the swordsman’s arm. These hilts are cut out of solid pieces of
rhinoceros horn, at great waste of material, and a handsome one costs as
much as £2 sterling. The sword is worn on the right side, that the
Abyssinian warrior may not, when he has thrown his lance, have to
disturb the position of his shield, and so uncover himself, whilst
drawing his weapon across his body. Such, at least, is the explanation
Mr Parkyns gives. But the whole military equipment of the Abyssinians is
far from formidable. They are tolerably expert in throwing the javelin,
but with firearms they are extremely clumsy; and, notwithstanding their
large buffalo-hide shields, a European, who has any knowledge of the
sword, is more than a match for the best of them.
“It was my original intention” (we revert to Mr Parkyns’ Introduction)
“to write solely on the habits of the people, without bringing myself
into notice in any part of the story; but from this I was dissuaded by
being told that, without a little personal narrative, the book would be
unreadable. I have, therefore, divided the subject into two
parts—Travel, and Manners and Customs.” Your dissuasive friends, Mr
Parkyns, were in the right, and you showed your good sense by taking
their advice—in _form_ as regards the first volume, in _fact_ as regards
also the greater part of the second. Personal narrative is evidently
your forte; a humorous, rollicking, letter-writing style, the one you
have most at your command. The “exuberant animal spirits, not dependent
on temporary excitement, but the offspring of abstemious habits,
combined with plenty of air and exercise—the feeling which inspires a
calf to cock his tail, shake his head, kick and gallop about—which
swells a pigmy into a Hercules, and causes a young hippopotamus to think
of adopting the ballet as his profession,”—which you declare to be the
reason of your addiction to savage life, and which you so enjoyed in
Abyssinia, had evidently not abandoned you when dressing up your journal
for the press within the civilised precincts of the Nottinghamshire
County-hall, whence you date your dedication to Lord Palmerston. Your
style, of which you unnecessarily deprecate criticism, is spirited,
racy, and abundantly good for the subject. When the mass of your book is
so highly interesting, it may seem unkind to mention that a few of your
jokes are a little the worse for wear, and remind us too strongly of the
departed Miller to add much to the originality of your otherwise
extremely original and capital volumes; and if we touch on that point,
it is merely in the hope that you will take the hint in a kindly spirit,
and profit by it when preparing for the press the “ponderous heap of
papers” you inform us you accumulated during four and a half years’
travel in Nubia, Kordofan, and Egypt. Prepare them by all means, at your
leisure, and with care, and let us have them in type at the earliest
convenience of yourself and publisher. After your present work, we shall
expect much from them, and do not fear being disappointed. As to
attacking your statements, in the way of impugning your veracity, such
temerity would never enter our minds. We will not say that we have not
at times been startled, almost staggered, as we read with foot on
fender, and much enjoyment, the narrative of your strange experience;
but, as you justly observe, stay-at-home critics sometimes get hold of
the wrong end of the stick, and sneer at truth whilst swallowing
exaggerations. We beg, then, to assure you that, until we ourselves have
passed a season in Abyssinia, with butter on our hair, and nothing on
our feet—until we have dined upon raw beefsteaks, with fingers for
forks, and a curved sabre for a carving-knife—we shall never venture to
question the strict correctness and fidelity of any portion of your
singular narrative—an assurance you may safely accept as a guarantee of
impunity at our hands, even though you should draw a far longer bow than
we believe you to have done in the case of the country of which you have
so pleasantly written. Of one thing we are convinced, and that is, that
few who take up _Life in Abyssinia_ will lay it down without reading it
through, and without exclaiming, when they come to the end, “What an
amusing book this is, and what an agreeable savage is Mansfield
Parkyns!”
THE QUIET HEART.
PART III.—CHAPTER XI.
“My patience! but ye’ll no tell me, Miss Menie, that yon auld antick is
the doctor’s aunt?”
“She was no older than my father, though she was his aunt, Jenny,” said
Menie Laurie, with humility. Menie was something ashamed, and had not
yet recovered herself of the first salute.
“Nae aulder than the doctor!—I wouldna say; your mamma hersel is no sae
young as she has been; but the like of yon!”
“Look, Jenny, what a pleasant place,” said the evasive Menie; “though
where the heath is—but I suppose as they call this Heathbank we must be
near it. Look, Jenny, down yonder, at the steeple in the smoke, and how
clear the air is here, and this room so pleasant and lightsome. Are you
not pleased, Jenny?”
“Yon’s my lady’s maid,” said Jenny, with a little snort of disdain.
“They ca’ her Maria, nae less—set her up! like a lady’s sel in ane of
your grand novelles; and as muckle dress on an ilkaday as I’ve seen mony
a young lady gang to the kirk wi’, Miss Menie—no to say your ain very
sel’s been plainer mony a day. Am I no pleased? Is’t like to please folk
to come this far to an outlandish country, and win to a house at last
with a head owre’t like yon?”
“Whisht, Jenny!” Menie Laurie has opened her window softly, with a
consciousness of being still a stranger, and in a stranger’s house. The
pretty white muslin curtains half hide her from Jenny, and Jenny stands
before the glass and little toilet-table, taking up sundry pretty things
that ornament it, with mingled admiration and disdain, surmising what
this, and this, is for, and wondering indignantly whether the lady of
the house can think that Menie stands in need of the perfumes and
cosmetics to which she herself resorts. But the room is a very pretty
room, with its lightly-draped bed, and bright carpet, and clear
lattice-window. Looking round, Jenny may still fuff, but has no reason
to complain.
And Menie, leaning out, feels the soft summer air cool down the flush
upon her cheeks, and lets her thoughts stray away over the great city
yonder, where the sunshine weaves itself among the smoke, and makes a
strange yellow tissue, fine and light to veil the Titan withal. The heat
is leaving her soft cheek, her hair plays on it lightly, the wind
fingering its loosened curls like a child, and Menie’s eyes have
wandered far away with her thoughts and with her heart.
Conscious of the sunshine here, lying steadily on the quiet lawn, the
meagre yew-tree, the distinct garden-path—conscious of the soft bank of
turf, where these calm cattle repose luxuriously—of the broad yellow
sandy road which skirts it—of the little gleam of water yonder in a
distant hollow—but, buoyed upon joyous wings, hovering like a bird over
an indistinct vision of yonder pier, and deck, and crowded street—a
little circle enclosing one lofty figure, out of which rises this head,
with its natural state and grace, out of which shine those glowing
ardent eyes—and Menie, charmed and silent, looks on and watches, seeing
him come and go through all the ignoble crowd—the crowd which has ceased
to be ignoble when it encloses him.
And voices of children ringing through the sunshine, and a sweet, soft,
universal tinkle, as of some fairy music in the air, flow into Menie
Laurie’s meditation, but never fret its golden thread; for every joy of
sight and sound finds some kindred in this musing; and the voices grow
into a sweet all-hail, and the hum of distant life lingers on her ear
like the silver tone of fame—Fame that is coming—coming nearer every
day, throwing the glow of its purple royal, the sheen of its diamond
crown upon his head and on his path—and the girl’s heart, overflooded
with a light more glorious than the sunshine, forgets itself, its own
identity and fate, in dreaming of the nobler fate to which its own is
bound.
“A young friend of yours?—you may depend upon my warmest welcome for
him, my dear Mrs Laurie,” says a voice just emerging into the air below,
which sends Menie back in great haste, and with violent unconscious
blushes, from the window. “Mr Randall Home?—quite a remarkable name, I
am sure. Something in an office? Indeed! But then, really, an office
means so many very different things—may be of any class, in fact—and a
literary man? I am delighted. He must be a very intimate friend to have
seen you already.”
Menie waits breathless for the answer, but in truth Mrs Laurie is very
little more inclined to betray her secret than she is herself.
“We have known him for many years—a neighbour’s son,” said Mrs Laurie,
with hesitation; “yet indeed it is foolish to put off what I must tell
you when you see them together. Randall and my Menie are—I suppose I
must say, though both so young—engaged, and of course it is natural he
should be anxious. I have no doubt you will be pleased with him; but I
was hurried and nervous a little this morning, or I should have
postponed his first visit a day or two, till we ourselves were less
perfect strangers to you, Miss Annie.”
“I beg——” said Miss Annie Laurie, lifting with courteous deprecation her
thin and half-bared arm. “I felt quite sure, when I got your letter,
that we could not be strangers half an hour, and this is really quite a
delightful addition;—true love—young love!—ah my dear Mrs Laurie, where
can there be a greater pleasure than to watch two unsophisticated hearts
expanding themselves? I am quite charmed—a man of talent, too—and your
pretty little daughter, so young and so fresh, and so beautifully
simple. I am sure you could not have conferred a greater privilege upon
me—I shall feel quite a delight in their young love. Dear little
creature—she must be so happy; and I am sure a good mother like you must
be as much devoted to him as your darling Menie.”
Mrs Laurie, who was not used to speak of darling Menie, nor to think it
at all essential that she should be devoted to Randall Home, was
considerably confused by this appeal, and could only answer in a very
quiet tone, which quite acted as a shadow to Miss Annie’s glow of
enthusiasm, that Randall was a very good young man, and that she had
never objected to him.
“The course of true love never did run smooth,” said the greatly
interested Miss Annie. “My dear Mrs Laurie, I am afraid you must have
had some other, perhaps more ambitious views, or you could not
possibly—with your experience, too—speak with so little interest of your
dear child’s happiness.”
Here Menie ventured to glance out. The lady of the house swayed lightly
back and forward, with one foot on the ground and another on the close
turf of the little lawn, switching the yew-tree playfully with a wand of
hawthorn; and the wind blew Miss Annie’s long ringlets against her
withered cheek, and fluttered the lace upon her arm, with a strange
contempt for her airy graces, and for the levity so decayed and out of
date which Menie felt herself blush to see. Opposite, upon the grass,
stood Mrs Laurie, the sun beating down upon her snowy matron-cap, her
healthful cheek, her sober household dignity. But the sun revealed to
Menie something more than the natural good looks of that familiar face.
Mrs Laurie’s cheek was flushed a little. Mrs Laurie’s fine clear dark
eye wandered uneasily over the garden, and Mrs Laurie’s foot patted the
grass with a considerable impatience. Half angry, disconcerted, abashed,
annoyed, Menie’s mother could but half-conceal an involuntary smile of
amusement, too.
“Yes, my child’s happiness is very dear to me,” said Mrs Laurie, with
half a shade of offence in her tone. “But Menie is very young—I am in no
haste to part with her.”
“Ah, my dear, youth is the time,” said Miss Annie, pathetically—“the
first freshness, you know, and that dear, sweet, early susceptibility,
of which one might say so many charming things. For my part, I am quite
delighted to think that she has given her heart so early, so many
experiences are lost otherwise. I remember—ah, I remember!—but really,
Mrs Laurie, you surprise me. I see I must give my confidence to Menie.
Poor little darling—I am afraid you have not encouraged her to confide
all her little romantic distresses to you.”
“I have always respected Menie’s good sense,” said Mrs Laurie hastily.
Then she made a somewhat abrupt pause, and then glanced up with her look
of disconcertment and confusion, half covered with a smile. “I am
Menie’s mother, and an old wife now, Miss Annie. I am afraid I have lost
a great deal of that early susceptibility you spoke of—and I scarcely
think my daughter would care to find it in me—but we are very good
friends for all that.”
And Mrs Laurie’s eye, glistening with mother pride, and quite a
different order of sentiment from Miss Annie’s, glanced up involuntarily
to Menie’s window. Menie had but time to answer with a shy child’s look
of love out of her downcast eyes—for Menie shrank back timidly from the
more enthusiastic sympathy with which her grand-aunt waited to overpower
her—and disappeared into the quiet of her room to sit down in a shady
corner a little, and wind her maze of thoughts into some good order. The
sun was drawing towards the west—it was time to descend to the shady
drawing-room of Heathbank, where Randall by-and-by should be received
for the first time as Miss Annie Laurie’s guest.
CHAPTER XII.
It is very pleasant here, in the shady drawing-room of Heathbank. Out of
doors, these grassy slopes, which Menie Laurie cannot believe to be the
heath, are all glowing with sunshine; but within here, the light falls
cool and green, the breeze plays through the open window, and golden
streaks of sunbeams come in faintly at one end, through the bars of the
Venetian blind, upon the pleasant shade, touching it into character and
consciousness. It is a long room with a window at either end, a round
table in the middle, an open piano in a recess, and pretty bits of
feminine-looking furniture straying about in confusion not too studied.
The walls are full of gilt frames, too, and look bright, though one need
not be unnecessarily critical about the scraps of canvass and
broad-margined water-colour drawings which repose quietly within these
gilded squares. They are Miss Annie Laurie’s pictures, and Miss Annie
Laurie feels herself a connoisseur, and is something proud of them,
while it cannot be denied that the frames do excellent service upon the
shady drawing-room wall.
Mrs Laurie has found refuge in the corner of a sofa, and, with a very
fine picture-book in her hand, escapes from the conversation of Miss
Annie, which has been so very much in the style of the picture-book that
Menie’s mother still keeps her flush of abashed annoyance upon her
cheek, and Menie herself lingers shyly at the door, half afraid to
enter. There is something very formidable to Menie in the enthusiasm and
sympathy of her aunt.
“My pretty darling!” said Miss Annie—and Miss Annie lifted her dainty
perfumed fingers to tap Menie’s cheeks with playful grace. Menie shrank
back into a corner, blushing and disconcerted, and drooped her head
after a shy girlish fashion, quite unable to make any response. “Don’t
be afraid, my love,” said the mistress of the house, with a little
laugh. “Don’t fear any jesting from me—no, no—I hope I understand better
these sensitive youthful feelings—and we shall say nothing on the
subject, my dear Menie—not a word—only you must trust me as a friend,
you know, and we must wait tea till he comes—ah, till _he_ comes,
Menie.”
Poor Menie for the moment could have wished _him_ a thousand miles away;
but she only sat down, very suddenly and quietly, on a low seat by the
wall, while Miss Annie tripped away to arrange some ornamental matters
on the tea-table, where her little china cups already sparkled, and her
silver tea-pot shone. Menie took courage to look at her kinswoman’s face
as this duty was being performed. Withered and fantastic in its decayed
graces, there was yet a something of kindness in the smile. The face had
been pretty once in its youthful days—a sad misfortune to it now, for if
it were not for this long-departed, dearly remembered beauty, there
might have been a natural sunshine in Miss Annie Laurie’s face.
As it was, the wintry light in it played about gaily, and Miss Annie
made very undeniable exertions to please her visitors. She told Menie of
her own pursuits, as a girl might have done in expectation of a sharer
in them; and to Mrs Laurie she gave a sketch of her “society,” the few
friends who, Menie thought, made up a very respectable list in point of
numbers. Mrs Laurie from her sofa, and Menie on her seat by the wall,
looking slightly prim and very quiet in her shy confusion, made brief
answers as they could. Their entertainer did not much want their
assistance; and by-and-by Menie woke with a great flush to hear the
little gate swing open, to discern a lofty figure passing the window,
and the sound of a quick step on the gravel path. Randall was at the
door.
And Randall, looking very stately, very gracious and deferential, came
through the shower of “delighteds” and “most happys” with which Miss
Annie saluted him, with a bow of proud grace and much dignity of manner,
to Mrs Laurie’s extreme surprise, and Menie’s shy exultation. Another
hour passed over very well. The strangers grew familiar with Miss Annie;
then by-and-by they strayed out, all of them, into the sweet evening
air, so full of charmed distant voices, the hum and breath of far-off
life; and Menie found herself, before she was aware, alone under a sky
slowly softening into twilight, in a pretty stretch of sloping turf,
where some young birch-trees stood about gracefully, like so many
children resting in a game, with Randall Home by her side.
And they had found time for various pieces of talk, quite individual and
peculiar to themselves, before Menie lifted her face, with its flush of
full unshadowed pleasure, and, glancing up to the other countenance
above her, asked, “When is the next book coming, Randall?”
“What next book, May Marion?”
This was his caressing name for her, as May alone was his father’s.
“_The_ next book—our next book,” said Menie. “I do not know much, nor
maybe care much, about anybody else’s. Randall—our own—when is it
coming?”
“What if it should never come at all?”
Randall drew her fingers through his hand with playful tenderness, half
as he might have done with a child.
“Yes—but I know it is to come at all, so that is not my question,” said
Menie. “I want to know _when_—not if. Tell me—for you need not be coy,
or think of keeping such a secret from me.”
“Did you never hear that it is dangerous to hurry one work upon
another?” was the answer somewhat evasively given. “I am to be prudent
this time—there is peril in it.”
“Peril to what?” Menie Laurie looked up with simple eyes into a face
where there began to rise some faint mists. Looking into them, she did
not comprehend at all these floating vapours, nor the curve of
fastidious discontent which they brought to Randall’s lip and brow.
“My simple Menie, you do not know how everything gets shaped into a
trade,” said Randall, with a certain condescension. “Peril to
reputation, risk of losing what one has gained—that is what we all
tremble for in London.”
“Randall!” Menie looked up again with a flush of innocent scorn. He
might speak it, indeed, but she knew he could mean nothing like this.
There was a slight pause—it might be of embarrassment—on Randall’s part;
certainly he made no effort to break the silence.
“But a great gift was not given for that,” said Menie rapidly, in her
unwitting enthusiasm. “People do not have unusual endowments given them
to be curbed by such things as that; and you never meant it, Randall; it
could not move _you_.”
But Randall only drew his hand fondly over the fingers he held, and
smiled—smiled with pleasure and pride, natural and becoming. He had not
been sophisticated out of regard for the warm appreciation and praise of
those most dear to him. He might distrust it—might think the colder
world a better judge, and the verdict of strangers a safer rule, but in
his heart he loved the other still.
But Menie’s thoughts were disturbed, and moved into a sudden ferment.
Her hand trembled a little on Randall’s arm; her eyes forsook his face,
and cast long glances instead over the bright air before them; and when
she spoke, her voice was as low as her words were quick and hurried.
“It does not become me to teach you, but, Randall, Randall, you used to
think otherwise. Do you mind what you used to say about throwing away
the scabbard, putting on the harness—Randall, do you mind?”
“I mind many a delightful hour up on the hillside yonder,” said Randall
affectionately, “when my May Marion began to enter into all my dreams
and hopes; and I mind about the scabbard and the harness no less,” he
continued, laughing, “and how I meditated flashing my sword in the eyes
of all the world, like a schoolboy with his first endowment of
gunpowder; but one learns to know that the world cares so wonderfully
little about one’s sword, Menie; and moreover—you must find out for me
the reason why—this same world seems to creep round one’s-self
strangely, and by-and-by one begins to feel it more decorous to hide the
glitter of the trenchant steel. What a coxcomb you make me,” said
Randall, abruptly breaking off with a short laugh; “one would fancy this
same weapon of mine was the sword of Wallace wight.”
Menie made no answer, and the discontent on Randall’s face wavered into
various shades of scorn,—a strange scorn, such as Menie Laurie had never
seen before on any face—scorn half of himself, wholly of the world.
“When I knew I had succeeded,” said Randall at length, with still a tone
of condescension in his confidence, “I was a little elated, I confess,
Menie, foolish as it seems, and thought of nothing but setting to work
again, and producing something worthy to live. Well, that is just the
first impulse; by-and-by I came to see what a poor affair this applause
was after all, and to think I had better keep what I had, without
running the risk of losing my advantage by a less successful stroke.
After all, this tide of popularity depends on nothing less than real
‘merit,’ as the critics call it; so I apprehend we will have no new
book, Menie; we will be content with what we have gained.”
“If applause is such a poor affair, why be afraid of the chance of
losing it?” said Menie; but she added hastily, “I want to know about
Johnnie Lithgow, Randall; is it possible that he has come to be a great
writer too?”
“If I only knew what you meant by a great writer _too_,” said Randall,
with a smile. “Johnnie Lithgow is quite a popular man, Menie—one of the
oracles of the press.”
“Is it a derogation, then, to be a popular man?” said the puzzled Menie;
“or is he afraid to risk his fame, like you?”
The lofty head elevated itself slightly. “No. Johnnie Lithgow is not a
man for fame,” said Randall, with some pride. “Johnnie does his literary
work like any other day’s work; and, indeed, why should he not?”
Menie looked up with a blank look, surprised, and not comprehending.
Even the stronger emotions of life, the passions and the anguishes, had
never yet taken hold of Menie; still less had the subtle refining, the
artificial stoicism of mere mind and intellect, living and feeding on
itself; and Menie’s eye followed his slight unconscious gestures with
wistful wonderment as Randall went on.
“After all, what does it signify—what does anything of this kind
signify? One time or another appreciation comes; and if appreciation
never should come, what then? So much as is good will remain. I do not
care a straw for applause myself. I rate it at its own value; and that
is nothing.”
It began to grow somewhat dark, and Menie drew her shawl closer. “I
think it is time to go home,” she said softly; and as she spoke, a
vision of the kindly home she had left—of the brave protecting hills,
the broad fair country, the sky and atmosphere, all too humble for this
self-abstraction, which answered in clouds and tears, in glorious
laughter and sunshine, to every daily change—rose up before her; some
tears, uncalled for and against her will, stole into Menie’s eyes. With
a little awe, in her innocence, she took Randall’s arm again. He must be
right, she supposed; and something very grand and superior was in
Randall’s indifference—yet somehow the night air crept into Menie’s
heart, as she had never felt it do before. Many an hour this soft night
air had blown about her uncovered head, and tossed her hair in curls
about her cheeks—to-night she felt it cold, she knew not why—to-night
she was almost glad to hurry home.
CHAPTER XIII.
“Randall Home is a very superior young man,” said Mrs Laurie, with quiet
approbation. “Do you know, Menie, I had begun to have serious thoughts
about permitting your engagement so early?—if my only bairn should leave
me—leave me, and get estranged into another house and home, with a man
that was a stranger in his heart to me. Whisht, Menie—my darling, what
makes you cry?”
But Menie could not tell; the night air was still cold at her heart, and
she could not keep back these unseasonable tears.
“But I am better pleased to-night than I have been for many a day,” said
Mrs Laurie. “I never saw him so kindly, so like what I would desire. I
was a little proud of him to-night, if it were for nothing but letting
Miss Annie see that we are not all such common folk as she thinks down
in the south country—though, I suppose, I should say the north country
here. Menie! he will lose my good opinion again if I think he has vexed
you. What ails you, bairn? Menie, my dear?”
“I don’t know what it is, mother—no, no, he did not vex me. I suppose I
am glad to hear you speak of him so,” said the shy Menie, ashamed of her
tears. The mother and daughter were in their own room preparing for
rest, and Menie let down her hair over her face, and played with it in
her fingers, that there might be no more remark or notice of this
unwilling emotion. It was strange—never all her life before had Menie
wept for anything indefinite: for childish provocations—for little
vexations of early youth—for pity—she had shed bright transitory tears,
but she had never “cried for nothing” until now.
“Yes, I am pleased,” said Mrs Laurie, as she tied her muslin cap over
her ears: “what did you say, Menie? I thought this coming to London
would satisfy me on the one point which is likely to be more important
than all others, and I was right. Yes, Menie, lie down, like a good
girl; you must be wearied—and lie down with a good heart—you have a fair
prospect, as fair as woman could wish. I am quite satisfied myself.”
But how it came about that Menie only slept in broken snatches—that
Menie dreamt uncomfortable dreams of harassment and annoyance—dangers in
which Randall forsook her—cares of which he had no part—Menie did not
know. A day ago, and Mrs Laurie’s unsolicited avowal of “satisfaction”
had lifted Menie into the purest glow of joy, but to-night she cannot
tell what makes her so restless and uneasy—what prompts her now and then
to fall a-weeping, all unwillingly, and “for nothing.” Alas for Menie
Laurie’s quiet heart!—something has come to trouble the waters, but in
other guise than an angel’s.
The grass is soft and mossy under the elm trees, and the morning air—a
world of sweetness—beautifies their every branch and stem. Down yonder
in the hollow, low at your feet, Menie Laurie, the great slave Titan has
wakened to his daily toil. Is that the sweep of his mighty arm stirring
the heavy mist which hangs above him? Is this the clang of his ponderous
tools ringing up faintly into the quiet skies? The children are not
astir yet, to seek their pleasure in these precincts. Nothing seems
awake in this composed and sober place; but yonder, with many a conflict
in his heart, with many a throbbing purpose in his brain, with life and
strength tingling to his finger-points, with sighs and laughter swelling
in his breath—yonder great vassal of the world is up and doing, holding
the fate of a new day undeveloped in his busy hand.
And you, young wondering heart, look out upon him, innocent, ignorant,
wistful, like an angel on the threshold of the world—nothing knowing the
wiles and snares, the tortures and deliriums that live yonder under the
battle-cloud, unacquainted with those prodigious penalties of social
life, which yonder are paid and borne every hour; but looking out with
your head bent forward, and your innocent eyes piercing far in the
dreamy vision of reverie, making wistful investigation into the new
marvels round you, pondering and bewildered in your own secret soul.
Randall—looking out thus through the morning light upon the city, one
can see him in so many aspects;—the light shines upon his lofty head,
reaching almost to the skies, like the hill of his quiet home—and Menie
lifts her eyes to follow that noble daring look of his, piercing up
through mortal clouds and vapours to do homage with the gifts God has
given him, at his Master’s throne and footstool; but anon there steals a
cloud round the hero of Menie’s vision—a dim background, which still
reveals him, not less clearly, nor with less fascination, but with a
sadder wonder of interest—for Randall’s eyes are bent earthward,
Randall’s lofty head is bowed, and Menie, though she watches him with
yearning curiosity, can never meet his downcast look to read what is
there—can never fathom what lies within the veiled heart and
self-abstracted soul. You would think now that her eyes are caught by
the sunshine yonder making such mischievous confusion among the city
vapours: Not so; for Menie’s eyes, under that troubled curve of her
forehead, are studying Randall, and see only an incomprehensible
something in him, overshadowing all the earth and all the skies.
With her little basket in her hand, with her dainty step, and fluttering
muslin gown, Miss Annie brushes the dew from the grass, as she draws
near the elm trees. But though Miss Annie has been very confidential
with her grand-niece on the subject of her own juvenile occupations, one
little piece of daily business Miss Annie has forborne to tell of, and
that is a morning visit she pays to a poor pensioner or two in the
village, where, if perhaps her charity may be sometimes intrusive, it is
always real. For poor Miss Annie’s heart, though it figures so much in
her common talk, and is overlaid with so many false sentimentalities,
has a true little fountain of human kindness in it, spite of the
fantastic pretences that hide it from common view. Absorbed with her new
thoughts, Menie neither heard nor saw her aunt’s approach, till she woke
with a start to hear a gay laugh behind her, and to feel the pressure of
those long thin fingers upon her eyelids. “Dreaming, Menie? ah, my
pretty love! but not ‘in maiden meditation fancy free.’”
Startled and abashed, Menie drew back, but Miss Annie’s ringlets had
already touched her forehead, as Miss Annie bestowed the morning
salutation upon Menie’s cheek; and now they are seated side by side
under shadow of the greatest elm.
“My dear, I am afraid your mamma does not encourage you to confide in
her; you must tell me all your little trials, Menie,” said Miss Annie,
fluttering with her finger-points upon Menie’s hand; “and now, my
darling, speak to me freely—you were delighted to meet him last night.”
But Menie had no voice to answer, and could only bend down her flushed
face, and pluck up the grass with her disengaged hand.
“Don’t be shy, love. I am so much interested; and tell me, Menie, you
found him quite unchanged?—just as devoted as he used to be? I am sure
one only needed to look at him—and how delightful to find him quite
unchanged!”
“How far is it to London, aunt?” said Menie, with confusion.
“So near that your thoughts have travelled there this morning to find
him out, I know,” said Miss Annie,—“so near that he can come out every
night, so we need not talk of London: but come now, darling; have you
nothing to tell me?”
“You are very good,” said Menie, with a slight falter in her voice. “I—I
should like very well to take Jenny, if you please, to see some of the
great sights.”
Miss Annie shook her head—“Ah, Menie, how mischievous! Don’t you think I
deserve your confidence?”
“But, indeed, I have no confidence to give,” said Menie, almost under
her breath.
“My dear, I was just like you: the Scotch system is so restrictive—I was
afraid to speak to any one,” said Miss Annie; “and so you see I had a
little misunderstanding; and he was angry, and I was angry; and first we
quarrelled, and then we sulked at each other, and so at last it came
about that we were parted. Yes, Menie, dear! just now you are happy; you
do not care for a sympathising heart; but if you should chance to be
disappointed—I trust not, my love, but such things will happen—you will
then remember that I too have been blighted—oh, my dear child!”
And with a wave of her hand, expressing unutterable things, Miss Annie
arranged her light silken mantle over this same blighted heart of hers,
as if to hide the wound.
But Menie, whose mind already had recovered its tone—Menie, who now only
remembered Randall unchanged, unchangeable, towering high above all
vulgar quarrels and sullennesses, a very fortress for a generous heart
to dwell in—Menie sprang lightly up from the elastic turf, and stood
with her slight young figure relieved against the morning sky, and all
her frame vibrating with pride and joy in her worthy choice. What chance
that she should ever give this wished-for confidence—should ever turn to
seek such sympathy—should ever find comfort or solace in hearing of Miss
Annie Laurie’s kindred woe?
CHAPTER XIV.
“It is two years now since Randall came to London. From Dumfriesshire we
send out a great many cadets into the world, Miss Annie; and some one
who knew his father found a situation here for Randall Home. He brought
his book with him, and it was published, and very successful; then he
came home, and sought my consent to his engagement with Menie. That is
all Randall’s history in connection with us. The other young man you
expect to-night, Miss Annie, is only a cottager’s son—very clever, I
hear, but not in any way, I fancy, to be put in comparison with Randall
Home.”
And Mrs Laurie took up her work with a little quiet pride, resolved to
be very kind to Johnnie Lithgow, but by no means pleased to have him
mentioned in the same breath with her future son-in-law.
“I adore talent,” said Miss Annie, opening her work-table to take out a
tiny bit of “fancy” work. “I could not describe the delight I have in
the society of people of genius—self-taught genius too—so charming; and
both of these delightful young men must be self-taught.”
Mrs Laurie drew herself up with a little hauteur.
“Mr Home has had an excellent education; his father is a very superior
man. Johnnie Lithgow, as I said before, is only a cottager’s son.”
But Miss Annie could not see the distinction, and ran on in such a
flutter of delight in anticipation of her guests, that Mrs Laurie
quietly retired into the intricacies of her work, and contented herself
with a resolution to be very kind and condescending to the popular
editor, the cottager’s son.
The drawing-room is in special glory—the pinafores discarded from the
chairs, the little tables crowded with gay books and toys and flowers,
and everything in its company dress. Mrs Laurie—who never can be
anything but Mrs Laurie, a matron of sober years, and Menie’s
mother—sits, in her grave-coloured gown and snowy cap, upon the sofa;
while on a stool low down by her side, in a little tremor of
expectation, Miss Annie perches like a bird, waiting the arrival of her
visitors. Mrs Laurie, with her Dumfriesshire uses, quite believes what
Miss Annie says, that only “a few friends” are coming to-night, and has
not the slightest idea that the lady of the house will be greatly
mortified if her rooms are not filled in an hour or two with a little
crowd.
And up-stairs, resplendent in Jenny’s gown, Menie Laurie stands before
the glass, fastening on one or two simple ornaments, and admiring, with
innocent enjoyment, her unusually elegant dress. You may guess by this
glimpse of these well-known striped skirts, full and round, revealing
themselves under cover of the curtains, that Jenny too has been admiring
her own magnificent purchase. But Jenny by this time has grown
impatient, and jealous that Menie’s admiration prolongs itself only to
please her, Jenny; so, giving premonition by sundry restless gestures of
the advent of a “fuff,” she has turned to look out from the window upon
the sandy road which leads to ’Eathbank.
“Eh, Miss Menie! that brockit ane’s a bonnie cow,” said Jenny; “I never
see onything else in this outlandish place that minds me of hame, if it
binna the mistress and yoursel. I’ll just bide and look out for the
young lads, Miss Menie. Ye needna clap your hands, as if Jenny was
turning glaikit; if they werena lads frae our ain countryside, they
micht come and gang a twelvemonth for me.”
“But the ladies and the gentlemen will see you from the window, Jenny,”
said Menie Laurie.
“Ise warrant they’ve seen waur sichts,” said Jenny briskly; “I’m no gaun
to let down my ainsel, for a’ I _have_ a thraw; and I would just like to
ken, if folk wanted to see a purposelike lass, fit for her wark, wha
they could come to in this house but me? There’s my lady’s maid—set her
up!—in her grand gown, as braw as my lady; and there’s the tither
slaving creature put off a’ this morning clavering to somebody, and no
fit to be seen now; for a’ they scoff at my short-gown and good linsey
coats. But they may scoff till they’re tired, for Jenny; I’m no gaun to
change, at my time of life, for a’ the giggling in London town.”
“But you’ll put on your gown to-night, Jenny,” said Menie persuasively,
patting her shoulder. “There’s Randall did not see you last time he was
here; and Johnnie Lithgow, you would like to see him. Come, Jenny, and
put on your gown.”
“It’s no muckle Randall Home heeds about me, and you ken that,” said
Jenny; “and for a’ he didna see me, I saw him the last time he was here.
I’ll just tell you, Miss Menie, yon lad, to be a richt lad, is owre
heeding about himsel.”
“You’re not to say that, Jenny; it vexes me,” said Menie, with simple
gravity; “besides, it is not true. You mistake Randall—and then Johnnie
Lithgow.”
“I wadna say but what I micht be pleased to get a glint of _him_,” said
Jenny. “Eh, my patience! to think of Betty Armstrong’s son sitting down
with our mistress. But I’ll be sure to ca’ them by their richt names
afore the folk. I canna get my tongue about thae maisters. Maister
Lithgow! and me minds him a wee white-headed laddie, hauding up his
peeny for cakes on the Hogmanay, and pu’ing John Glendinning’s
kailstocks at Hallowe’en. What would I put on my gown for, bairn? As
sure as I gang into the room, I’ll ca’ him Johnnie.”
But Jenny’s scruples at last yielded, and Jenny came forth from her
chamber glorious in a blue-and-yellow gown, printed in great stripes and
figures, and made after an antediluvian fashion, which utterly shocked
and horrified the pretty Maria, Miss Annie Laurie’s favourite maid. Nor
was Miss Annie Laurie herself less disconcerted, when honest Jenny, the
high shoulder largely developed by her tight-fitting gown, and carrying
a cake-basket in her brown hands, made her appearance in the partially
filled drawing-room, threading her way leisurely through the guests, and
examining, with keen glances and much attention, the faces of the
masculine portion of them. Miss Annie made a pause in her own lively and
juvenile talk, to watch the strange figure and the keen inquiring face,
over which a shade of bewilderment gradually crept. But Miss Annie no
longer thought it amusing, when Jenny made an abrupt pause before her
young mistress, then shyly endeavouring to make acquaintance with some
very fine young ladies, daughters of Miss Annie’s loftiest and most
aristocratic friends, and said in a startling whisper, which all the
room could hear, “Miss Menie! ye micht tell folk which is him, if he’s
here; but I canna see a creature that’s like Johnnie Lithgow of
Kirklands, nor ony belanging to him, in the haill room.”
Miss Annie Laurie, much horrified, rose from her seat somewhat hastily;
but at the same moment up sprang by her side the guest to whom her most
particular attentions had been devoted—“And Burnside Jenny has forgotten
me!”
Burnside Jenny, quite forgetful of “all the folk,” turned round upon him
in an instant. Not quite Johnnie Lithgow, the merriest mischief-doer in
Kirklands parish, but a face that prompted recollections of his without
dispute—blue eyes, dancing and running over with the light of a happy
spirit—and a wisp of close curls, not many shades darker in colour than
those of the “white-headed laddie,” whose merry tricks Jenny had not
forgotten. “Eh, man! is this you?” said Jenny, with a sigh of
satisfaction. “I aye likit the callant for a’ his mischief, and it’s
just the same blythe face after a’.”
Randall Home stood leaning his fine figure against the mantelpiece, and
took no notice of Jenny. Randall was somewhat afraid of a similar
recognition; but Johnnie Lithgow, who did not affect attitudes—Johnnie
Lithgow, who was neither proud nor ashamed of being a cottager’s son,
and who had a habit of doing such kindly things as occurred to him
without consideration of prudence—drew her aside by both her brown
hands, out of which Jenny had laid the cake-basket, to talk to her of
home. A slight smile curled on the lip of Randall Home. How well he
looked, leaning upon his arm, his lofty head towering over every other
head in Miss Annie’s drawing-room, with his look of conscious dignity,
his intellectual face! Menie Laurie and Menie Laurie’s mother did not
find it possible to be other than proud of him; yet the eyes of both
turned somewhat wistfully to the corner, to dwell upon a face which for
itself could have charmed no one, but which beamed and shone like
sunshine upon Jenny, greeting her as an old friend.
“Your friend is a literary man?” said somebody inquiringly, taking up a
respectful position by Randall’s side.
“Yes, poor fellow; he spins himself out into daily portions for the
press,” said Randall.
“A high vocation, sir; leader of public opinions and movements,” said
the somebody, who professed to be an intellectual person, a man of
progress.
“Say rather the follower,” said Randall; “and well for those who have
the happy knack of following wisely—chiming in, before itself is fully
aware of it, with the humour of the time.”
Menie Laurie, who was close at hand, and heard all this, ventured a
whisper, while Randall’s companion had for the moment turned away.
“Your words sound as if you slighted him, Randall, and you too call
yourself a literary man.”
“Good Johnnie Lithgow, I like him extremely,” said Randall, with the
half-scornful smile which puzzled Menie; “but he is only a literary
workman after all. He does his literature as his day’s labour—he will
tell you so himself—a mere craft for daily bread.”
And just then Lithgow turned round, with his radiant face—he who had no
fame to lose, and did an honest day’s work in every day, not thinking
that the nature of his craft excused him from the natural amount of
toil—and again Menie felt a little pang at her heart, as she thought of
Randall’s jealous guardianship of Randall’s youthful fame.
CHAPTER XV.
“I have been thinking of bringing up my mother to live with me,” said
the Mr Lithgow in whom Mrs Laurie and her daughter were beginning to
forget the humble Johnnie: “I see no reason why she should live in
poverty in Kirklands, while I am comfortable here.”
His face flushed slightly as he concluded, and he began to drum with his
fingers in mere shyness and embarrassment upon Miss Annie Laurie’s
work-table. Randall, a little distance from him, was turning over with
infinite scorn Miss Annie’s picture-books. The two young men had grown
familiar in the house, though it was not yet a month since they entered
it first.
“And I think you are very right,” said Mrs Laurie cordially, “though
whether Mrs Lithgow might be pleased with a town life, or whether—”
She paused; it was not very easy to say “whether your mother would be a
suitable housekeeper for you.” Mrs Laurie could not do violence either
to her own feelings or his by suggesting such a doubt.
“I think it would be a great risk,” said Randall, “and if you consulted
me, would certainly warn you against it. Your mother knows nothing of
London—she would not like it; besides, a young man seeking his fortune
should be alone.”
“Cold doctrine,” said Lithgow, smiling, “and to come from _you_.”
His eye fell unconsciously upon Menie; then as he met a quick upward
glance from her, he stammered, blushed, and stopped short—for Johnnie
Lithgow was as shy and sensitive as a girl, and had all the reverence of
youthful genius for womanhood and love. With compunction, and an idea
that he had been jesting profanely, Lithgow hurriedly began again.
“I am so vain as to think _I_ myself would be London to my mother—old
ground long known and well explored. If she would not like the change,
of course—but I fancy she might.”
“I advise you against it, Lithgow,” said Randall; “in your case I should
never entertain such an idea. There is my father—no one can have a
greater respect for him than I—but to bring him to live with me—to bring
him to London—I should think it the merest folly, injurious to us both.”
“Your wisdom is very safe at least,” said Mrs Laurie, with a little
asperity, “since there is no chance of your good father leaving his own
respectable house for an unknown and strange place in any case; but I
think your wish a very natural one, and very creditable to you, Mr
Lithgow; and whether she comes or not, the knowledge that you wish for
her will be joy to your mother’s heart.”
With his usual half-disdainful smile Randall had turned away, and there
was a slight flush of anger upon Mrs Laurie’s face. Indignation and
scorn,—there was not much hope of friendliness where such unpromising
elements had flashed into sudden existence. Menie, looking on with
terror, and perceiving a new obstacle thrown into her way, hastily
endeavoured to make a diversion.
“Do you know, Mr Lithgow, that July Home is coming up to London to see
me?”
There came a sudden brightening to all the kindly lines of the young
man’s face. “July Home! if I am too familiar, forgive me, Randall—but I
have so many boyish recollections of her. She was such a sweet little
timid simple womanly child too. I wonder if July minds me as I mind
her.”
Randall stood apart still, with his smile upon his lips. True, there had
been a momentary curve on his brow at Lithgow’s first mention of his
sister’s name, but his face cleared immediately. Poor little July!
Randall might know her sufficiently timid and simple—but July was a
baby, a toy, a good-hearted kindly little fool to her intellectual
brother—and any higher qualities sweet or womanly about her remained to
be found out by other eyes than his.
“And Miss Annie has promised us all the sight-seeing in the world,” said
Menie with forced gaiety, anxious to talk, and to conciliate—to remove
all trace of the little breaking of lances which had just passed. “July
and Jenny and I, we are to see all manner of lions; and though they will
be very dull at Crofthill when she is gone, Mr Home and Miss Janet have
consented—so next week July is to come.”
“Poor July! she will have enough to talk of all her life after,” said
her brother.
“Yes; our kindly country seems such a waste and desert place to you
London gentlemen,” said Mrs Laurie; “and it is wonderful, after all, how
we manage to exist—ay, even to flourish and enjoy ourselves, in these
regions out of the world.”
But Randall made no response. A shivering chill came over Menie Laurie;
this half-derisive silence on one side, this eager impulse of
contradiction and opposition on the other, smote her to the heart. It
had been rising gradually for some days past, and Menie, without being
quite aware of it, had noticed the bias with which her mother and her
betrothed listened and replied to each other; the unconscious
inclination of each to give an unfavourable turn to the other’s words, a
harshness to the other’s judgment, an air of personal offence to a
differing opinion, of grave misdemeanour to a piece of blameless
jesting. Lithgow, stranger as he was, discovered in a moment, so quick
and sensitive was his nature, the incipient estrangement, and grew
embarrassed and annoyed in spite of himself—annoyed, embarrassed, it
looked so much like the last ebullition of some domestic quarrel; but
Lithgow was a stranger, and had no interest farther than for the harmony
of the moment in any strife of these conflicting minds.
But here sits one whose brow must own no curve of displeasure, whose
voice must falter with no embarrassment. She is sitting by the little
work-table in the window, her eyes, so wistful as they have grown, so
large and full, and eloquent with many meanings, turning from one to the
other with quick earnest glances, which are indeed whispers of
deprecation and peace-making. “He means something else than he says; he
is not cold-hearted nor insincere; you mistake Randall,” say Menie’s
eyes, as they labour to meet her mother’s, and gaze with eager
perturbation in her face, deciphering every line and wrinkle there. “Do
not speak so—you vex my mother; but she does not mean to be angry,” say
the same strained and ever-changing eyes, as they turn their anxious
regards to Randall’s face. She sits between us and the light—you can see
her girlish figure outlined against the window—her face falling from
light to shadow, brightening up again from shadow to light, as she turns
from one to the other; you can see how eagerly she listens, prompt to
rush forward with her own softening gentle speech upon the very border
of the harsher words, whose utterance she cannot prevent. The very stoop
of her head—the changeful expression of her face, which already
interprets the end of the sentence ere it is well begun—her sudden
introduction of one subject after another, foreign to their former
talk—her sudden interest in things indifferent, and all the wiles and
artifices with which she hedges off all matters of personal or
individual interest, and abstracts the conversation into the channel of
mere curiosity, of careless and everyday talk—are all sufficiently
visible exponents of Menie’s new position, and new trials. She is
talking to Lithgow now so rapidly, and with so much demonstration of
interest—you would almost fancy this poor loving Menie had caught a
contagious enthusiasm from Miss Annie Laurie’s juvenile delights—talking
of these sights of the great unknown London, which have grown so
indifferent and paltry to this suddenly enlightened and experienced mind
of hers; but in the midst of all you can see how steadily her wakeful
eyes keep watch upon Randall yonder by Miss Annie’s miniature
book-cases, and Mrs Laurie here, with that little angry flush upon her
brow.
So slow the hours seem—so full of opportunities of discussion—so
overbrimming with subjects on which they are sure to differ; till Menie,
in her gradually increasing excitement, forgets to note the progress of
time; but is so glad—oh, so glad and joyful—to see the evening fall dark
around them, to hear Maria’s step drawing near the door, while the
lights she carries already throw their glimmer on the wall. It is late;
and now the visitors take leave, somewhat reluctantly, for Lithgow
begins to like his new friends greatly; and Randall, though something of
irritation is in the face, where his smile of disdain still holds sway,
is Menie’s ardent wooer still, and feels a charm in her presence, simple
though he has discovered her to be. But at last they are gone—safely
gone; and Menie, when she has watched them from the door, and listened
to their steps till they die away a distant echo upon the silent air,
steals away in the dark to her own room—not for any purpose—simply to
rest herself a little; and her manner of rest is, sitting down upon a
low stool close by the window, where some pale moonlight comes in
faintly, and bending down her face into her clasped hands to weep a
little, silently and alone.
Is it but to refresh the wistful eyes which this night have been so
busy? is it but to wash and flood away the pain that has been in their
eager deprecating looks, their speeches of anxious tenderness? But Menie
does not say even to herself what it is for, nor why. For some weeks
now, Menie has been sadly given to “crying for nothing,” as she herself
calls it. She thinks she ought to be ashamed of her weakness, and would
be afraid to acknowledge it to any living creature; but somehow, for
these few days, Menie has come away about this same hour every night
into the solitude here, to cry, with sometimes a little impatient sob
bursting out among her tears—though she cannot tell you, will not tell
you—would not whisper even to her own very secret heart, the reason why.
CHAPTER XVI.
Mrs Laurie sits by the table with her work; but it is still an easy
thing to perceive the irritation on Mrs Laurie’s brow; her hand moves
with an additional rapidity, her breath comes a little faster; and if
you watch, you will see the colour gradually receding from her cheek,
like an ebbing tide, and her foot ceasing to play so impatiently upon
its supporting stool.
Very humbly, like a culprit, Menie draws forward her chair to the light.
She is admonished, ere long, by a hasty answer, an abrupt speech, a
slight pushing back from the table, and erection of her figure, that Mrs
Laurie is still angry. It is strange how this cows and subdues Menie—how
eager she is to say something—how humble her tone is—and how difficult
she feels it to find anything to say.
Poor heart! like many another bewildered moth, Menie flutters about the
subject it behoves her most to avoid, and cannot help making timid
allusions to their future life in London—that future life which begins
to darken before her own vision under a cloudy horizon of doubt and
dread. It has ceased to be a speculation now, this future; for even
within these few days there has been talk of Menie’s marriage.
“We will speak of some other thing; there is no very great charm in the
future for me, Menie,” said Mrs Laurie, with a sigh.
But Menie, with trembling temerity, begs to know the reason why.
Why?—what concerns her concerns her mother also. Very timid, yet too
bold, Menie insists, and will be satisfied—why?
“Because it is hard to lose my only child,” said Mrs Laurie. “Let us not
deceive ourselves; it is easy to say we will not be separated, that
there shall be no change. I know better, Menie: well, well; do not
cry—say it is only the natural lot.”
“What is only the natural lot? O mother, mother! tell me.” Menie is
still pertinacious, even through her tears.
“I will tell you, Menie,” said Mrs Laurie, quickly. “Randall Home and I
cannot dwell under one roof in peace. I foresee a wretched life for you,
if we tried it; a constant struggle—a constant failure. Menie, I will
try to be content; but your mother feels it hard to yield up you and
your love to a stranger—very hard. I ought to be content and submissive.
I ought to remember that it is the common necessity—an everyday trial;
but we have been more to each other than mere mother and daughter. I
cannot hide it from you, Menie; this trial is very grievous to me.”
“Mother! mother!” It is not “for nothing” now that Menie Laurie weeps.
“You have been the light of my eyes for twenty years—my baby, my only
bairn! I have nothing in the world when you are gone. Menie, have
patience with your mother. I thought we might have been one household
still. I never thought I could have hurt my bairn by clinging to her
with all my heart. I see through another medium now. Menie, this that I
say is better for us both. I would lose my proper place—I would lose
even my own esteem—if I insisted, or if I permitted you to insist, upon
our first plan. I do not mean to insist with Randall,” said Mrs Laurie,
with a sudden flush of colour, “but with ourselves. It is not for your
credit, any more than mine, that your mother should be unnecessarily
humiliated; and I choose to make this decision myself, Menie, not to
have it forced upon me.”
“If you think so—if I have nothing to hope but this—mother, mother!”
cried Menie in her sobs, “there is yet time; we can change it all.”
But Menie’s voice was choked; her head bowed down upon her folded arms;
her strength and her heart were overcome. The room was only partially
lighted. So vacant—only these two figures, with their little table and
their lamp at one end—it looked lonely, silent, desolate; and you could
hear so plainly the great struggle which Menie had with these strong
sobs and tears.
Mrs Laurie wiped a few hot hasty drops from her own eyes. She was not
much used to contest; nor was it in her to be inflexible and stern; and
the mother could not see her child’s distress. “Menie!” Menie can make
no answer; and Mrs Laurie rises to go to her side, to pass a tender
caressing hand over the bowed head, to shed back the disordered hair.
“Menie, my dear bairn, I did not mean to vex you. I will do
anything—anything, Menie; only do not let me see you in such grief as
this.”
“He is not what you think, mother—he is not what you think,” cried
Menie; “it is not like this what he says of you. O mother! I do not ask
you to do him justice—to think well of him. I ask a greater thing of
you;—mother, hear me—I ask you to like him for Menie’s sake.”
And it will not do to evade this petition by caresses, by soothing
words, by gentle motherly tenderness. “Yes, Menie, my darling, I’ll
try,” said Mrs Laurie at last, with tearful eyes. “Do you think it is
pleasant to me to be at strife with Randall? God forbid! and him my dear
bairn’s choice; but do not look at me with such a pitiful face. Menie,
we’ll begin again.”
Was Menie content? for the moment more than content, springing up into a
wild exhilaration, a burst of confidence and hope. But by-and-by the
conversation slackened—by-and-by the room became quite silent, with its
dim corners, its little speck of light, and the two figures at its
farther end. A heavy stillness brooded over them—they forgot that they
had been talking—they forgot, each of them, that she was not alone. The
leaves stirred faintly on the windows—the night wind rustled past the
yew-tree on the lawn. From the other end of the house came sometimes a
stir of voices, the sound of a closed or opened door; but here
everything was silent—as still as if these were weird sisters, weaving,
with their monotonous moving fingers, some charm and spell; while, down
to the depths—down, down, as far into the chill and dark of sad
presentiment as a heart unlearned could go—fluttering, with its wings
close upon its breast, its song changed into a mournful cry—down out of
the serene heavens, where it had its natural dwelling, came Menie
Laurie’s quiet heart.
CHAPTER XVII.
Through the depth and darkness of the summer night, you can hear Mrs
Laurie’s quiet breathing as she lies asleep. With a pain at her heart
she lay down, and when she wakes she will feel it, or ever she is aware
that she has awaked; but still she sleeps: blessing on the kind oblivion
which lays all these troubles for a time to rest.
But what is this white figure erecting itself from the pillow, sitting
motionless and silent in the night? It is tears that keep these gentle
eyelids apart—tears that banish from them the sleep of youth. Still,
that she may not wake the sleeper by her side, scarcely daring to move
her hand to wipe away this heavy dew which blinds her eyes. Menie
Laurie, Menie Laurie, can this sad watcher be you?
And Menie’s soul is vexing itself with plans and schemes, and Menie’s
heart is rising up to God in broken snatches of prayer, constantly
interrupted, and merging into the bewilderment of her thoughts. Startled
once for all out of the early calm, the serene untroubled youthful life
which lies behind her in the past, Menie feels the change very hard and
sore as she realises it; from doing nought for her own comfort—from the
loving sweet dependence upon others, to which her child’s heart has been
accustomed—suddenly, without pause or preparation, to learn that all
must depend upon herself—to have the ghost of strife and discord, where
such full harmony was wont to be—to feel the two great loves of her
nature—the loves which heretofore, in her own innocent and unsuspicious
apprehension, have but strengthened and deepened each the other, set
forth in antagonism, love against love, and her own heart the
battle-ground. Shrinking and failing one moment, longing vainly to flee
away—away anywhere into the utmost desolation, if only it were out of
this conflict,—the next resolving, with such strong throbs and beatings
of her heart, to take up her burden cordially, to be ever awake and
alert, to subdue this giant difficulty with the force of her own strong
love and ceaseless tenderness—praying now for escape, then for
endurance, and anon breaking into silent tears over all. Alas for Menie
Laurie in her unaccustomed solitude! and Menie thinks, like every other
Menie, that she could have borne anything but this.
But by-and-by, in spite of tears and trouble, the natural rest steals
upon Menie—steals upon her unawares, though she feels, in the sadness of
her heart, as if she could never rest again; throws back her drooping
head upon her pillow, folds her arms meekly on her breast, closes her
eyelids over the unshed tear; and thus it is that the dawn finds her
out, like a flower overcharged and drooping with its weight of evening
dew, but wrapt in sleep as deep and dreamless and unbroken as if her
youth had never known a tear.
The sun is full in the room when Menie wakes, and Mrs Laurie has but a
moment since closed the door softly behind her, that the sleeper might
not be disturbed. Even this tender precaution, when she finds it out,
chills Menie to the heart; for heretofore her mother’s voice has roused
her, and even her mother’s impatience of her lingering would be joy to
her to-day; but Mrs Laurie is not impatient. Mrs Laurie thinks it
better, for all the sun’s unceasing proclamation that night and sleep
are past, to let the young heart refresh itself a little longer, to
leave the young form at rest.
Ay, Menie Laurie, kneel down by your bedside—kneel down and pray; it is
not often that your supplications testify themselves in outward
attitude. Now there is a murmur of an audible voice speaking words to
which no mortal ear has any right to listen; and your downcast face is
buried in your hands, and your tears plead with your prayers. For you
never thought but to be happy, Menie, and the gentle youthful nature
longs and yearns for happiness, and with the strength of a rebel fights
against the pain foreseen—poor heart!
“Eh, Jenny! you’re no keeping ill-will?” said a doleful voice upon the
lawn below; very distinct, through the open window, it quickened Menie’s
morning toilette considerably, and drew her forward, with a wondering
face, to make sure. “I’m sure it’s no in me to be unfriends with
onybody; and after ane coming a’ this gate for naething but to ask a
civil question, how you a’ was. I’m saying, Jenny? you’re no needing to
haud ony correspondence with me except ye like; it’s the mistress and
Miss Menie I’m wanting to see.”
“Am I to let in a’ the gaun-about vagabones that want to see the
mistress and Miss Menie?” said Jenny’s gruff voice in reply. “I trow no;
and how ye can have the face to look at Jenny after your last errand
till her, I canna tell; ye’ll be for undertaking my service ance mair?
but ye may just as weel take my word ance for a’—the mistress canna bide
ye ony mair than me.”
“Eh, woman, Jenny, ye’re a thrawn creature!” said Nelly Panton. “I’m
sure I never did ye an ill turn a’ my days. But ye needna even the like
of your service to me; I’m gaun to live with our Johnnie, and keep his
house, and Johnnie’s company are grander folk than the mistress; but I’m
no forgetting auld friends, so I came to ask for Miss Menie because I
aye likit her, and because she’s a young lass like mysel; and I’ll gang
and speak to that ither servant-woman if you’ll no tell Miss Menie I’m
here.”
Jenny’s fury—for very furious was Jenny’s suppressed fuff at the
presumptuous notion of equality or friendship between Menie Laurie and
Nelly Panton—was checked by this threat; and fearful lest the dignity of
her young mistress should be injured in the eyes of the household by the
new-comer’s pretensions, Jenny, who had held this colloquy out of doors,
turned hastily round and pattered away by the back entrance to open the
door for the visitor, muttering repeated adjurations. “My patience!” and
Jenny’s patience had indeed much reason to be called to her aid.
Menie’s curiosity was a little roused—her mind, withdrawn from herself,
lightened somewhat of its load, and she hastened down stairs less
unwillingly than she would have done without this interruption. Jenny
stood by the drawing-room door holding it open; and Jenny’s sturdy
little form vibrated, every inch of it, with anger and indignation. “Ane
to speak to you, Miss Menie!—ane used with grand society, and owre high
for the like of me. Ye’ll have to speak to her yoursel.”
And Menie suddenly found herself thrust into the room, while Jenny, with
an audible snort and fuff, remained in possession of the door.
Nelly Panton had too newly entered on her dignities to be able to
restrain the ancient curtsey of her humility. Yes, undoubtedly, it was
Nelly Panton—with the same faded gown, the same doleful shawl, the same
wrapped-up and gloomy figure. Against the well-lighted, well-pictured
wall of Miss Annie Laurie’s drawing-room she stood in dingy
individuality dropping her curtsey, while Menie, much surprised and
silent, stood before her waiting to be addressed.
“Can nane of ye speak?” said the impatient Jenny, from the door. “Miss
Menie, are ye no gaun to ask what is her business here? A fule micht
ha’e kent this was nae place to come back to, after her last errand to
Burnside; and when she kens I canna bide her, and the mistress canna
bide her, to come and set up for a friendship with you!”
“She’s just as cankered as she aye was, Miss Menie,” said Nelly Panton,
compassionately, shaking her head. “It shows an ill disposition, indeed,
when folk canna keep at peace with me, as many a time I’ve telt my
mother. But ye see, Miss Menie, I couldna just bide on in Kirklands when
ye were a’ away, so I just took my fit in my hand, and came on to London
to see after Johnnie with my ain een. He needs somebody to keep him
gaun, and set him richt, puir callant; and he’s in a grand way for
himsel, and should be attended to—so I think I’ll just stay on, Miss
Menie; and the first thing I did was to come and ask for you.”
“You are very kind, Nelly,” said Menie Laurie; but Menie paused with a
suppressed laugh when she saw Jenny’s clenched hand shaken at her from
the door.
“And ye’ll maybe think I’m no just in condition to set up for friends
with the like of you,” said Nelly, glancing down upon her dress; “but I
only came in to London the day before yesterday, and I’ve naething yet
but my travelling things. I’m hearing that little Juley Home of
Braecroft’s coming too; and between you and me, Miss Menie, no to let it
gang ony farther, I think it was real richt and prudent of you to show
us the first example, and draw us a’ up to London to take care of thae
lads.”
“What do you mean, Nelly?” exclaimed Menie, somewhat angrily.
“Ye may weel say what does she mean,” said Jenny, making a sudden inroad
from the door. “Do you hear, ye evil speaker!—the mistress is out, and
there’s naebody to take care of this puir bairn but me; whatever malice
and venom ye have to say, out wi’t, and I’ll tell the young lady what
kind of character ye are when a’s dune.”
“I wadna keep such a meddling body in my house—no, if she did the wark
twice as weel,” retorted Nelly, with calm superiority; “and I’ve nae
call to speak my mind afore Jenny, and her aye misca’in’ me; but it’s
nae secret of mine. I was just gaun to say, that for a’ our Johnnie’s a
very decent lad, and minds upon his friends, I never saw ane, gentle or
simple, sae awfu’ muckle tooken up about himsel as Randy Home. He’s
anither lad altogether to what he used to be; and it’s no to be thocht
but what he’s wanting a grand wife like a’ the rest. Now, ye’ll just
see.”
Menie Laurie put down Jenny’s passionate disclaimer by a motion of her
hand. “If this was what you came to tell me, Nelly, I fear I shall
scarcely be grateful for your visit. Do you know that it is an
impertinence to say this to me? Whisht, Jenny, that is enough; and I
came here to look after no one. Whatever you may have thought before,
you will believe this now, since I say it. Jenny will see that you are
comfortable while you stay out here; but I think, Nelly, you have said
enough to me this morning, and I to you—Jenny, whisht.”
“I’ll no whisht,” cried Jenny, at last, freed by Menie’s pause. “Eh, ye
evil spirit! will ye tell me what cause of ill-will ye ever could have
against this innocent bairn? I’m no gaun to whisht, Miss Menie—to think
of her coming up here ance errand to put out her malice on you! My
patience! how ony mortal can thole the sicht o’ her, I dinna ken.”
“I can forgive ye, Jenny,” said the meek Nelly Panton, “for a’ your
passions, and your glooms, and your ill words—I’m thankful to say I can
forgive ye; but, eh, sirs, this is a weary world;—wherever I gang, at
hame, or away frae hame, I’m aye miskent—naebody has the heart to take a
guid turn frae me—though, I’m sure, I aye mean a’thing for the best, and
it was richt Miss Menie should ken. I thocht I would just come up this
far to give ye an advice, Miss Menie, when we were our lanes; and I’m no
gaun to blaze up into a fuff like Jenny because it’s ill ta’en. I’m just
as guid friends as ever. The next time I come I’ll come with our
Johnnie, so I bid you a very good morning, Miss Menie Laurie, and mony
thanks for your kind welcome. Jenny, fare-ye-well.”
Menie sat down in the window when the dark figure of her unwelcome
visitor was gone. The sun came in upon her gaily—the genial August
sun—and the leaves without fluttered in a happy wind and a maze of
morning sounds, broken with shriller shouts of children, and rings of
silvery laughter floated up and floated round her, of themselves an
atmosphere fresh and sweet; but Menie bowed her face between her hands,
and looked out with wistful eyes into the future, where so many fears
and wonders had come to dwell; and vigilant and stern the meagre
yew-tree looked in upon her, like an unkindly fate.
NATIONAL GALLERY.
REPORT OF COMMISSION.
The publication of the evidence given before the Select Committee on the
National Gallery, enables us to return to the subject of our article of
December with a more complete knowledge of the facts than we could
gather from the unfinished Report and the extracts of evidence, which
the press of the day supplied. The whole Blue Book is a valuable
document: it contains a very clear index by which references to all
details, as well of fact as of opinion, can be readily made, rendering
the alarming bulk of the materials very manageable. We can now see what
each witness actually said, so that none need complain of partial or
mutilated extracts; every passage may be taken with its context. We
shall take occasion thereby to correct some portions of evidence, upon
which we commented in our former paper, having been misled by the
versions in the newspaper reports, from which we took them. To correct a
misstatement should be our first task. We were certainly much surprised
to find it stated that Sir Charles Eastlake had made such a declaration
as this, that he would not hesitate to clean a picture, and “to _strip
off the whole of its glazings_.” We thought it at the time so improbable
that we could not believe such to have been his meaning; and accordingly
said, that Sir Charles must have meant coats of varnish, for that we
knew him to be too experienced a master of his profession to mean the
glazings. We have, since the publication, carefully examined his
evidence, and not only do not see the words attributed to him, but
collect from his answers to the queries put to him, a general aversion
to “cleaning,” and that, in most instances, he opposed subjecting
pictures to it, as a dangerous process.
It might, however, be supposed that artists would agree as to the
meaning of terms of art. Those on the Commission unacquainted with the
processes of painting, must have been very much surprised and perplexed
by the very different meanings given to technical terms, and that not by
one or two, or by artists of little note, but by nearly all, including
the most celebrated. The confusion caused by this non-agreement among
the artists, with regard to the terms of their art, the contradictions,
and explanations, occupy a very large portion of the Blue Book. Nor does
it appear that the Commissioners are able to come to any clear
conclusion upon the matter. They labour hard, it is true, and put their
questions in every shape, to learn what seems to be simple enough—in
fact, whether any paint, put on a picture by the original painter, in a
thin transparent manner, has been removed by the cleaning process; but
the examined force their examiners into a labyrinth of words, of various
and tortuous uses, in which there is all bewilderment, and no
master-clue is given them by which they might escape into unobscured
ground. Thus, we see in the index the word “glazings” requires four
heads of examination—1. Explanation of the process; its susceptibility
to injury by cleaning. 2. How far it was used by the ancient masters. 3.
Proofs of glazings having been extensively used. 4. Removal by cleaning
of the glazings from certain pictures in the Gallery. There is, at
least, one certain conclusion to be drawn—that there was, and is, such a
thing as glazing. That is generally agreed upon—in fact, is only doubted
by the keeper, Mr Uwins, R.A.; and his denial, causing so much
astonishment, has raised a storm of contradictory opinions, which have
obfuscated the whole artistic atmosphere. The public attention had been
drawn to a supposed injury, said to have been inflicted on some of the
finest pictures in the National Gallery. The attack, through letters in
the _Times_, on the trustees, keeper, cleaners, and general system, was
so vigorous that the Commission of Enquiry became absolutely necessary,
in order either to allay the public alarm or to provide security for the
future. The result has been certainly to justify and confirm the alarm,
and to offer certain propositions for the better providing for the
safety and progressive improvement of our National Gallery. The system,
which includes the whole management of the Gallery, is condemned, in
unhesitating terms of compliment to those who _made_ the system, and who
ought to have made a better, or to have refused position in one so bad.
Yet we really think it is straining a point of grace to dignify the
general mismanagement with the title of “system” at all, for no regular
system seems ever to have been pursued from the beginning. As we showed
in our former article, (and not from our own surmise, but from the
evidence of a parliamentary report), our several Governments were never
in earnest with regard to the Fine Arts; and a National Gallery having,
by a kind of accident, been forced upon them, they chose trustees as to
an honorary office in which there was nothing to do, selected for their
title and rank rather than for their taste, knowledge, or ability. The
consequences have been sad indeed, and exhibit a catalogue of sins of
commission and omission. A National Gallery was founded thirty years
ago; what is the great production of these thirty years of peace? It is
the old fable of the mountain’s labour. The evidence as to losses
sustained by omission to purchase is quite vexatious; there is a long
list, to which every one acquainted with the picture world may make
additions. We have often and often expressed our astonishment, when we
have seen pictures on sale, wanted in the Gallery, and not purchased. To
say nothing of the greater schools, the Italian, less understood by
collectors of pictures, and for which there is as yet unhappily no
sufficient public taste—How many pictures of value, of the schools for
which a taste is professed, have been allowed to pass away, and many of
them sent out of the country? We allude to pictures of which there could
be no doubt, either as to their condition or originality. For instance,
how miserably poor is our gallery in the works of the younger
Vanderveldt, who may be almost classed as an English painter; yet the
country had an opportunity of making a purchase of that exceedingly fine
one sold from the collection of Sir Bethel Codrington. How poor are we
in the works of Ruysdael, of Hobbima—painters so highly estimated by
private collectors. We are not giving a preference to these schools; we
only show, that what entirely falls within the taste of all collectors
among us the nation disregards. An indifference has been proved. Did not
a member of the Government declare, in his place in Parliament, that it
was preferable that pictures should rather be in private collections
than in a public gallery?
We cannot subscribe to the censure passed on our Prime-Minister, Lord
Aberdeen, by a writer in the _Morning Post_, that he consented to the
purchase of two pictures which he never saw. Surely he was justified in
his reliance upon the recommendation of the Trustees, especially as he
was well aware of the difficulty of obtaining their consent to make any
purchases. But the inadequacy of the system is thus admitted. _Question_
5289.—“Your Lordship has probably become aware that a want of definite
and well-subdivided responsibility is the main defect of the institution
as it exists at present?”—“Yes, I think that where the trustees are
numerous, and their attendance is not compulsory, there is great
uncertainty; different persons attend on different days, and come with
different views and different projects.” But further on we have the real
cause of the difficulty exposed, the incompetency of the judges. _Q._
5319.—“Your Lordship is aware that opportunities have occurred for the
purchase of pictures which belonged to Mr Solly, Mr Conyngham, Mr Younge
Otley, and various other gentlemen; and some persons regret that we have
not availed ourselves of those opportunities. I presume your Lordship
conceives it might be desirable that authority should be given to a
limited body of trustees to give a positive recommendation in such cases
to the Chancellor of the Exchequer?”—“Yes, I think that would be very
useful; but at the same time, on all these subjects, people differ very
much among those who are generally supposed to understand matters of art
exceedingly well—I have never found two agree. In the case of pictures
not enjoying public notoriety and celebrity, you are always liable to
that: one man will think that he has found something that is invaluable,
while others will think that it is good for little or nothing. You are
always liable to a difference of opinion, and the selection must be left
to those who are admitted to be the best judges. I do not expect to see
a tribunal in which there will not often be a great difference of
opinion on matters of art.” Although his Lordship is aware that there is
in France, and Prussia, and other countries, “one supreme head, not an
artist, but a nobleman or gentleman of high attainments in those
matters, in whom the country has confidence,” he is also aware of the
hornet’s nest that free discussion is: in answer to question 5314, “Yes,
I believe so—a sort of minister; but in a country where there is the
same freedom of discussion that there is here, I should not envy the
person occupying such a position.” It would indeed be a responsibility
requiring a strong and firm mind. And “public confidence” is a variable
thing, as his Lordship may at the present moment shrewdly suspect; yet
we doubt not there would be many candidates for, or at least many having
sufficient confidence in themselves to accept, such a position. Such
might be found amongst the competent and incompetent. It is not
improbable that Mr Morris Moore, fully assured of his own taste and
knowledge, would accept it; or if Sidney Smith were living, he would be
likely to add that to the catalogue of undertakings to which Lord John
Russell would think himself fully equal, even though there would be a
chance of being flayed alive by public discussion and averted public
confidence. There are men who desperately love to give judgment _ex
cathedra_, whether it be about a Titian or a nation’s safety, and would
hardly be restrained though the fate of Sisanes were threatened them,
and they were to encounter the chance of being flayed, and their skins
made cushions for their successors in the same seat, to remind them of
the consequences of an ill judgment. Still we advocate the one supreme
head—a minister of the fine arts—and would have him choose his council;
nor should we be so unreasonable as to expect even such a one to be a
competent judge in all departments. Few, indeed, are so gifted. Sir
Robert Peel, who appears from the beginning to have taken great interest
in the Gallery, would scarcely have been a competent authority with
regard to Italian art; for, if we mistake not, in the public exhibition
of his pictures, a few years ago, there were none of any of the Italian
schools. We know no man whose general judgment we should so much rely
upon as Sir Charles Eastlake, for he is accomplished, not only as a
painter, but as a scholar of artistic research, and full of knowledge;
but we learn from himself, in his evidence before this Commission, that
when he was appointed to the keepership by Sir Robert Peel, he accepted
the office on the condition that he was only to be consulted on, and
responsible for, the purchase of Italian pictures. A minister of fine
arts should certainly be well acquainted with the finest works of art,
and they are undoubtedly of the Italian schools—a real knowledge of
these, to a great extent, implies a Catholic taste. The possessor of
such knowledge is not likely to be blind to the merits of other schools,
though his preference for the higher may have limited his search, and in
some measure lowered his zeal as a collector. He would, of course, have
subordinate officials, who would, for final judgment, refer to him; and
we should in no case fear his decision if he were versed in the
fundamental principles of art discoverable in the great schools of
Italy. There should be purveyors everywhere. But we have seen enough in
the pages of the Report to show that such employed purveyors should not
be selected from picture-dealers. Any one attached to the Gallery in
this capacity should be a sworn agent, bound to renounce all
picture-dealing as a trade, and not to accept anything whatever in the
shape of commission. We see no reason why he should ever have been in
the trade at all, quite sure that there are many gentlemen out of it
perfectly qualified to undertake the important duty.
The main object of the Commission being to discover if the charges of
injury, from cleaning certain pictures, have any foundation, it may be
thought somewhat strange that they scarcely come to a conclusion upon
the matter, which, if they had been inclined to trust to their
perception, would not have been a difficult task. They tell us that “the
preponderance of testimony is to the effect, that the appearance of the
pictures has been _rendered less agreeable by the operation of cleaning_
(the draught of Report says deteriorated)—in some of them, in regard to
their general aspect, by removal of the mellow tone which they
previously exhibited; in others, from special blemishes, which have
become apparent, and which in a former state of the pictures were not
perceptible.” In another place we are told, “the weight of evidence
varies considerably in respect of the effect produced upon each of the
nine pictures which have been lately subjected to the process of
cleaning.” We should have thought the _weight_ of evidence had been the
_preponderance_; the weighing down testimony, the turning the scale for
or against a varying weight, as a conclusion of evidence appears rather
unintelligible. There never was so great a weight of evidence as the
Blue Book itself. Did the Commissioners—admitting that, from the
examination of artists, amateurs, and picture-dealers, the only result
was “great contrariety of judgment and irreconcilable differences of
taste”—go to the pictures and examine for themselves? They did so. They
went “in company with several witnesses, and in some instances they had
also the advantage of engravings and painted sketches of the pictures,
so that the witness could point out in detail the precise grounds upon
which his conclusions were founded.” We did expect, when we came upon
this passage in the Report, that we should learn what the Commissioners
themselves thought after this inspection, especially as they had
immediately stated that the object of the inspection was, “_in order
that every facility_ might be afforded for _the elucidation of these
conflicting_ opinions.” But, no. They avoid throwing any opinion into
the scale; so that there is no positive decision; and at this
interesting point they suddenly turn aside, make, as it were, a ring, to
enjoy the stand-up fight of the conflicting opinions of Mr Morris Moore
and Mr Uwins the keeper, as some relief to the discrepancies among
themselves. We do not doubt that they did form a judgment in their own
minds, and can readily guess it. They are cautious, and avoid
pronouncing it. Indeed, the Commissioners seem to have been a little
vexed with Mr Morris Moore, and look unpleasantly upon him as a chief
accuser who had put into their hands a very disagreeable work, which
they do not at all sit easy under. They show their vexation in the
Report, p. xi., where, in commenting upon the contradictory evidence of
Mr Morris Moore and Mr Uwins, they embody in the Report the opinion of
Mr Uwins, who characterises the evidence of Mr M. Moore as “displaying a
mass of ignorance and want of intelligence.” And immediately, as if to
set aside the evidence of both, we presume by the context as prejudiced,
they say—“Your Committee wish to direct attention to the _unprejudiced_
[the italics are ours] opinions of many eminent artists and amateurs.”
So when Mr Morris Moore justly complains of insult from the unreproved
words used by Mr Farrer, “If the imputation came from a person who I
thought would be believed, I should take it up,” the Commissioners,
after clearing the room to consider the charge of Mr Moore, that he had
been insulted, came to the strange conclusion, not that Mr Farrer’s
words were no insult, but that “Mr Moore had himself frequently used
language towards others which might reasonably give offence.” Now this
is not fair. Offence may be given reasonably, and therefore admissibly;
but when it is of a nature to impugn the veracity generally, not as to
any particular fact, of a person under examination, as one not to be
believed, he has a right to demand protection; and if it be not given,
their right of examination ceases. There is a great difference between
what may be in the nature of the evidence offensive and what is
insulting. If Mr Moore had been equally guilty with Mr Farrer, the
Commissioners should, when so guilty, have reproved it; whereas they
make this their omission an excuse for not doing plain justice now.
Doubtless Mr M. Moore has given great offence by his evidence, but that
does not justify Mr Farrer in offering an insult which is not evidence;
nor are the Commissioners justified in their comment that Mr Moore had
given offence, without marking still more strongly the insult offered by
Mr Farrer, still unreproved. We are not acquainted with Mr Moore, nor do
we in any way take up his “_animosities_,” if he has any; but we think
towards him the Commissioners did not act quite fairly, nor consistently
with the dignity of their position.
We may not unaptly look upon their visit to the National Gallery as an
inquest on the bodies of certain old masters—say Claude, Titian,
Velasquez—for the charge had been made of positive murder. The decision
required—Were they dead, killed, murdered, or still alive and
well-looking? A physician once told us an anecdote in point. He, with
another physician, had been some time in attendance upon a patient. (We
believe the man was a baker). One day they went up-stairs as usual,
looked a moment or two at the poor man, then at each other
significantly, and walked out of the room. On the stairs they met the
wife, and tenderly informed her that she was a widow; and as a widow she
properly conducted herself, and saw the physicians depart. It so
happened that our friend, some weeks after, turning the corner of a
street, came suddenly against the baker—“What! aren’t you dead?” “No,”
said the man, “I recovered as soon as you left me.” A little farther on
he met the widow that should have been. Perhaps she had less reason to
be thankful than her recovered husband. She raised a tumult against the
physician, vociferating, “Pretty fellows you must be—much you must know
of your business, not to know whether a man be living or dead.” From
this, he said, he determined henceforth, on most occasions, to use only
dumb show, or ambiguous expressions. The Commissioners seem to have been
of this way of thinking. They cannot altogether acquit the irresponsible
responsibles—are unwilling to condemn; they adopt, therefore, a figure
not unknown in oratory, a mystification under the ambiguity of a varying
weight of evidence.[4]
We are, however, now in a position to hear the witnesses speak for
themselves. Such a mass of contradictions it will be difficult to find
elsewhere among professors of any other art or science. In the multitude
of counsellors there may be wisdom, but it is not the less hard to
extract it; and certainly one part of the wisdom is sometimes to conceal
it.
As “glazing” has been shown to be a fertile source of discrepancies of
opinion, and the whole question of the cleaning process so much depends
upon its existence or non-existence in certain works, and upon its
peculiar liability to injury, it may not be unimportant to examine the
testimonies concerning it.
What is the definition of glazing? Sir Charles Eastlake makes it to be,
“The passing a dark transparent colour over a lighter colour.” He also
draws a distinction between the Italian and Flemish glazing. “The
Italian practice is glazing over a solid, light preparation; the Flemish
is passing transparent colours over a light ground.” Mr Charteris doubts
the propriety of the definition; Sir Charles explains, “I would say
that, if a dark transparent colour be passed too thickly, even over a
white ground, so as to exclude the light entirely, it becomes opaque; on
the other hand, if an opaque colour be passed so thinly over a light
ground as to show the light through, it partakes of the nature of
glazing. There are pictures by Rubens, in which some of the tints are
produced in that way, with opaque colour in a diaphanous state. I was
about to state, when you called my attention to the meaning you attach
to glazing, that the system of passing a thin opaque colour over its
ground is called, in English technical phraseology, ‘scumbling;’ and the
passing a strictly transparent colour over its ground is called
‘glazing.’” It may appear very bold in us to question this definition of
the President of the Academy; yet we are inclined to do so, because we
think our artists have not agreed to adopt it, and because it leaves a
common mode of painting without any technical term; but if scumbling may
be allowed to express the thin, yet somewhat dry, rubbing in of opaque
colour, we may well leave glazing to the conception of it adopted by the
Italians, which strikes Sir Charles Eastlake as remarkable. “Now, it is
remarkable that the Italians have but one word for both operations—the
term _velare_ (to veil) comprehends both glazing and scumbling.” Nor do
we see any sufficient reason for confining glazing to dark over light.
We cannot but think it was the practice of the Italian schools, at least
some of them, to paint glazingly light over dark. Did not Correggio,
especially in his backgrounds, paint out the light, the white ground—if
he used always light grounds—with deep greys, not of a uniform tone, and
afterwards go over them, sometimes with dark transparent colour, and
sometimes semi-transparent, and so on lighter? The practice of Rembrandt
seems to want technical terms, if Sir Charles’s definition is to be an
authority. That eminent painter of mysterious effect, of “palpable
obscure,” certainly often painted glazingly semi-opaque lighter over
dark, as well as dark over light. It may be a question of practical art,
if it be not as desirable that dark under-painting should come out, or
slightly appear through a lighter, as that light should come up through
the dark. We never can be brought to believe that a white ground,
showing through dark glazings, will imitate all the depths of nature. It
was perhaps too much the practice of the Flemish schools, but they were
not schools from which we should learn the power of sentiment in
colouring. It was an expeditious practice, but it led to a conventional
colouring, sacrificing the truth of shadows, with the object (if
attained) of setting off, and giving body to the lights. We the rather
dwell upon this, because we believe that the Flemish system, and
particularly that of Rubens, has had an injurious influence upon modern
art. Rubens was a painter of great power, and dared an extravagance of
conventionality, which, in weaker hands, becomes a conspicuous fault.
Hence a thin, flashy, and flimsy style of painting, unnatural, because
unsubstantial;—we say unsubstantial; for, however illuminated, or
covered with transparency of light or of shadow, nature is ever
substantial. The Italian practice is, therefore, greatly to be
preferred.
It is well known that our Gainsborough said, that with black or blue,
and asphaltum, he would make a pit as deep as the Inferno; but it was a
mistake: with such dark transparency, especially over a light ground, he
would make no pit at all, but a hole scarcely the depth of his
mall-stick; his arm could reach to the end of it, as against a wall. In
the greatest depths of nature, there is a depth of dark below, not of
light, over which there is atmosphere. It is this depth that should come
up, not light. We are not unaware that any semi-opaque glazing over a
darker colour has a tendency to coldness, but it may not be the worse on
that account, as the painter has the choice of making his under-darks as
warm as he pleases, and his semi-opaque glazing warm too. This, cool, in
its various degrees over warm, was the method adopted by both the
Poussins: they painted on red ground, and that generally not light, but
of deep tone; as it was also pretty much the case with the Bolognese
school. Gaspar Poussin, by this method, gave great effect to his cool
greens in masses of wood, the red ground imperceptibly giving an under
warmth, the general masses being laid in with a body of colour, but
semi-transparent, as if chalk, or some transparent body, had been
embodied with the colour. In his pictures, cool greys, more or less
mixed with ochres, tell with great truth over the red ground. We hope
the condemnation passed by the President of the Academy upon this method
may not be quite merited. Indeed, the beauty of most of that great, we
should say greatest, of landscape-painter’s works, which are yet
uninjured by the cleaner, would contradict so strong an assertion, as
that they are sure to perish from the cause ascribed; for, as they have
survived at least two hundred years, Gaspar Poussin having been born in
1600, (and, it may be worth observing, Claude in the same year), we may
fairly presume that the work of time on white lead has already done its
worst; and we would almost doubt the effect ascribed to time, when we
look at the perfect pictures of the master, which appear as if fresh
from the easel, and certainly the white not too transparent. Sir Charles
is explaining why he objected to the cleaning certain pictures. “The
general reason I have given; but if you were to ask me about those
pictures, I should say of the two, Canaletti and the Poussin, that it is
extremely injudicious to clean pictures of that kind, because time, even
without any assistance from picture-cleaners, is sure to destroy such
pictures in the end; they are painted on a dark ground, and every
painter knows, that when white lead is thinly spread over a dark colour,
it becomes more or less transparent in time: white lead has a tendency
to grow transparent. If you were to paint a chess-board with a thin coat
of white lead, so as effectually to conceal the black squares, and not
suffer it to be touched, in a certain time, longer or shorter, according
to the thinness of the paint, the black squares would again become
apparent. The white lead has a tendency to grow transparent, and the
consequence is, that, when a picture is painted on a dark ground, time
does it harm rather than good.” We would, with some hesitation—for we
pay great deference to the opinions of Sir C. Eastlake—suggest another
cause for this appearance of the chess-board—the tendency of oil to
become a varnish, and therefore itself more transparent; and we are
inclined to think that, had the experiment been tried with any other
colour, ochres, or Naples yellow, the effect would have been the same.
Nay, what would be a still better test—had the whole board been covered
with black, the white squares, we believe, though concealed for a time,
would have appeared through. We also hope and trust that this effect of
time on the oil is on the whole rather beneficial than otherwise, and
that it is not continuous beyond a certain point. It is almost
incredible that either the oil or the white lead, laid on canvass two or
three hundred years ago, is now, at the present, and will be in future,
to a day of destruction, changing their properties. Then, with regard to
Gaspar Poussin, if such were really the case, the lights would be the
first to disappear; but, on the contrary, Mr Brown, who cleaned the Dido
and Æneas about thirty years ago, a very dark picture, gives another
kind of evidence. _Q._ 1128.—“Did you observe in that picture that a
very considerable part of the discolouring and blackness arose from
internal causes, from an internal alteration in the colours?”—“In some
instances; but the general effect of the picture was very much lowered
by the heterogeneous mass of oil that was upon it, and the very dark
parts did not, of course, come out, as you would imagine they would,
from the removal of that: the lighter parts were very brilliant, indeed,
but it was always a dark picture.” _Q._ 1130.—“Is there not something
peculiar in the ground on which Gaspar and Nicholas Poussin painted
their pictures, which rendered them liable to decomposition and
discolourment?”—“I think not so much the ground, as the colour which
they would put upon the ground, because the ground that you see in those
masters, where they have used it to assist them in painting the picture,
is an universal colour: in some parts of the picture, the ground is more
or less painted on, but all the light parts of Gaspar Poussin’s pictures
are very tender.” The differences of opinion with respect to glazing are
chiefly among the artists. Picture-cleaners and picture-dealers are in
better agreement. Even the artists who differ, perhaps differ more on
account of the definition not being very clear, and established in the
artists’ vocabulary, than as to the fact. But the evidence of the
present keeper, Mr Uwins, is certainly very extraordinary on this, as on
every point upon which his examination entered. We showed, in our last
paper, how he was present and absent at the cleanings at the same times;
how he gave evidence as to the methods adopted by the cleaners in his
presence, which the cleaners themselves very flatly contradicted; how he
astonished Lord Monteagle by assertions which his lordship denied; how
he protested he did not advise, yet did advise; and now we find, with
regard to this question of glazing, having contradicted nearly every one
else, he turns round, for lack of others, to contradict himself. His
first answers about glazing were most plain and unhesitating. Being
asked if the Venetian painters did not use glazing, and that, in
consequence, their pictures are liable to injury in cleaning, he says,
“That is a question that can never be settled, because nobody can prove
that they did use glazings.” _Q._ 116.—“Is it your opinion that they
did, or that they did not?”—“I believe that the best painters of every
school used very little, indeed, if any at all, of what is called
glazing. I think it quite a modern quackery, that has nothing to do with
the noble works of remote ages in art.” _Q._ 117.—“You consider the
theory, as to the Venetian painters having used very delicate glazings
in finishing off their pictures, is fallacious?”—“I do not admit those
glazings, as they are called; I believe that they sought for freshness
and pureness of colour, and depended on their knowledge of colour for
the harmony of their picture, and not on putting on what the Romans call
‘la velatura Inglese;’ they wished to obtain the vigour and freshness of
nature, or their pictures would not have lasted as they have.” _Q._
118.—“Will you explain to the Committee why the Romans (I presume you
mean the Romans of the present day) call that particular process by the
name of ‘la velatura Inglese?’”—“Because the English painters only adopt
it.” _Q._ 119.—“The English painters of the modern school?”—“It is only
those who adopt it; that is why it is especially called ‘la velatura
Inglese.’” This is very childish, to attempt to disprove the practice of
the old Roman, or other masters, by the supposed—for it is only
supposed—or assumed criticism of modern Romans, who can be no authority
upon the practice of modern art in this country. Having found, however,
that “velare” and “velatura” are old, not new terms of art, in another
examination Mr Uwins comes to his explanation, which is as extraordinary
as his first assertion. He contradicts himself, by admitting, that all
good painters did use glazings, and even asserts that he never denied
it, only in a particular sense. It is in vain that the Committee tell
him, they asked not the question in any particular sense; he slips out
of the hands of the examiner with wonderful lubricity. It is the hardest
thing to bring his comprehension to any sense whatever of the questions
put to him; and as to the unfortunate “velatura,” he has examined the
dictionary of the Academy of Bologna, and, although he has admitted its
meaning by the thing, as in practice they all glazed, yet, not to be
vanquished, even by his extracts from his dictionary, he pertinaciously
says, “I believe that both these extracts relate to the preparation of
the canvass.”
We fear the reader may be weary of this discussion on glazing, but we
must beg him to go a little further with us on the subject; it is
important, for if there were no glazings, both during the process and
final, no damage may have been done, in respect to them, for there could
be none to remove—a state of the case which some would fain establish,
if possible. The Committee take a great deal of trouble to get the
clearest evidence upon the point. We perfectly agree with Mr Morris
Moore in his evidence in this matter, and utterly repudiate the idea
that the mellow, warm, lucid tones of the old masters have been in any
degree given by time. He very appositely quotes the sensible Hogarth,
“Time cannot give a picture more union and harmony than has been in the
power of a skilful master, with all his rules of art, to do.” Mr Morris
Moore denies it, with the examples of Claude and Titian, and quotes
amply old authorities. We have immediately referred to Leonardo da
Vinci’s treatise on painting in general, a very puzzling book; but we
find a passage which shows that not only tone might be given by glazing,
but colours changed by it—that is, one colour over another, making a
third. He says, “A transparent colour being laid on another colour of a
different kind forms a third, partaking of each of the two simples that
compose it.” Mr Dyce, R.A., comes to the rescue of the Paul Veronese,
one of the recently cleaned pictures, showing from the authority of
Boschini, a satirical writer on art, of the seventeenth century, that
Paul Veronese did not glaze his draperies. The conclusion would of
course be, that in that respect the picture could not have been injured,
or that it is not the work of Paul Veronese. But surely the passage from
Boschini proves too much; for it asserts with regard to drapery an
impossibility, or at best a very unlikely thing, unless glazing be taken
into the account. For though Boschini is made to say, that Paul Veronese
never glazed his drapery, he is made also to say that “he was accustomed
to paint the shadows of drapery with lake, not only of red draperies,
but also of yellow, green, and even blue, thus producing an
indescribably harmonious effect.” But he had also said, that the painter
“put in the local tints of draperies first, painting the blue draperies
for the most part in water-colour.” It is, in the first place, most
unlikely that he left these draperies in water-colour only; it is more
probable that this first painting was entirely gone over, or his lake in
shadows would hardly have suited all the colours. We happen to have in
our possession a Venetian picture, which shows this Venetian practice of
lake, under blue drapery. It is a Palma; the subject, The Dead Christ,
The Virgin Mother, Mary Magdalene, and other figures. The foot of Mary
the Mother rests on a stone, on which is written Jacobus Palma. He was
the pupil of Titian, and is said to have finished a picture left
unfinished by Titian. The lake is very visible under the blue, which was
evidently put over it; and being rubbed off here and there, the red is
very conspicuous. We mention this, merely to show that so far Boschini
was right, and that the practice was not confined to Paul Veronese. And
is there not presumption in any one, whether painter or not—and Boschini
was no painter, or a poor one—to assert positively, that a master who
lived a generation before him did not use this or that process of
painting, having a choice of all, and skill to use them. Boschini’s
aversion was the abuse of varnishes; and it is curious that, among the
condemned recipes is the _olio d’abezzo_, for which there are other
authorities besides Armenini, and it is mentioned in the Marciana
Manuscript, supposed to have been the varnish of Correggio. Boschini is
speaking of _foreigners_, “forestiere,” not Venetians:—
“O de che strazze se fa cavedal
D’ogio d’avezzo, mastice e sandraca,
E trementina (per no dir triaca)
Robe che illusterave ogni stival.”
—MARCO BOSCHINI, _Vinisto Quinto_.
Mr Dyce is unfortunate upon one occasion in rejecting the evidence of
Armenini, “because he describes the practice of another school,” “his
own school, the school of Ferrara.” Upon this Mr Morris Moore is
somewhat sharp upon him, and quotes Armenini himself, to show that he
does not confine himself to any school, but speaks from the “practice
and example of the most excellent artists that have existed,” and that
he was of Faenza, not Ferrara.
Mrs Merrifield, in her valuable work on the ancient practice of
painting, the result of a Government Commission, expresses great
confidence in the information she received from a learned and skilful
Milanese painter and cleaner, Signor A. He had particularly studied the
works of Titian, and describes his practice. If his account be correct,
Titian certainly glazed over his lights as well as darks; and, like Paul
Veronese, by the account of Boschini, he painted the shadows of blue
drapery with lake. “He (Titian) then painted the lights with
flesh-colour, and laid by the picture to dry. After five or six months
he glazed the flesh with _terra rossa_, and let it dry. He then painted
in the shades transparently (that is without any white in the shadows),
using a great deal of asphaltum[5] with them.” “He also said, that in a
blue drapery he painted the shades with lake, and then laid on the
lights (with white); that these colours were laid on with great body,
and, when dry, he took a large brush and spread the biadetto over the
whole.” This biadetto was used by Paul Veronese; we suppose it was a
blue from copper, and, owing to its liability to turn green, used
without oil. Now, if such was the practice of Titian, it was most likely
in some degree the practice also of Paul Veronese, who, though younger,
was contemporary with Titian. We somewhat enlarge upon this question
here, because, by the evidence given, doubts were thrown upon the
originality of the “Consecration of St Nicolas,” or to prove that no
glazings had been removed.
We shall not pursue this subject further, concluding that, whatever
practice is in use now by various artists was known by the ancient
masters, and some things more, which are either lost or uncertainly
recovered. No one has paid greater attention to this subject, or applied
to it more research and discrimination, than Sir Charles Eastlake. We
still look for more valuable and decisive information from him,
especially with respect to the Italian schools.
We are certainly surprised at the opinions given by artists of eminence
as to the condition of the Claude, “The Queen of Sheba;” that Mr
Stansfield should confirm his opinion of its being uninjured “from the
extremities of the trees next the sky, and the foliage generally,”
because those very parts have appeared to our eyes so feeble, so washy,
as if at some time or other painted on by another hand than Claude’s: we
say the same also, somewhat fearlessly, of the edges of the trees in the
small upright Claude. The outlining, too, of the cloud in the Queen of
Sheba is of the same feeble handling; and the upper and lower tones of
the sky are quite out of agreement. Mr Stansfield and others think time
will restore the lost tone and harmony: we cannot comprehend this
judgment. If time can give that peculiar warm glow of Claude, we should
see that time had done this kind or unkind office on the works of other
painters, as cold as that picture is now. There were many who avoided
this glow, as unsuited to their subjects; we do not see that time has in
this respect converted any of them into Claudes. There is Claude’s
imitator, Swannevelt, without the glow; but take Ruysdael, who painted
upon an opposite principle—we never see that glow thrown over his
pictures. His fresh blue and white skies are still free from that yellow
toning of time’s fingers. It comes to this—either Claude painted his
peculiar glow, or time did for him. If Time did it for him, Time must
have been constrained by his office and nature to do the same thing for
others. He did not do so for others, or Claude’s would not be a glow
peculiar to him—_ergo_, Claude did the work, and not time. But time is
also supposed to do this ameliorating work very speedily. Mr Stansfield
thinks “we all must allow that the Cuyp has recovered its tone.” Will it
be allowed? There is, and was after the cleaning of that picture in
1844, a pink colouring in the sky, which put the whole picture out of
harmony, which, if painted by Cuyp, to be like his other works, could
only have been an under-tone, and by him gone over with another, which
must have been at some time or other removed.
How could so skilful a marine painter as Mr Stansfield look accurately
at the water from the foreground to the distance in the Claude and think
it uninjured? The very forms of the waves, in the second and third
distances, are interrupted and faint. An argument has been brought,
that, if the sky had been injured, the ropes would have suffered.
Besides that it is merely assumed that they have not suffered, that
argument is fallacious. We have the authority of a very experienced
picture-cleaner, and one well acquainted with pictures and all
processes, which tends to a contrary proof. De Burtin, in his treatise
on picture-cleaning, says: “A point of the utmost importance, and which
never must be lost sight of, is this, that among the glazings there will
be found some which, although very transparent and delicate, it is
nevertheless very difficult to injure, because they have been laid on
the colour when fresh, and have become thoroughly incorporated and
united therewith; and, on the contrary, there will be found others, and
sometimes not so transparent and delicate, but which will yet be injured
very readily, because they stand separate from, and do not adhere to the
colour beneath them, that having been almost dry ere they were put on.”
Now, supposing that Claude’s glow were—we say not that it was—an
after-glaze, the ropes may have been put in on the wet sky. Does any one
think that Claude’s skies were painted at one painting, or even two?
Mr Stansfield had used the words “raw and disagreeable;” but being asked
if he thought that picture raw and disagreeable when it left Claude’s
easel? replies, No. We must in justice say, that he somewhat modifies
the expression. “Perhaps I have used a wrong term in saying ‘raw’ and
‘disagreeable,’ for we all paint for time to have some effect upon our
pictures.” Notwithstanding Mr Stansfield’s great experience, we more
than doubt this fallacy as to time. We know it to be, and to have been,
a favourite maxim of many painters of the English school, that time will
remedy rawness, and make their works in mellowness what those of the
ancient masters were. We utterly disbelieve it, and for the following
reasons: It is out of character with the mind of genius purposely to
leave a work incomplete. The idea of perfection being in the mind, the
hand cannot resist the operation. Then, has time had that effect upon
more modern works? We appeal for evidence to the Vernon Gallery. Are the
pictures there better than when they were fresh from the easel? Not one,
we verily believe, and _know_ some to be much worse. This was a notion
of Constable’s and his followers, and it has infected the minds of too
many. He painted as if he would frost his pictures with white—has time
finished them to his conceived perfection? Those who trust to time must,
we fear, also trust to the picture-cleaner and picture-toner, against
whom there is, rather inconsistently, a considerable outcry. This is a
point not requiring a test of long ages. Mr Stansfield himself thinks
“The Queen of Sheba” will recover its tone in six months, and that from
1846 to the present time the satisfactory change has taken place in the
pictures cleaned.
With regard to Claude’s general yellow tone, there remains yet a
question to be asked—Did he take it from nature, or did he add it with a
view of improving nature? Quite aware that the question will shock the
Naturalists, we still venture it. In the first place, be it observed—and
we have noticed it elsewhere in the pages of this Magazine—nature will
bear great liberties with regard to colour, without losing her
characteristics. Colour may be said, in this sense, to be the poetical
language of nature. It is astonishing that any can doubt whether or not
this view of nature was taken by the Ancient Masters. It is
unfashionable now. To apply this to Claude: In Sir David Brewster’s
evidence, we find mention made of “Claude glasses,” some of which he
produced. He considered that, looking through these, the tone would be
much restored to the eye. “I conceive,” he says, “this (the yellow tone)
is proved by the glasses, which I have produced, having got the name of
Claude Lorraine glasses from their giving that general tone to nature
that characterises all his pictures.” This leads to a slight discussion
on the subject of the glasses. Mr B. Wall asks Sir David, “Are you not
aware that, about forty-five years ago, those Claude Lorraine glasses
were introduced and sold, three, or four, or five together, and they
were very much used by tourists who used to see the English Lakes?—were
they not of different colours—blue, pink, green, and almost every
shade?” “No such name was given to such glasses as you refer to in your
question.” Mr B. Wall: “I venture to differ from your high authority,
and to think that the glass which you call a Claude Lorraine glass is
not the only glass that went by that name; and therefore that the
inference which you have drawn, that the yellow one was the proper one
to use when you looked at Claude’s pictures, was not correct.” Mr
Stirling asks if there is not another thing called a Claude Lorraine
glass, “a piece of coloured glass which is used to reduce the landscape,
and reflect it like the surface of a mirror?” Sir David says, he never
saw it done with coloured glass. The difference between the glass spoken
of by Sir David, and that by Mr B. Wall, does not seem very
important,—it being that one admits other colours more freely than the
other. Mr Wall is not, however, quite correct in limiting the invention
to forty-five years ago. We have one in our possession which we know to
have been in existence very near a century, and it has always been
called a Claude glass. I believe it has been in use, as was the black
glass, in the days of the Old Masters. The effect on the natural
landscape is curious, and worth recording. The yellow glass is very
extraordinary: it wondrously heightens the lights, so that a sky, for
instance, in which scarcely an illuminated cloud is seen, looked at
through this glass, exhibits great variety of parts. Shadows are
deepened, and light strengthened; real colours not lost, but as it were
covered with a glaze. We have always been of opinion that Rembrandt used
it, his pictures are so like nature seen through that medium. It mostly
reduces the blue, making it greenish. There was a little picture of
Rembrandt exhibited some years ago at the Institution in Pall-Mall,
which presented exactly the effect we speak of. It was a most simple
subject—a hilly ground, on the undulating summit of which, on one side,
was a village church among trees, on the other a few scattered houses,
all dark, against the sky; from the division of the hill, a road very
indistinct came down to the foreground, which, to the right, melted off
into a dark brook, going into deep shade, where it was lost. The sky was
exceedingly luminous—a cloud rising over the village, such as would
“drop fatness,” and the whole tone of that greenish-grey, with
rich-toned illuminations, which the Claude glass constantly presents to
the eye. In a paper of this Magazine of 1847, in which we had occasion
to speak of colour, and the habit of the Old Masters in deviating from
the common, obvious colouring of nature, we alluded to this Claude
Lorraine glass. “This may be exemplified by a dark mirror—and, better
still, by a Claude glass, as it is called, by which we look at nature
through coloured glasses. We do not the less recognise nature—nay, it is
impossible not to be charmed with the difference, and yet not for a
moment question the truth. We are not here discussing the propriety of
using such glasses—it may be right, or it may be wrong, according to the
purpose the painter may have. We only mean to assert, that nature will
bear the changes and not offend any sense. The absolute naturalness,
then, of the colours of nature, in its strictest and most limited sense,
local and aërial, is not so necessary as that the eye cannot be
gratified without it. And it follows, that agreeability of colour does
not depend upon this strict naturalness.”
We learn from Mrs Merrifield, that Signor A. showed her a black mirror,
which had belonged to Bamboccio (Peter Van Laer). “This mirror was
bequeathed by Bamboccio to Gaspar Poussin; by the latter to some other
painter, until it ultimately came into the hands of Signor A.” It is
admitted by Mr Seguier himself, as by other witnesses, that Claude
painted thinly, semi-opaque over dark, but this is called “scumbling.”
It is, however, in fact, if done with a free hot dry brush, a glaze, and
he may have thus toned his pictures. That tone once removed, as in the
case of the Sheba, we believe irrecoverable but by such a master-hand as
put it on, and possessed of the same pure medium. We fancy we discover
in the working that a great deal of the detail of his pictures was
painted in this method. To expect that time only will restore that fine
glow is worthy the philosopher of Laputa, and his resolution to extract
sunbeams from cucumbers. Poor Claude! Professors of the art of painting
are far worse off than professors of literature, whose tormentors are
but the printer’s devil and the compositor. The poor painter has an
endless generation of tormentors. The “Quidlibet audendi” is not his
motto; his genius will never be half so daring as the hands of his
scrubbers. Let him sit at his easel, and, in his enthusiasm, throw
sunshine from his brush, and dream fondly that it will be eternal; a
host of cleaners are looking over his shoulder, or lurking in secret, to
catch the treasure, and smudge his dream and his work out for ever. And
when they have visibly, too visibly, done their worst, old Time, that
used to be represented as the “Edax rerum,” the general destroyer, is
introduced as a newly-dubbed professor of the art of cleaning and
restoring by dirt.
We do not, however, wish to speak disrespectfully of picture-cleaners,
or picture-varnishers, or picture-dealers. There are many very skilful
and very useful, and, of dealers, honourable and liberal. Nor do we say
this without knowledge; yet habit creates boldness, and removes caution.
Like the medical profession, cleanership, it is to be feared, must kill
before it has learned to cure. But the professors sometimes forget the
wholesome rule, “Fiat experimentum in corpore vili.” Even the wise Sir
David Brewster confesses to having dabbled in destruction. There is not
a man of note in it but must have killed his man; and few are so happy
as the wonderful Mr Lance, to make a new one so well that none can tell
the difference. Indeed, Mr Lance’s magic brush did a great deal more. A
cleaner had wiped out of existence whole members—man and horse;
sometimes had left half a horse, and scarcely half a man, and sometimes
had ironed them all out together. Mr Lance brought all to life again,
without having ever seen one of them; and all so like, that their most
familiar acquaintances had never missed them, nor known they had ever
been defunct. Yet was his modesty equal to his skill. He never boasted
of his performance. Man and horse were revivified, and remounted, and
caracoled with the utmost grace and precision before himself and the
public, with unbounded applause; and the wonderful restorer was
contented to sit quietly in a corner, as if unconscious of his own
creations, and deaf to the loudest blast of Fame’s trumpet. If we have
wearied our readers with too long discussions upon technicalities, we
can now make amends by retiring behind the scenes, first introducing Mr
Lance himself, who will be as amusing to others as he has been to us.
But there is a prologue to every play; we would not usher in so
celebrated a performer without one.
Every one acquainted with the National Gallery knows the Velasquez
“Boar-hunt.” It was always a celebrated picture, and henceforth will be
more celebrated than ever. In the very Index of the Report it occupies
more than a whole page. The famous Erymanthian boar never gave half the
sport, though it required a Hercules to kill him. But there is a
difference: he was killed, and frightened people after he was dead; this
boar was killed, and brought to life again, and pleased every one ever
after. It had been hunted in many countries, and would have been hunted
in many more, had it not received its Apotheosis from the hand of Sir
Robert Peel, and found a place in the galaxy of the National Gallery.
This picture was presented to Lord Cowley by the Court of Spain; and
from him came into the hands of Mr Farrer, a dealer in pictures. By him
it was sent to Holland, having been refused by our Gallery, and offered
to the king, who rejected it. On its return from Holland, Mr Farrer left
it in its case, in his front shop, with the direction on it to his
Majesty the King of Holland—no direction to Mr Farrer appearing. Mr B.
Wall, one of the Commissioners, sees the case, and asks what it
contains; is told the Velasquez: has the “impression,” but is not quite
certain, that Mr Farrer told him it was going to the King of Holland. Mr
B. Wall upon this goes to Sir Robert Peel, and both fear the picture may
be lost; and, with the sanction and at the desire of Sir R. Peel, it was
purchased for the Gallery. Now, Mr B. Wall was not the only person who
saw the case in Mr Farrer’s shop. Mr Morris Moore was one, and, as he
says, there were many others. He names two—Mr Coningham and Mr Chambers
Hall—to all of whom Mr Farrer, according to the evidence of Mr Morris
Moore, told the same tale—namely, “that the Trustees were but just in
time to save it from exportation to the King of Holland.” This Mr Farrer
stoutly denies, and Mr Morris Moore offers to take his oath to the fact.
In the denial, Mr Farrer states, that he may have said he was going to
send it _abroad_, for that he intended to offer it in Paris; but, after
a while, speaks rather uncertainly, not knowing exactly where abroad he
should have sent it; but it is possible he may have intended again to
send it to Holland, under a kind of conviction that the King of Holland
would, after all, have it. Then he asserts that the visit from, and
conversation with, Mr Morris Moore upon the subject were before, not
after, the picture had gone to Holland. Mr Moore, on the other hand, is
positive it was after it had returned, because it was then secured for
the National Gallery, and Mr Farrer admits it was not so secured till
after its return from Holland. This is, as far as we can make it, a
plain statement, in abstract, from the evidence. The Commissioners leave
these “discrepancies” where they found them; so do we. It is a common
saying that truth lies somewhere between two contradictory statements.
Wherever it may appear to lie, there appears but little space, on any
intermediate ground, upon which it could, by any possibility, stand
upright. This little history has seen the picture lodged in the Gallery.
We must beg the reader to imagine it not as yet to have been located,
that he may learn a little of its antecedents. Lord Cowley had placed
the picture in the hands of Mr Thane to keep, where it remained some
years. But Mr Lance shall tell the tale. “After a considerable time, Mr
Thane, as I heard afterwards, had been commissioned to clean the
picture, and reline it. A colourman was employed to reline the picture,
a most skilful man, and, in relining it, I understand, he blistered it
with hot irons.... When the picture was returned to Mr Thane in this
condition, it naturally distressed him very much; he was a very
conscientious man, and he became very deeply distressed about it: he saw
the picture passing over his bed in procession. After a certain time, he
thought it got worse, and that the figure of it was more attenuated; and
at length he fancied he saw a skeleton. In fact, the poor man’s mind was
very much injured. It was then proposed that he should employ some
painter to restore the picture; and three persons were selected for that
purpose. Sir David Wilkie, Sir Edwin Landseer, and myself, were
mentioned; but it was supposed that neither Sir David Wilkie nor Sir
Edwin Landseer would give their time to it, and that probably I might;
and, therefore, the picture was placed with me, with a representation
that, if I did not do something to it, serious consequences would follow
to the cleaner. I undertook it, though I was very much employed at the
time; and, to be as short as possible, I painted on this picture. I
generally paint very rapidly, and I painted on that occasion as
industriously as I could, and was engaged for six weeks upon it. When it
was completed, Lord Cowley saw it, never having been aware of the
misfortune that had happened to the picture. It was then in Mr Thane’s
possession, and remained with him some time afterwards. From that time I
saw no more of the picture until it was exhibited in the British Gallery
some time afterwards, where it was a very popular picture, and was very
much thought of. Since then, I have heard it was sold to the nation; and
twice I have seen it in the National Gallery. I saw it only about a week
ago, and I then thought it was not in the same condition (indeed, I am
certain it is not) as when it was exhibited in the British Gallery
formerly, after I had done it.” This is sufficient evidence that the
picture has been damaged in cleaning. Let us pursue the story through
question and answer.
“_Q._ 5124. What was the state of the picture when it came into your
hands? There were portions of the picture entirely gone.—_Q._ 5125. What
portions? Whole groups of figures, and there was a portion of the
foreground entirely gone also.—_Q._ 5126. Do you mean that celebrated
group which is so often copied—the man in a red coat? That is original.
I think that any man, with any knowledge of art, will see at once that
that is original; and I am only surprised that it has not been seen that
other parts are original also.—_Q._ 5127. Which portions of these groups
did you chiefly restore? You are very near the mark when you speak of
the red coat; it is the group on the right hand; the outlines were
entirely gone.—_Q._ 5128. Do you mean to say, that the whole of the
paint was removed from that part of the picture? Entirely.—_Q._ 5129.
Was the canvass laid bare? Entirely.—_Q._ 5130. What guide had you in
repainting those groups? Not any.—_Q._ 5131. Did you paint groups that
you yourself imagined and designed? Yes.—_Q._ 5132. Did Lord Cowley not
distinguish any difference in the groups? Not any.—_Q._ 5133. What was
the extent of paint wanting on that group which you say you repainted on
the right—was it a portion as large as a sheet of note-paper? Larger,
considerably; the figures themselves are larger than that.—_Q._ 5134.
Was it as large as a sheet of foolscap? About that size, I should
imagine.—_Q._ 5135. There was a piece of the original paint wanting as
large as that? Yes, in the foreground.—_Q._ 5136. It was totally
wanting, and the canvass to that extent laid bare—is that so? Yes.—_Q._
5137. And on that bare canvass you painted the groups of figures we see
now? Exactly.—_Q._ 5138. Will you have the goodness to describe to the
committee any other portions of the picture where the paint was in a
similar or in an analogous state? The whole of the centre of the picture
was destroyed, with slight indications here and there of men; there were
some men without horses, and some horses without men.—_Q._ 5139. That is
in the arena? Yes.—_Q._ 5140. You are speaking of the figures on
horseback? Yes: some riders had no horses, and some horses had no
riders.”
We must curtail the evidence for want of space. It appears that his
brush, taking the number of square feet, went over a great deal more
than half. He is sorry to say it is now gone back to “Velasquez
mutilated.” But are there not infallible judges to discover all this
repainting? “I may mention that, many years ago, when the picture was at
the British Gallery, I was invited by a member of the Academy to go and
look at it; and I went there; Mr Seguier and Mr Barnard (who was also a
picture-cleaner) were present. They said, ‘I know what you have come
for; you have come to see the magnificent Velasquez.’ I said, ‘Well, I
have;’ and, with the greatest simplicity in the world, I said it gave me
a notion that some part had been much repaired and painted upon: upon
which Mr Barnard, the keeper of the British Institution, said
immediately, ‘No, you are wrong there; we never had a picture so free
from repair in our lives.’ I did not think it at all desirable to make
any statement,” &c. He hopes there is no engraving of the picture, for
the group in the foreground, entirely his, would be detected
immediately.
So much for Mr Lance’s doings with this celebrated Boar-hunt, which,
whatever part of it may be by Mr Lance, we are very glad to see in our
National Gallery, and should have been more glad if they had abstained
from cleaning it. But Mr Lance has further amusement for us. That
account is the serious play in which he was principal actor. We shall
see him again in the entertainment. It has a very excellent
title—“Diogenes in search of an Honest Man.” The part of Diogenes, Mr
Lance; the point being, the vain search for a time, but discovered at
last—in whom? In a negro. This was Mr Diogenes Lance’s satirical
discovery. There are countries where the scene must not be exhibited. He
shall tell the story. “_Q._ 5230. Have you ever restored any other
picture in the ordinary course of your professional practice? During the
time I was engaged upon that picture at Mr Thane’s, he had a picture
belonging to the Archbishop of York, to which rather an amusing thing
occurred.—_Q._ 5231. What was the subject of it? It was a picture of
Diogenes in search of an Honest Man, by Rembrandt; a portion of it was
much injured. Mr Thane said to me, ‘I wish you would help me out in this
difficulty.’ He did not paint himself.—_Q._ 5232. Which Archbishop was
it? The Archbishop of York. I said, ‘What am I to do? tell me what you
want.’ He said, ‘There’s a deficiency here—what is it?’ I said, ‘It
appears to me very much as if a cow’s head had been there.’ He said, ‘It
cannot be a cow’s head; for how could a cow stand there?’ I said, ‘That
is very true; there is no room for her legs.’ I fancied first one thing,
then another: at one time, I fancied it was a tree that was wanting; and
at length I said, ‘Well, I will tell you what will do—if you will let me
put in a black man grinning, that will do very well, and rather help out
the subject.’ He said, ‘Could you put in a black man?’ I said, ‘Yes, in
a very short time;’ and in about half an hour I painted in a black man’s
head, which was said very much to have improved the picture. Shortly
afterwards Mr Harcourt came in, and seeing the picture, he said, ‘Dear
me, Mr Thane, how beautifully they have got out this picture! my father
will be delighted. We never saw this black man before.’ And that is the
extent of my picture-repairing.” Mr Lance is a man of humour. When Mr
Harcourt came to examine the picture, did what his namesake Launce in
the play said occur to the painter? This is “the blackest news that ever
thou heard’st.” But no; both Lances were discreet in their humour, and
the one thought like the other—“Thou shalt never get a secret from me
but by a parable.” The idea of a black man grinning at the folly of
Diogenes, in looking for an honest man among the whites, was a most
original piece of humour, worthy the concentrated geniuses of all the
Launces that ever were.
All the world knew Mr Lance’s powers as a painter of still life; he has
now doubly established his fame, and notwithstanding that his modesty
would look shy upon his performances on the Velasquez “The Boar-hunt,”
as nobody else has been startled by them, we sincerely hope they will be
allowed to remain—that is, as much of them as the cleaners have spared.
We hope, also, that no experimentalists in nostrums will be allowed to
reiterate the attempt of the fable, and try to “wash his blackamore
white.” Let this be the picture’s motto—“Hic niger est, hunc
tu——caveto.”
It is to be feared that picture-cleaning has become a necessary evil, as
patients who have been long under the hands of empirics must needs have
recourse to regular practitioners to preserve even a sickly life.
Empirical nostrums must be got out of the constitution, for by a habit
of maintenance, however advantageous they may appear at first, they are
sure to side with the disease, and kill the patient. There is the first
Mr Seguier’s boiled oil, that terrible black dose—must that be allowed
to remain? Then comes the question, by what desperate remedies is it to
be eradicated? There is the Gaspar Poussin landscape near the injured
Claude “Queen of Sheba,” the “Abraham and Isaac:” we remember it a very
beautiful clear picture. It is now all obscured; there are large brown
patches in the once lucid sky. As so large a proportion of the pictures
in the Gallery are suffering under this oil-disease, and seem to
petition for a ticket to the hospital, we offer a suggestion made by De
Burtin, that experienced and cautious cleaner, who speaks with utter
abhorrence of the oiling system. He says that he tried every secret of
his art without success; “continuing always my experiments, however,
though with little hope, I have at length had the happiness to find in
the application of this same oil itself the means of so softening the
old oil, that I have afterwards, with spirit of wine, removed both the
oils, new and old together, without at all injuring the picture.
Although this plan has succeeded equally well with four pictures on
which I had occasion to employ it, yet I must not be understood to hold
it out as infallible until, from the number of the cases in which it is
tried, and the uniformity of its success, it shall earn for itself that
title; but, persuaded that the want of other known means will induce
connoisseurs to make trial of this one, I feel desirous to put them in
possession of all the information that I myself have in regard to it. My
four pictures, all painted on panel, were evidently covered with an oil
which gave them an aspect alike sad and monotonous, and which seemed to
be of many years’ duration. I gave them a coat of linseed oil during the
warmest days of summer, renewing once, and even twice a-day, the places
on which it seemed to be absorbed. On the twelfth day the oil on one of
the pictures was become so softened that it clung to my finger. I then
employed good spirit of wine, without any other admixture whatever, to
remove all the oil which I had put upon the picture; and the pleasure I
experienced was only equalled by my surprise, when I saw the vivacity of
the colours restored under my hands as the spirit of wine removed the
old oil along with the new. After a few days’ interval, the other three
pictures gave me renewed occasion for congratulation by the same
results, and with equal success.”
De Burtin has at least the great merit of having no concealments in his
practice. And here the Commissioners have done well in recommending that
no varnishes be used, the ingredients of which are kept secret. Mr
Farrer thinks he is the only person in this country using gum damas. He
is mistaken—we have used it many years, and agree with him that it is
far less liable to chill than mastic. The recommendation, also, that,
before cleaning a picture, an able chemist should be applied to, is a
proper precaution, which would, of course, include varnishing. That
pictures may not be subject to secret varnishes, the only one we would
have kept secret is that mentioned by Mr Niewenhuys, the
experimentalising in which brought the indignation of the court of
Lilliput on the unfortunate Gulliver. Picture-scourers have been
hitherto a ruthless race—with their corrosives they take the life’s
blood out of the flesh of works, like true Vampires, and appropriately
enough talk of _vamping_ them up. Few are as conscientious as Mr Thane,
to be persecuted with the “processions” of the skeletons they make.
There is an amusing story illustrated by Cruikshank. A lover, anxious
for the safety of his sick mistress, goes about seeking physicians; he
is gifted, for the occasion, to see over the doors of the faculty the
ghosts of the patients they had killed. It is within doors we would have
the picture possessor go. The outer shop of the cleaner is
enchanting—perhaps it may exhibit a face half of which is cleaned, and
half dirty, that, according to Mr Ford’s notion of looking better and
worse, customers may take their choice of the dingy or the clean. The
connoisseur and collector need have some “Diable Boiteux” to take them
unseen into the interior laboratories where the ghosts and skeletons lie
concealed, while the Medea’s pot is on the fire, whose boiling is to
transfer new flesh to the dry bones, that they may be produceable again,
as they often are, novelties of a frightful vigour and unnatural
sprightliness, to be reduced to an after-sobriety under a regimen of
boiled oil and asphaltum. Even Mr Lance’s work, which was believed to be
original, has been obscured and otherwise damaged. Salvator Rosa’s
“Mercury and the Woodman,” is as if it had been dipped in “the sooty
Acheron.” There is little pleasure in looking at pictures in such a
state. Altogether, then, to leave pictures “black, dirty, and in a
filthy state,” a condition which Mr Stansfield[6] properly abominates,
is to mislead the public, whom to instruct is one great object of a
National Gallery. But who is to restore the gem-like lustre when once
removed? There should be a cleaning, or rather a preservation committee.
Philosophers say, that diamonds are but charcoal; none have, however,
succeeded in converting the carbon into diamonds; but it may be possible
to convert the diamonds of art into charcoal, or into something worse,
“black, dingy, and filthy.”
We scarcely know where to stop with so large a volume as this Report,
with its evidence before us. The questions, with their answers, amount
to the astonishing number of 10,410! We necessarily leave much matter
untouched, very much interesting matter—We would gladly enlarge upon
some of the suggestions thrown out in our article on this subject of
December, but adequate space in this Magazine may not be allowed. Yet we
will refer to one suggestion, because it is now the very time that
public attention should be directed to it; we mean the appointment of
Professorships of the Fine Arts at our Universities of Oxford and
Cambridge. Lord Palmerston’s letter to the Chancellor of Cambridge shows
that great changes are in contemplation. Such professorships would be a
graceful offering to the universities, who may have been a little
suspicious of the movement of a commission; and we feel sure, that
nothing could be more promotive of the fine arts, the real taste of the
country, or more beneficial, as leading the educated to pursuits of a
high and noble nature. We will not attempt to discuss the “Removal of
the Gallery.” The Blue Book affords details, and plans of site. The
appendix is full of valuable information; but it contains matter upon
which we feel some alarm. We know there is a scheme, under peculiar
favour, to make our National Gallery a Chronological Almanac of Art,
than which nothing can be more worthless or more beyond the objects for
which we should have a National Gallery at all. What we should collect
is a large subject, which we may feel disposed to consider more at large
in a future article.
The public will now inquire, what is to be the result of this
pains-taking Commission? We are aware that the Chairman repudiates the
Report. It is one to which he does not give his assent. We know not the
particulars in which he differs from the Report as agreed upon. We could
have wished, for the sake of the arts, that there had been no
difference.
Of this there can be no doubt, that the system, if such it may be
called, is most unsatisfactory. If we would have a National Gallery at
all, the public have a right to demand that it shall be one befitting
the dignity of the country and the objects proposed by such an
establishment, none of which, it is manifest from the entire evidence,
can be realised unless the trust be thoroughly revised. Evils to be
avoided are now laid bare to sight. If it be true,
“They say best men are moulded out of faults,”
there are faults enough to mould them out of. May we not, then,
entertain a hope that we shall have a National Gallery?
A GLANCE AT TURKISH HISTORY.
Had history recorded the increase and decrease in the numbers of mankind
with the attention it has bestowed in chronicling the names of the
worthless dynasties which have devoured the wealth of nations, and
annihilated the accumulations of national industry, the history of the
Turks would occupy a prominent place in the annals of the human race. No
other people has made such extensive conquests. They subdued China
before the Moguls, and they formed a considerable part of the armies of
Genghis Khan and Tamerlane, which subdued Russia and ravaged Syria. Even
at the present day, though fallen from their ancient power, they are
spread over a considerable portion of Europe and Asia, from the Adriatic
and the Danube to the lake Baikal and the sources of the Lena. Their
original seats are supposed to lie round the Altaï mountains. The
Turkish nations of the present day, besides the descendants of the
Seljouks, the Turkomans, and the Othomans, who dwell in the sultan’s
dominions, are the Usbeks, the Ugours, the Kirgises, the Baskirs, the
tribe called Nogay Tartars, and the so-called Tartars of Astrakan and
Kasan. The real Tartars, or Moguls, are a different people, and the
Kalmuks on the Volga are of Tartar, not Turkish race.
The only modern European nations which pretend to be mentioned in
Scripture, are the Turks and Russians. Historical antiquaries tell us
that Togarmah is used for Turk; and they affirm, that the Targhitaos of
Herodotus, whom the Scythians called the founder of their nation, and
the son of Jupiter, is identical with the Togarmah of Moses and
Ezekiel.[7]
The Russians can boast of much more precise notice in Scripture than
their enemies the Turks. Though their name is omitted in our
translation, it occurs in the Septuagint three times, and under the
peculiar ethnic denomination in which it reappears in the Byzantine
historians. The word is Ῥὼς, and on this name Gibbon remarks, “Among the
Greeks this national appellation has a singular form as an undeclinable
word;” but he does not mention that it is found in the Septuagint. The
second and third verses of the thirty-eighth chapter of Ezekiel,
according to the Greek text, read thus: “Son of man, set thy face
against Gog, the land of Magog, the chief prince of the Russians
(ἄρχοντα Ῥὼς), Meshech and Tubal, and prophesy against him, and say,
Thus saith the Lord God, I am against thee, O chief prince of the
Russians, Meshech and Tubal.” And again, in the first verse of the
thirty-ninth chapter: “Therefore, son of man, prophesy against Gog, and
say, Thus saith the Lord God, Behold, I am against thee, O Gog, the
chief prince of the Russians, Meshech and Tubal.”
The Russians are said also to be noticed in the Koran, though not with
the same distinctness, under the name of Al Rass. In the chapter Al
Forkan, which is the twenty-fifth of Sale’s translation, it is said, “We
have prepared for the unjust a painful torment. Remember Ad and Tamud,
and those who dwelt at Al Rass.” In the chapter called the letter Kaf,
which is the fiftieth of Sale’s translation, we also find: “The people
of Noah, and those who dwelt at Al Rass, and Thamud, and Ad, and
Pharaoh, accused the prophets of injustice.”
The earliest authorities, however, who furnish us with an account of the
Turkish nation as it now exists, with the distinct nationality and
language preserved to the present day, are the Byzantine historians,
Menander and Theophylactus Simocalta. The latter historian gives a very
interesting account of the condition of the Turks in the sixth century
of our era. They were then the sovereigns of a great city called Tavgas;
they were the most valiant and populous of nations; they lived under the
protection of just laws, and carried on an extensive commerce. Tavgas is
supposed to be the name of a Chinese city, which was then one of the
seats of the Turkish government, for there is no doubt that somewhat
before this period the Turks had conquered a considerable part of the
north of China. Indeed, traces of the language of these early conquerors
are still preserved, which are identical with the Turkish spoken to-day
at Constantinople, for time has effected less change in the Turkish than
in any other European language. Collateral evidence concerning the power
of the Turks in central Asia during the latter part of the fifth, and
early part of the sixth centuries, is afforded by the history of the
life and travels of Hiouen-thsang, recently translated by Monsieur
Julien, whether that work be really the composition of a Chinese
contemporary, or only a Chinese compilation from earlier Arabic
authorities.[8] It is certain that about the commencement of the sixth
century the Turks ruled all central Asia, as far south as the
Hindookoosh, including the ancient Sogdiana and Bactria.
The first political intercourse between the Turks and a European state
occurred towards the middle of the sixth century. The great khan of the
Turks sent an embassy to Justinian I., to persuade the Roman empire to
refuse an asylum to the Avars. The dominions then ruled by the great
khan formed the first of the three great Turkish empires which have
exercised an important influence on the social condition of the
Christian nations, both in Europe and Asia. The second of these empires
was that of the Seljouk Turks, which caused the crusades, and ruined the
Byzantine empire. And the third was that of the Othoman Turks, which
destroyed the Greek empire, and has long been the master, patron, or
tyrant, of the patriarchs of Constantinople, Jerusalem, Antioch, and
Alexandria.
The first Turkish empire took its rise from the oppression of the Avars,
who were the dominant people in Asia, and who are supposed to have been
a mixed race of Mogul and Turkish origin. The oppression of the Avars
was submitted to as long as the body of the Turkish people was confined
by its circumstances to an agricultural and pastoral life. The
population being dispersed in small communities, which lived without
much intercommunication, was composed of as many isolated tribes as
there are springs in the plains they inhabitated; and these tribes were
as incapable of acquiring common motives of action as the population of
the islands in the eastern seas. But the scene changed in the fifth
century. The Turks who dwelt on Mount Altaï grew rich by mining
operations and manufactures. They became the principal traders in iron
and steel, and the manufacturers and merchants of the arms and armour
required in the Avar empire. But the government soon endeavoured to
appropriate the wealth which it saw was created by the industry of its
subjects to administrative purposes. Taxation was increased, and
monopolies were established, to enable the court of the Avar emperor to
display the power of centralisation. Governmental pageantry, court
spectacles, and military pomp, consumed the wealth of the people in the
unknown capital of this vanished empire; while the Turkish people, now
inspired by common feelings, called for an administration that would dig
wells, and construct cisterns and caravanserais in the desert. The Turks
were now united by the lessons which their trade had disseminated
through every province. With improved intercourse they had gained a more
enlarged experience, and acquired national feelings. They at last rose
in rebellion; and before the middle of the sixth century, the first
great Turkish empire was founded by Toumen the blacksmith, the ancestor
of Genghis Khan, and Timor the lame. This empire extended from the
Caspian sea to the ocean. The great Khan of the Turks, Askel, who sent
an embassy to the Roman emperor Justinian I., is supposed to have been
the son of Toumen.
In the year 568 another embassy arrived at Constantinople from the great
Khan Dizaboulos, with a letter for Justin II., written in the Scythian
character, which, whatever it was, was not unknown to the learned
interpreters of the Roman foreign office. One great object of Turkish
diplomacy had been to get possession of the whole of the silk trade with
Europe, but the Turkish ambassadors had been astonished to find that
Justinian had already succeeded in introducing the culture of the
silk-worm in the Roman empire, and that the imperial court was rich in
native silk, manufactured in Asia Minor and the islands. The ambassadors
of Dizaboulos, however, concluded the first formal treaty between the
Turks and the emperors of Constantinople; the bond of union between the
courts of Mount Altaï and Byzantium was hostility to Persia, and very
profound and enlightened views concerning the maintenance of the balance
of power in the East, while the tie which then connected the interests
of the Turks with those of the Romans and Greeks was commerce.
The long wars between the Persian and Roman empires, and the arbitrary
measures of the Persians, had stopped all commercial communications
between India and Europe through the Persian dominions. The countries on
the shores of the Mediterranean had in consequence been compelled to
draw their supplies of Indian and Chinese produce, and the productions
of the Spice islands, of which there was then an immense consumption, by
way of the Red Sea. This trade, even as early as the time of Pliny, was
so extensive as to excite the wonder of that aristocratic Roman. In the
sixth century it had greatly increased, and both Arabia and Ethiopia
were in a most prosperous condition, from the great profits it poured
into those countries. In the year 523 the king of Ethiopia was able to
collect a fleet of thirteen hundred ships in the Red Sea, and to obtain
abundant supplies for a large army on the coast of Arabia, where a
single ship and a company of infantry would find it difficult to procure
provisions for a week. After the reign of Justinian this commerce
rapidly declined. The increase of piracy on the coast near the entrance
of the Persian gulf, and the wars of the Ethiopian kings in Arabia, were
simultaneous with the poverty, depopulation, and destruction of capital
in Africa and Italy, caused by the Vandal and Gothic wars of Justinian.
At this crisis, when Alexandria and Rome were rapidly declining, the
security which the extent of the Turkish empire and the policy of the
great Khan afforded to merchants, turned a great portion of the Eastern
trade towards Constantinople. The Indian traders began to prefer the
caravan journey through the deserts of central Asia, to the tedious and
dangerous navigation of the Red Sea. By sea they could no longer venture
to visit the intermediate ports from fear of pirates, while on the land
journey they could carry on a profitable trade in slaves, and in
exchanging the precious metals, at many stations on their way. The great
importance of the slave trade at this time in central Asia is proved by
the circumstance that the emperor Tiberius II., A.D. 578–582, formed a
corps of fifteen thousand mamlouks, composed entirely of purchased
slaves, imported into the Roman empire by the traders engaged in the
Indian or the fur trade. Had the supply continued, and had the
successors of Tiberius II. pursued the same policy, the Roman empire
would in all probability have been overthrown by Turkish mamlouks, as
that of the caliphs of Bagdat was by following a similar military system
at a later period.
The first Turkish empire was not of long duration. The Khazar kingdom,
whose relations with the Roman and Persian empires in the hour of their
decline give it an important place in history, arose in its western
fragments, and inherited a considerable portion of its power and
commercial influence. But the Khazars, though called Turks by the
Byzantine historians, Nicephorus the patriarch and Theophanes, are
supposed by modern scholars to have been a people of mixed race.
There are several points connected with the history of the rise and fall
of the first Turkish empire which are interesting, as marking an era in
the progress of civilisation. At no previous period in the history of
mankind were greater changes made in the commercial, political, and
religious ideas of mankind. Religion was then closely connected with
political organisation. Christianity was identified with the Roman
government; the religion of Zoroaster with Persian domination. The fact
that both Christianity and the religion of Zoroaster were declining in
the sixth century is unquestionable. Historians have not clearly
explained the causes of a revolution so degrading to human nature. In
Arabia, in central Asia, and in Spain, an extensive conversion to
Judaism heralded the extraordinary rapidity with which the lizard-eaters
of Arabia, led by the followers of Mahomet, exterminated the religion of
Zoroaster, and converted the majority of the inhabitants of Syria,
Palestine, Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Africa to Mohammedanism. It is
evident that an internal canker in the social condition of the
Christians in the Roman empire, and of the inhabitants of Persia,
prepared the way for the desolation of many of the richest provinces of
the ancient world.
The second Turkish empire was founded by the Seljouks in the eleventh
century. Its power grew up on the political decline of the caliphate of
Bagdat and of the Byzantine empire. The dominions of the caliphs had
been dismembered, and Bagdat itself had been plundered by Turkish
mamlouks, before it was conquered by Togrulbeg with his Seljouks. The
Byzantine empire, which, by the creation of a systematic and legal
administration, had reinvigorated the expiring energies of the eastern
Roman empire, had declined into a pure despotism, and the rulers of
Constantinople were rapidly devouring the wealth and diminishing the
numbers of their subjects by financial oppression. The exploits of
Togrulbeg, Alp Arslan, and Malek Shah, may be read in the pages of
Gibbon, which have secured them fame wherever English literature is
known. Many traces of their handiwork are visible at the
present,—monuments of what is called their glory. When they entered the
countries between the Persian Gulf, the Caspian, the Black Sea, and the
Mediterranean, they found them filled with cities, which, though
declined in splendour and wealth by the loss of their municipal
administrations, in consequence of the rapacious centralisation of the
Roman, Byzantine, and Mohammedan empires, were nevertheless still well
inhabited, and surrounded by a numerous agricultural population. But
with the coming of the Seljouks, “the verdure fled the bloody sod.” They
were a nomade people, and their armies were composed of nomadic tribes,
who drew their supplies from the flocks and herds which moved with them.
The inhabitants of cities were their enemies unless they became their
tributaries; and in order to preserve a garrison in the countries they
conquered, it was necessary for them to exterminate the cultivators of
the soil in the richest and most central plains of their dominions. An
encampment of tents could only be secure from surprise by being
surrounded to the extent of a day’s journey by untilled pastures.
Similar desolation has been effected in agricultural countries for
ignobler objects. In England the traveller may still see the effects of
an arbitrary act of devastation, perpetrated about the same period, by
William the Conquerer, in the New Forest; and in wandering through Asia
Minor many of our readers have probably passed over districts as fertile
as the plains of Poland and Moldavia, on which wheat never grows, but
which the page of history informs us were inhabited by an industrious
agricultural population, until the towns were destroyed, and the
population exterminated, by Kutulmish the lieutenant of Alp Arslan, and
Suleiman his son, the lieutenant of Malek Shah. The Seljouk empire was
soon divided into the three secondary kingdoms of Roum or Iconium, of
Syria, and of Persia. It was subdued and rent into fragments by the
successors of Genghis Khan, and in the fourteenth century the Othoman
empire arose amidst its dismembered provinces.
Othman, the eponymous hero of the Othoman empire, entered the Seljouk
empire of Roum with his father, who was the chieftain of a small tribe
consisting of four hundred families. In the year 1289 he was appointed
governor of the town of Karady-hissar by Aladdin III., the last Seljouk
Sultan of Iconium. The market held on Friday at Karady-hissar was a
trading mart of great local importance. A judge sat in the centre of the
people to decide every question that arose without delay, and without
appeal. Othman frequently occupied the judicial seat. It happened that,
as he was presiding, an important dispute was brought before him for
decision, in which a Christian of Belokoma in the Greek empire
complained of the injustice of a Seljouk noble of Kermian. Othman
decided in favour of the Christian, and the equity of the sentence
extended his fame, and gave additional importance to his government.
Years rolled on. Many emirs established themselves as independent
princes, and have given their names to several provinces in Asia. Sultan
Aladdin III. died in the year 1307, and Othman secured to himself a
position as independent as any of the Seljouk emirs. Just before his
death, he conquered Brusa from the Greeks, and laid the foundation-stone
of the Othoman empire.
This new Turkish empire is remarkable for its rapid progress and firm
consolidation, but still more so for the singular fact that it never
reposed on a national basis. The four hundred families who accompanied
Othman’s father into the Seljouk empire never became the nucleus even of
an Othoman tribe. The Othoman empire threatened Europe with conquest;
the Othoman armies were long invincible; the Othoman administration was
superior to every contemporary government on the European continent;
but, during the period of Othoman greatness and power, there was no such
thing as an Othoman nation. Of the forty-eight grand-viziers who
conducted the administration from the taking of Constantinople to the
death of Sultan Achmet I. in 1617, only three or four were of Othoman or
Seljouk families, while more than thirty were either renegades or
children of Christian parents brought up in the Mohammedan religion. The
other born Mussulmans were not even of Turkish race. Few absolute
monarchies have preserved their pristine vigour with the same unimpaired
energy as the Othoman, and none have passed triumphantly through greater
disasters. Few national governments, indeed, could have survived the
fearful ordeal of the defeat at Angora, and the conquest of Asia Minor
by Timor. Neither Timor nor any of his contemporaries supposed that it
was possible to re-constitute the Othoman government; and, indeed, the
ease with which it regained its power over the Greek Christians and the
Seljouk emirs, is a singular political phenomenon.
This vitality was due to the institutions implanted in the government as
the very breath of its life, by Orkhan the son of Othman, the greatest
legislator of modern times. As a lawgiver, Orkhan was something between
a Lycurgus and a Loyola. At all events, he puts the modern
constitution-makers of Europe to shame. They strive to improve the
rotten fabric of their political institutions by patching the old
despotic garment of Roman law with the new cloth of representative
institutions, forgetting that the rabid appetite of centralisation
swallows the old garment and the new patches far more easily than the
boa-constrictor can swallow a blanket. The institutions of Orkhan were
superior to the Code Napoleon and its progeny, in as far as they were
framed on the exigencies of the time, and modelled on the demands of a
progressive state of society—not borrowed from an extinct people in a
different social and political condition.
We have no space to enumerate Orkhan’s institutions. It is sufficient
for our purpose to notice the keystone of the fabric which raised a
small band of emigrants from Mesopotamia, before three generations had
elapsed, into the founders of one of the great empires of the earth. A
tribute of Christian children, imposed by Orkhan on the people he
conquered, was the basis, the cement, and the keystone of the Othoman
empire. Never before were the laws of humanity and the principles of
justice so systematically violated for so long a period with such
success. The Othoman empire really dates from the year 1329, for it was
in that year that Orkhan assumed the power of coining money, placed his
name in the public prayers, and promulgated his laws. From that time he
was regarded as the founder and the legislator of a new state, and not
as the ruler of a Seljouk emirat. Orkhan made his household the nucleus
of his empire. The strength of his dominions was, by his legislation and
policy, concentrated within his palace walls. Under his roof was united
a college, conducted with all the order and talent of a college of
Jesuits, and a range of barrack-rooms, in which a discipline prevailed
as severe as that of Lycurgus.
The history of the institution of the tribute children, and the
formation of the corps of janissaries, is this: The Mohammedan law
authorises—and, indeed, commands—every Mussulman to educate unbelieving
children who have fallen into his power as orphans, in the Mohammedan
faith. As the military usages of the Seljouk empire gave the Sultan a
fifth of all the spoil taken in war, Orkhan soon became possessed of a
numerous household of Christian slaves, whom he might have sold like the
other Seljouk emirs, and hired mercenary troops with the produce, or
filled his palace with concubines and poets, and devoted himself to the
pursuit of pleasure and fame. Orkhan sought instruments to gratify his
ambition, and to extend the dominion of the Koran. His wars as the ally
of the rebel emperor and hypocritical historian Cantacuzenus, furnished
him with a large supply of slaves from the Greek empire. The base
ambition and rapacity of the rival emperors of Constantinople, induced
them to allow Orkhan to insert a clause in his treaties, authorising him
to transport Christian captives to Asia through the Greek territory. But
it was difficult, by means of war, to secure a constant supply of
healthy and intelligent children of the tender age required for their
conversion, since the Mohammedan law strictly prohibits the forced
conversion of prisoners who have attained the age of twelve. Orkhan’s
great object, however, was to obtain a constant and regular addition to
the young neophytes in his household. Either from his own impulse, or at
the suggestion of his brother, Aladdin, who acted as his prime minister,
or of his relation, Kara Khalil, who was his most intimate counsellor,
he at last resolved to impose a fixed tribute of children on every
Christian district he conquered. The measure was highly approved by all
pious Mussulmans, and, strange to say, it met with little opposition
from the Greek Christians. The empire of Constantinople had been so long
the scene of civil war, and its provinces were so desolated by the
fiscal oppression of the imperial administration, that famine prevailed
among the Greek population in Asia and Europe for several years; and
many parents saw no mode of saving their children from starvation but by
sending them to the serai of Orkhan. The tribute of Christian children
established by Orkhan was extended and systematised by his son, Murad
I., and formed the keystone of the political and military power of the
Othoman empire, until the corruption of the corps of janissaries by the
introduction of other elements. The tribute of Christian children,
however, continued until the year 1685, when it was formally abolished.
The tribute children were generally collected between the ages of seven
and nine. They were at first lodged in the Sultan’s palace, and
carefully instructed in the principles and forms of the Mohammedan
religion under the ablest teachers, selected by Orkhan, who studied
their dispositions and mental capacities. They then entered on a course
of elementary knowledge and gymnastics. As their mental capacities were
developed, and their physical strength increased, they were divided into
several classes. Some, destined to become “men of the pen,” were
educated in legal and administrative knowledge, and from them the
officials in the civil and financial administration were usually
selected. Many became secretaries of state, judges and viziers. Another
division was disciplined as “men of the sword,” and the celebrated corps
of janissaries was at first composed of select individuals from this
body. This college of conquering missionaries, when formed by Orkhan,
consisted of only one thousand, but before the end of his reign it had
increased to three thousand; and when Mohammed II. took Constantinople,
the number had attained twelve thousand. The tribute children were also
numerous in the ranks of the cavalry, artillery, and police soldiers of
the empire. Never, indeed, was so terrible an instrument of absolute
power created so rapidly and so completely beyond all external influence
as that which Orkhan formed. The tribute children were all members of
the household of the Othoman Sultan. They had no ties of family or
country, and felt no responsibility but what they owed to the prophet
and the Sultan. At the beck of the Sultan, and with a fetva of the
mufti, they were ready to strike down the proudest noble of the
Seljouks, to shed the purest blood of the Arabs, and to trample on all
the hereditary feelings and prejudices of the courts of the Caliphs.
Against the Christian nations they were animated with the most fervent
zeal; for it was a principal part of their education to infuse an
enthusiastic wish to extend the empire of Islam. Thus Orkhan made
Christian parents the most active agents in destroying the Christian
religion. It is impossible to reflect on this lamentable occurrence
without feeling that, had the Greek emperors and the orthodox priests of
the period given their subjects and their parishioners as good an
education as Orkhan gave his slaves, the attacks of the Turks might have
been triumphantly repulsed.
That the system of education pursued in the palace of Orkhan must have
derived some of its excellent qualities from the family system of
Othman’s household, cannot be doubted. The Othoman tribe was not morally
corrupted, like the society of the Seljouk Turks; the history of their
empire bears strong testimony to the fact during several generations.
The Othoman sultans were, during the early period of the empire,
educated on the same system, and in the same manner, as the tribute
children, and no state can show such a long succession of hereditary
sovereigns remarkable for great talent. The Othoman institutions testify
the sagacity of Orkhan and Murad I. more than their rapid conquests.
Bayezid the Thunderbolt, though his rash pride caused the defeat of
Angora and the ruin of the empire for a time, was liberal and generous
to his Christian subjects, whom he admitted freely to his society.
Mohammed I., who restored the empire ruined by his father’s ambition,
was a staunch friend and a kind master, though, in his hostilities, as
old Phrantzes says, he was as obstinately persevering as a camel. Murad
II. distinguished himself by his attention to the administration of
justice, and swept away many of the abuses which, under the Greek
emperors, had exhausted the fortunes of the Christians. If any of his
pashas or judges oppressed the Christians in his dominions they were
severely punished. Mohammed II., the conqueror of Constantinople, united
the activity of youth with the sagacity of age, both as a warrior and a
statesman. He possessed considerable literary and scientific knowledge,
and had made great progress in astrology, then the fashionable science
both among Christians and Mussulmans. He was fond of reading, and spoke
the Turkish, Arabic, Persian, Greek, Latin, and Sclavonian languages
with fluency. Such is the character of the early sultans for six
generations, as transmitted to us in the pages of their mortal enemies,
the Byzantine Greeks. Other authorities tell us that these infidels were
ready to receive suggestions for the improvement of their army and their
civil administration, and that they were indefatigably engaged in
submitting new ideas in the civil administration, and new inventions in
the art of war, to the most rigorous examination. Activity and
intelligence were stimulated in every branch of the public service by
the example of the prince. The consequences form the staple of early
Othoman history. New combinations in war and politics presented
themselves daily to every Turkish pasha, which called for a prompt
decision; and as it was incumbent on him to transmit a report of the
reasons which had determined his conduct to an able and despotic master,
he soon learned prudence in counsel as well as promptitude in action.
For two centuries we find nothing vague and indefinite in the operations
of the Othoman sultans, or of the pashas intrusted with the command of
their armies. The first modern school of generals and statesmen was
formed in the Othoman empire.
The general causes of the decline of the Othoman empire are well known.
The janissaries, instead of being tribute children, were transformed
into a _garde nationale_, like what we have seen flourish and disappear
at Paris. But the logical principles of a paternal monarchy still exist
at Constantinople. The Sultan is connected with his people, but can have
no ties of family. He ought not to be the son of a free woman, but the
child of a slave, destitute of every family tie, in order that no
personal attachments and family sympathies may interfere with the cares
of administration.
At the present moment we hear it asserted on all sides, that the Othoman
administration is making great progress in restoring energy and
intelligence in the government. Yet there are some who insist that the
progress is small; that it is an empire without roads, and a government
without a people; a central administration which every subject, be he
Christian or Mussulman, detests for its financial rapacity and
systematic contempt for justice. Inshallah! there is some truth on both
sides, but it is not exactly our clue to separate the wheat from the
tares, as they resemble one another so much at Stamboul as to confound
the skill of European diplomatists. We know to our cost that there is no
road either to Brusa or Adrianople fit for a French diligence, and that
an abortive attempt was made to form a road from Trebizond to Erzeroum.
The great feature of the Othoman empire at the present day is this, that
capital cannot be profitably employed in the improvement of the soil,
and, strange to say, this peculiar feature of its social condition is
common to the new-created monarchy of Greece, and to no other European
state. Trade often flourishes, cities increase in population and wealth,
gardens, vineyards, and orchards grow up round the towns from the
overflow of commercial profits, but the canker is in the heart of the
agricultural population; a yoke of land receives the same quantity of
seed it did a hundred years ago, and the same number of families
cultivate the same fields. This is the most favourable view of the case;
but the fact is, that many of the richest plains of Thrace, Macedonia,
and Asia Minor, are uncultivated, and have only the wolf and the jackal
for their tenants. In Greece, too, under the scientific administration
of King Otho, and with a representative government _à la Française_, we
see the plains of Thebes, Messenia, and Tripolitza, present the same
agricultural system which they did under the Othoman government, and
agriculture in general quite as much neglected and more despised. Now
the line of demarcation between civilisation and barbarism really
consists in the profitable investment of capital in the soil. The
agricultural population is the basis of a national existence, and unless
the soil produce two bushels of wheat from the same surface where one
formerly grew, and fatten two sheep where one merely gathered a
subsistence, a nation gains little in strength and wellbeing though its
cities double their population. The political and social problem, with
regard to the governments of Constantinople and Athens, which now
requires a solution, is, to determine the causes that prevent the
cultivation of wheat on the European and Asiatic coasts of the
Archipelago, and in the fertile island of Cyprus. The provinces between
the Danube and the Don were in a similar condition when Akerman,
Okzakoff, and Azof, were Turkish pashaliks; under the Russian
government, they supply France and England with grain. Now, the
grain-growers of Turkey could furnish half the grain exported at present
from the Black Sea, and they could obtain much higher prices for their
produce in consequence of the great saving of freight to consumers. Even
the fertile districts of Bithynia and Thrace, bordering on the Sea of
Marmora, than which there are no finer corn-districts in the world,
cannot furnish Constantinople with a regular supply of wheat; and the
Osmanlees would often suffer famine in the capital of their empire,
unless they were provisioned from the provinces taken from them by the
_Moskof gaiour_.
For our part, we must say that it is not unreasonable to entertain some
doubts of the improvement which has manifested itself in the Othoman
administration proving permanent, until we see some increase of the
agricultural population. When the citizens of Stamboul and Athens begin
to colonise the country, it will be time enough to talk of the
regeneration of the Othoman power. And unless the population of the
kingdom of Otho of Bavaria, which possess all the advantages to be
derived from universal suffrage, joined to the inestimable liberty of
walking about the streets with pistols and Turkish knives stuck in the
belt, begin to abandon its passion for coffeehouses, and find pleasure
and profit in the cultivation of the fields, the improvement of the
Greek nation will not be generally admitted, even though Athens become a
clean, elegant, and flourishing city. There must be an evident increase
in the amount of the produce of the soil from a given number of acres,
before those who study the political history of nations can be persuaded
of the feasibility of the project of restoring a Greek empire.
MACAULAY’S SPEECHES.[9]
As we never had the good fortune of moving in that circle of society to
which the power of retailing anecdote, with minute circumstantiality,
was considered as the proper passport—as we never were invited to listen
to the small scandals of the group collected at Holland House, or the
smaller delivery of the contents of commonplace books, which, in less
renowned Whig coteries, is considered the perfection of sprightly
converse—we are not ashamed to acknowledge our momentary oblivion of the
party, who, in the sonorous verse and rounded periods of a brother
dramatist, recognised his own thunder. We cannot at this moment
accurately remember whether it was the figurative Puff or Plagiary, or
the real Cumberland, who preferred that accusation; and, therefore, we
frankly admit, that we lie at the mercy of those gentlemen who consider
a slip in an anecdote, or an erroneous name and date in a fragment of
gossip, as the evidence of deficient education, and the token of
unpolished intercourse. We allude to the story in question merely
because the preface to Mr Macaulay’s collected speeches exhibits a
curious specimen of the wrath which may be excited by another method of
conveyance. It is not the appropriation of his thunder, but the
non-appropriation of it, which seems to have roused Mr Macaulay to a
point of very vehement indignation. It appears that a London publisher,
Mr Vizetelly, availing himself of a licence which the law
permits—namely, that of reprinting speeches which have been publicly
delivered—conceived that the issue of a collection of Mr Macaulay’s
speeches might possibly prove a paying speculation. He reprinted, as we
are given to understand, from “Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates,” a
number of these orations; but, in his preliminary advertisement he
appears to have announced that he did so “by special permission.” That
phrase ought not to have been used; or if used, it should have been
accompanied by a distinct reference to the party who granted the
permission. Nine out of ten of the reading public would certainly
conclude, from the terms employed, that Mr Macaulay, not the proprietor
of Hansard, had authorised the publication; and, so far, there is just
ground for complaint. It was not only natural, but proper, and due to
himself, that Mr Macaulay should have taken steps to disavow any
connection with, or any countenance given to the enterprise of the
enigmatical publication. But he has not contented himself with a broad
disclaimer. Stung to the quick by some absurd blunders which the
self-constituted editor has committed, and which are specially referred
to in the preface, in terms of vehement indignation, he has thought it
necessary for his own fame to suspend “a work which is the business and
the pleasure of my life, in order to prepare these speeches for
publication.” It is no compliment to Mr Macaulay to say that the public
will not thank him for having done so. The desire and eagerness, on the
part of the public, to receive a new instalment of his History, is only
equalled by their repugnance to peruse speeches upon subjects the
interest of which has long gone by—a repugnance not lessened by the
impression that, even when new, the speeches were not of a superlative
degree of merit. We are sorry that because Vizetelly—whom Mr Macaulay
supposes to be actuated by a desire of attaining the same distinction
which was formerly enjoyed by Curll—should have mistaken Pundits for
Pandects, and magnified the city of Benares into an oriental
nation—because he has made the gifted orator “give an utterly false
history of Lord Nottingham’s Occasional Conformity Bill”—or because he
has represented him as saying “that Whitfield held and taught that the
connection between Church and State was sinful,” whereas Whitfield never
said anything of the kind, nor was Mr Macaulay so ignorant as to have
averred that he did,—we say we are sorry that because Vizetelly did
these things, our brilliant, though tardy historian, should have
considered his reputation so dangerously imperilled, as to depart from
his legitimate and most interesting labours, for the purpose of
presenting us with a mediocre and uninspiring volume of speeches. It is
true that he avers reluctance, nay, even disinclination to the task. If
that were his real feeling, he need not have troubled himself much about
the speculations of Vizetelly. During the last twenty years, many public
speakers—nay, some men who may be classed as real orators—all of them
far more distinguished than Mr Macaulay, for power, energy, pathos, wit,
and influence, have gone to their graves; and yet no attempt has been
made, though the absence of copyright in speeches might have encouraged
the speculation, to publish their works in a collected form. If we want
to form an idea of the styles of the late Earl Grey, or Lord Durham, or
Sir Francis Burdett, we must necessarily have recourse to the Mirror of
Parliament. The filial piety of their relatives, great as it was, did
not lead them to the generous error of supposing that their speeches
would hereafter rank with those of Demosthenes or Cicero. In our own day
no man, as a popular orator, equalled Daniel O’Connell; yet where are
his collected speeches?—and be it remembered that popular oratory is
essentially Demosthenic, and that O’Connell could produce a greater
effect upon a mixed audience—which is the test of oratory—than any other
man of our time. Where are Shiel’s speeches? In Hansard—where, we
hesitate not to say, the speeches of every man of the slightest eminence
in public life ought to be allowed to remain, without separate
collection, at least during his own lifetime, and until his career is
accomplished. Indeed, there are many prudential reasons, at the present
day, against the collection of senatorial speeches. No one has proposed
to issue those of the late Sir Robert Peel, although there can be no
doubt that such a publication would afford some curious subjects for
commentary. It would serve the same purpose as the ancient collections
of commonplaces—_loci communes_, _loci rerum_, &c.—from which the tyro
in rhetoric might draw arguments adapted for immediate use on either
side of a question. In such a collection all possible _pros_ and
_contras_ would be found, not drily stated, but set forth with elaborate
ingenuity. One speech would give the Protestant, and another the
Catholic side of the question—one while we should find the orator
supporting agriculture against manufactures—another, manufactures
against agriculture; the zeal and sincerity being in both cases the
same. Then, what a charming miscellany Sir James Graham has it in his
power to offer to the public! What deftness—what dexterity—what amazing
complexity of tergiversation would be exhibited by a collection of his
Parliamentary speeches! We feel almost inclined to advise Mr Vizetelly
to ransack Hansard for the Netherby harangues; the more so because Mr
Macaulay, in his own edition, has taken care to insert nothing
calculated to irritate Sir James. That is not altogether fair, and it is
certainly the reverse of valorous. Mr Macaulay had occasion, in his
place in Parliament, to direct vigorous speeches both against Sir Robert
Peel and against Sir James Graham. He tells us now in his preface that
“it was especially painful to me to find myself under the necessity of
recalling to my own recollection, and to the recollection of others, the
keen encounters which took place between the late Sir Robert Peel and
myself;” and he pays a very handsome compliment to the memory of the
deceased statesman. That is graceful, amiable, and, we doubt not,
entirely sincere. Nevertheless he publishes _verbatim_, what he said in
debate against Sir Robert Peel, who is no more; whereas we find no trace
of his famous speech in the letter-opening case, directed against Sir
James Graham, who is the living colleague of Lord John Russell. The
omission may be accidental; or Mr Macaulay may think the speech in
question not so felicitous as to be worth recording. If the latter, we
differ from him. It was a spirited speech—much more nettlesome and
pungent than threefourths of those which he has included in the present
volume; and we have no doubt that Sir James Graham, if appealed to, will
corroborate our opinion. Be it observed, however, that we do not by any
means maintain that Mr Macaulay was bound to reprint his diatribe
against Sir James. We make these remarks for the purpose of showing how
unwise it is for any man to become the editor of his own speeches;
seeing that he must either give huge offence to the living, or let them
escape scot-free, whilst he repeats his strictures on the dead. After
all, we think he would have acted prudently in submitting to the “great
wrong,” which Mr Vizetelly, under the tacit sanction of the law, which
in theory is held to countenance no wrong, has found it his interest to
inflict. We rather fear that he has been too hasty in intermitting his
historical labours. Had some excessively imprudent speculator in
literature chosen to risk his capital by reprinting from Hansard the
speeches of Lord John Russell or of Lord Aberdeen, we are certain that
Mr Macaulay, if consulted on the subject, would have advised these
eminent statesmen—even although the ignoramus of an editor had distorted
the nature of their arguments, and substituted Pandects for Pundits—to
abstain from putting forth their lucubrations in a collected form. We
have that confidence in his judgment and discretion, when called upon to
advise others in matters of a literary nature, that we cannot doubt such
would have been the tenor of his recommendation. But, unfortunately, in
regarding matters personal to themselves, the great majority of mankind
use glasses materially differing in focus from those which they assume
when investigating the affairs of others; and it is painful to remark
that, on this occasion, Mr Macaulay has acted as his own optician. It
would have been much wiser in him to have allowed Mr Vizetelly to have
disposed of as many copies as the public would take, without more
remonstrance than a simple disclaimer, than to have fastened upon the
blunders about Benares, and Whitfield, and Lord Nottingham’s Bill, as so
many apologies for bringing forward a revised and collected series of
his speeches.
He has done so, however; and we have now to consider him as a man, who,
by no means verging towards the end of his career—for we trust he may
long be spared to delight the public by the elaborate compositions of a
mind naturally highly gifted, greatly improved by exercise, and
prodigiously stored with information—has deliberately chosen to set
forth his claims to be ranked in the scale of orators. Whether Mr
Macaulay may choose to believe that we are sincere, or not, in the
opinion we are about to express, is, to us, of little consequence.
Politically, of course, we differ from him in many respects. We cannot
even challenge, what is generally understood to be the opinion of his
own party, that he is not qualified to act in the capacity of a leading
statesman, or member of the Cabinet. We believe his mind to be of that
cast, that it does not readily and aptly conform itself to present
exigencies. It is too much wedded to the past, and to mere party
traditions and intrigues. Let a crisis arrive, demanding immediate and
decided action, and Mr Macaulay will be found puzzling back to the
Revolution Settlement of 1688, or some other event of lesser consequence
about the same date; and descanting on the conduct of the leading Whig
Lords of that period, and the way in which they managed to juggle and
forswear themselves; and from these premises he would form conclusions
applicable to the present times. The Whig party leaders are notoriously
addicted to tradition, but Mr Macaulay’s ideas go back a great deal
farther than is convenient even for their purpose. They, naturally
enough, do not want the aid of history farther than concerns their
immediate guidance; and they would be glad to sink altogether the memory
of dynastical questions, and begin with Fox, who is the proper god of
their idolatry. Mr Macaulay, by resolutely harking back to forgotten
eras, frightfully embarrassed his colleagues in the Cabinet, when he
ranked as a minister. It _was_ an excessive bore to be told what Danby
did or would have done, or what Halifax meditated, or William of Orange
proposed, when the point at issue was something referring to our own
day, arising out of entirely novel circumstances, and having nothing
whatever in common with the policy that actuated statesmen at a time
when rival dynasties placed in dispute the true succession to the crown.
In reality, however, it is no disparagement to Mr Macaulay to say that,
from the peculiar turn of his mind, the nature of his pursuits, and the
intenseness of his literary habits, he has failed in acquiring even a
moderate reputation as a statesman. To the public, his withdrawal or
exclusion from office ought to be anything but matter of regret; since
it is better, both for his own fame and for the literary reputation of
our country, that he should be employed in illustrating its annals
according to his own views and conviction, than if he were participating
in the labours of Molesworth, Wood, and the other eminent individuals
who drone away their time in the Cabinet. As an historian, he has
already made himself a name far more enduring than that of any mere
politician, and he can very well afford to abandon the honours and
responsibilities of office to inferior men who regard that alone as the
summit of earthly ambition. And we know, and are pleased to know, from
his own statement and from the assurance of his friends, that he feels
anything but regret at having exchanged the harassments of office for
the literary leisure, which he knows so well and so effectively to
employ. We are only sorry that he has thought fit, in this very marked
and unusual manner, to invite public discussion of his claims to be
considered as an orator. As an historian, and historical writer, he has
already received, in the pages of the Magazine, a warm and deserved
tribute. Without acknowledging the soundness of all his views—indeed,
while questioning many, and decidedly objecting to some, both as regards
facts and conclusion—we have been, and are ready to bear testimony to
his talent, his research, the vigour of his style, and the occasional
brilliancy of his pictures. That he is a literary artist of high rank
and position, we have admitted most cheerfully, and, we know, have said
so cordially. But he now comes before us in another character. The
historian requests—nay, demands—that we shall regard him as a public
speaker, and assign him his proper place in the roll of orators. In
doing so, he certainly departs from his own familiar walk, challenges
comparison, which it would have been wise to have avoided—and provokes
criticism which otherwise would not have been exerted. When men play
many parts, it is inevitable, unless in the case of such a phœnix as the
Admirable Crichton, that some one part must be vastly inferior to the
others. As an historian, an essayist, and a vivid versifier, we are
inclined to rank Mr Macaulay high. We cannot admit that he is an orator
in the strict sense of the term. As a public speaker, he has almost
invariably failed in realising the expectations excited by his literary
renown.
We must, as we are aware, assign sufficient reasons for that opinion;
and we shall be met, at the outset, by the fact, that a speech from
Macaulay is considered as an event. So it is; and so, too, in the House
of Commons, would be deemed a speech from Sir Charles Wood, did that
parody of a statesman confine himself to a single harangue in the year.
Mr Macaulay, we know, will not suspect us of any intention of comparing
him with the present President of the Board of Control. We are in no
danger of mistaking Hyperion for a satyr. But the truth is, that men who
have been thrust, whether by interest or not, into high official
situations, are as likely, if they practise general reticence, to be
listened to in the House of Commons, as are men of exalted intellect;
and that an elderly proser, who speaks only once in each session, has a
better chance of an audience than the glib and voluble orator who starts
up in every debate. In public life Mr Macaulay has shown great
discretion. During the last twenty years he has spoken but seldom, and
never without careful and elaborate preparation; therefore, when it
becomes known that he is about to address the House, he is sure to meet
with a large, respectful, and attentive audience. Nor is this to be
wondered at, on other grounds; for, independently of his high celebrity,
Mr Macaulay’s speeches are much better worth listening to than the
majority of those now delivered in the House of Commons. The language is
correct and well-chosen, the arguments are carefully arranged, and there
is none of that hesitation, repetition, and digression, which frequently
disfigures the efforts of those who have less leisure beforehand to
prepare and adjust their speeches. The curiosity of the audience is
excited by the eminence of the speaker, and they are well assured that
what he is about to lay before them will bear the peculiar and
unmistakable impress of his style. And so it does; but then the genius
of Mr Macaulay is not of the oratorical kind. He can impart
information—that is, he can summon to the aid of his arguments whole
lists of precedents, some of them not very applicable, and countless
parallels, or instances which he alleges to be such. These give, at all
events, an air of profundity to his discourse, and cannot be called
inappropriate to the mouth of an historian. But upon a mixed audience
they can produce very little effect, for this reason, that they are not
familiar with one out of ten of the cases which he cites, or the
incidents to which he refers; and, consequently, they must either
receive them on trust, or disregard them altogether. We do not think, as
some of his associates have alleged, that Mr Macaulay intends to make a
parade of his acquired learning. We rather incline to hold that, as is
common with men who addict themselves greatly to any particular branch
of study, he takes it for granted that the whole world is studying in
the same direction, and is not conscious that he is throwing an
extravagant quantity of historical pearls—or, it may be, paste—before
his audience. Such at least is our belief; for we are not willing to
suppose that Mr Macaulay would condescend to that very low kind of
pedantry, not unusual among country preachers and schoolmasters, which
seeks to astonish by the assumption of superior learning. “It was in
this way,” said Mr Macaulay, in one of his earlier speeches, “that
Charles II. was forced to part with Oropesa, and that Charles III. was
forced to part with Squillacci.” Very likely it was; but how many of the
House of Commons had ever heard of Oropesa or Squillacci? How many were
familiar with the events he referred to? Probably not one. He would have
produced the same effect upon their reason and understanding, have
influenced their convictions quite as powerfully, if he had told his
audience that Mumbo-jumbo and Arimaspes had been dismissed by Don John,
or Peter of Portugal. Let us refer to that passage in his speech on the
Dissenters’ Chapels Bill, which the ignorant Vizetelly mangled. The
speech is evidently a favourite with Mr Macaulay, and we presume he has
restored it in its integrity. Addressing himself to the point, that
prescription constitutes a good title to property, he brings into the
compass of one page such a mass of illustration from all ages, nations,
and institutions, that we cease to be shocked at the barbarism of the
Vizetellian blunder, especially when we observe that the Jurists who
framed the Code of Justinian are referred to in the same sentence with
the Pundits of Benares. Indeed, we think that Mr Vizetelly is fairly
entitled to stand upon the very excuse which the legally-inclined Mr
Bartoline Saddletree proponed, when challenged by Reuben Butler for an
error on the same subject.
“‘It’s owre true, Mr Butler,’ answered Bartoline, with a sigh; ‘if I had
had the luck—or rather, if my father had had the sense to send me to
Leyden and Utrecht to learn the Substitutes and Pandex’——
“‘You mean the Institutes—Justinian’s Institutes, Mr Saddletree?’ said
Butler.
“‘Institutes and substitutes are synonymous words, Mr Butler, and used
indifferently as such in deeds of tailzie, as you may see in Balfour’s
Practiques, or Dallas of St Martin’s Styles. _I understand these things
pretty weel, I thank God; but I own I should have studied in Holland._’”
Such far-fetched illustrations necessarily tend to diminish the force of
Mr Macaulay’s speeches, which is the more unfortunate, because he is
peculiarly addicted to that kind of argument which the old rhetoricians
styled the παράδειγμα, being that which is drawn from Example. Even when
he does not pass into ground altogether unknown to his audience, when he
refers in support of his position to some passages in British history,
he avoids those which are most familiar, and selects the remoter and
more obscure. Hence it is that he so often fails in exciting and
maintaining enthusiasm. No sympathy can be roused by references to Sir
George Savile, Hugh Peters, or Praise-God-Barebones; nor is the
substitution of a political essay for a speech the best means of
commanding the admiration or influencing the will of an audience. We are
inclined to think that Mr Macaulay’s early oratorical training has
exercised a prejudicial rather than a salutary influence over his
subsequent style. He was, we believe, a member of the Union Debating
Society at Cambridge, in which arena questions of immediate political
interest were discussed quite as keenly as on the floor of the House of
Commons. Without pronouncing an opinion hostile to the institution of
debating societies, we may be allowed to remark, that the too frequent
introduction of politics as the subject of discussion among the young
can hardly receive the approbation of any thinking man of maturer years.
The arguments employed on such occasions must be, and are, the spent
weapons of politicians who are engaged in real warfare; and these are
used by the juvenile enthusiasts without any examination as to their
soundness or propriety. There is, in truth, little sense, and no
advantage in this mimic warfare. Young men are thereby induced, not to
reason, but to dogmatise—not to argue, but to declaim; and the
opposition which they encounter to their borrowed views only serves to
strengthen them in prejudice. The leader of a political debating society
is usually an insufferable specimen of the juvenile prig. He can prate
for the hour on such generalities as the constitution, the liberty of
the subject, the rights of the people, and so forth; but, if you bring
him to book, and demand a distinct explanation of what he has been
saying, you will immediately discover that he is neither in possession
of fixed notions nor of intelligible ideas. There is a kind of frothy
rhetoric, very much used in debating societies, which serves to disguise
commonplaces, and helps to make them appear almost brilliant to an
inexperienced audience; and in that sort of rhetoric Mr Macaulay early
became an adept. Most men who have acquired this style in public are
compelled to get rid of it. At the bar it would not be tolerated; and it
is worthy of remark that the most shining lights in debating societies
usually pale their ineffectual fires when brought into the legal
profession. In the senate, where less precision is required, they
succeed better; but even there it requires an immense deal of attrition
and wear before they can become expert masters of debate. Now it seems
to us, after a diligent perusal of his speeches, that Mr Macaulay has
never been able to emancipate himself from the bondage of the debating
society. He speaks now, just as he might have spoken more than thirty
years ago; only that his language is more select, his range of
illustration larger, and his perorations more artificial, and therefore
more frigid than before. In point of confidence, we do not believe that
he has either gained or lost. Some men begin their public career with
diffidence and trembling, and end by becoming remarkably self-possessed.
Others, who had a fine stock of assurance to begin with, are so cowed by
the buffets they receive, as actually to have modesty forced upon them;
and we have known more than one instance of a young Boanerges who, by
dint of constant punishment, has been brought to see the error of his
ways, and the exaggerated estimate he had formed of his own natural
powers. Mr Macaulay, however, belongs to neither category. He believed
himself an oracle as a boy: he believes himself an oracle as a man. And,
if justified in the one belief, who shall venture to say that he is
erroneous in the other? Certain it is that, in 1826, when he penned his
essay on Milton, he displayed as much power, taste, and vigour, as are
exhibited in the volumes of his History given to the public in 1849. He
spoke with more animation, clearness, and effect, on the subject of the
Reform Bill in 1831, than on any subsequent occasion, though some of his
later speeches may have been more highly elaborated. He is, of course,
better informed now on points of history, science, and literature, than
when he emerged from Cambridge; but we question whether he has gained
much additional knowledge of the world, or of the motives which actuate
mankind. Never, perhaps, did a man attain so high a point of literary
distinction without possessing in a moderate degree the power of
affecting the passions. We can scarcely refer to a single passage out of
his whole writings, whether in prose or verse, which is likely to have
drawn a tear. His speeches, as we now read them, are remarkably frigid.
They may satisfy the understanding, but they never could influence the
will. We are well aware that, in the House of Commons, as presently
constituted, no speech, however eloquent, can be supposed to affect the
votes of any considerable section; but the peculiarity of Mr Macaulay’s
speaking is this, that we can hardly conceive the possibility of his
making a convert. This is owing, we think, in a great measure, to a
somewhat singular disregard—for we cannot suppose it ignorance—of the
means which the chief orators, both of ancient and modern times have
deemed it their duty to employ. In the first place, Mr Macaulay never
seems to think it necessary to take the slightest pains to conciliate
his audience. Of course there are many cases when such introductory
conciliation is not required—for example, when addressing an entirely
sympathetic meeting, or when retorting upon the direct attack of an
antagonist—but in very few instances indeed does Mr Macaulay introduce
himself, upon a debated point, otherwise than as a determined partisan.
There can be no doubt that introductions of a conciliatory nature
require the utmost delicacy of handling. They are made for the purpose
of showing that the speaker comes to the consideration of the question
at issue, with as much fairness, deliberation, and candour, as can be
expected from man of mortal mould; and further, that he does not intend
to dictate to his audience, but rather, by impressing them with his own
views, to induce them to consider calmly whether his conclusions are
true or false. This does not imply the abandonment of the strongest
argument, or the most forcible illustration in the after-part of the
speech. It is an arrangement dictated by nature; because in every case,
when a man rises to address an assembly, his first care ought to be to
dispel, if possible, personal suspicion if that should exist, and to
secure a willing auditory. Of this art Cicero was an entire master; and
it is no exaggeration to say, that his most remarkable forensic triumphs
were achieved rather by the effect of his introductions, than by the
subsequent ingenuity of his arguments, and his unrivalled skill in the
disposition of narrative. We are quite aware that introductions of this
kind, when badly framed, have exactly the opposite effect from that
which was intended. There probably never was a worse one than that
attempted by the late Sir Robert Peel, in his memorable speech delivered
in the House of Commons on 27th January 1846, in which he beat about the
bush so long, that he entirely destroyed the effect which he intended to
produce. But, whether as regards the immediate impression on the House,
or the subsequent effect on the country, we must hold that a speaker
ought to endeavour, in the first instance, to divest himself of the
appearance of being actuated by mere party motives. Such men as the late
Duke of Wellington, or the present Marquis of Lansdowne, whose long and
unblemished public lives have been accepted as full evidence of the
purity of their motives, might indeed dispense with any such
protestation; but there are not many who, from age and public
confidence, have acquired a similar privilege. Now, it is rather curious
to observe that Mr Macaulay seems, throughout his whole career, to have
disdained any kind of conciliation. He has approached every question,
not only with his mind made up upon it, but in the spirit of the
strongest contempt and depreciation towards all who disagreed with him.
He never, like Themistocles, volunteered to receive a buffet in order to
gain a hearing. He rather, in imitation of Dares, walked into the arena
with the gauntlets buckled round his wrists,
“And dealt in empty air his whistling blows.”
It is no business of ours to recount how often he has met with an
Entellus, who has doled out severe punishment; we are now simply
referring to what we consider to be his oratorical deficiencies or
omissions.
Next we would observe, that the impression left on our mind by the
perusal of these Speeches—which, referring as they do to bygone events,
do not excite the slightest feeling of antagonism—is that the value of
the matter is generally disproportioned to the grandiose nature of the
style, and the uniform pomposity of language. It is quite true, that Mr
Macaulay has spoken upon several interesting and important questions;
and it is equally true that an orator, in addressing himself to themes
of that description, is entitled to assume a higher tone than might be
suitable to a meaner subject of debate. But then, he must take care that
his thoughts and sentiments are raised to the like elevation. One
distinguishing quality of the real orator is, that he rises with his
subject. His intellect seems to expand in proportion to the greatness of
his theme—he elevates himself in feeling and energy above the level of
his audience, and the high thoughts which then rush upon his mind are
expressed with corresponding dignity. The orator, like the poet, has his
fits of inspiration, varying in intensity and degree according to the
subject with which he deals. This, of course, precludes that method of
slavish preparation, now unfortunately too common, by means of which not
only the substance of the speech, but the very words, are elaborately
fabricated in the closet, and committed to memory. The man who adopts
that system may be a good speaker, but he never will attain the highest
point of elevation as an orator. Like the swimmer on a stormy sea, the
orator should rise and fall with the wave of his audience; for he is
contending for the mastery over a moral element, than which the natural
one is not always more fluctuating or fierce. It may be well to
calculate and consider beforehand the line of argument to be adopted,
just as a prudent general will make his dispositions before going into
battle. But as no commander can foresee what may happen in the field,
can provide for every emergency, or lay down for himself a course of
action from which he will not deviate—so neither ought the orator to
commit himself to a certain form of words, which possibly may prove
either unappropriate to the occasion, or injurious to his cause. Men
think differently in the closet, and in the scene of action. In the
former they are comparatively unimpassioned—in the latter they must
necessarily exhibit passion if they seek to rouse it in others. The most
skilful and elaborate discourse, if coldly conceived and expressed, will
have a drenching rather than an inspiring effect upon an audience which
is already possessed with a considerable degree of enthusiasm. Their
feeling, favourable to the speaker and his cause, must not be put
back—it ought, on the contrary, to be heightened. The force of these
observations will become apparent to every one who will take pains to
investigate the subject, for there is nothing more certain, than that
the success of an orator depends mainly upon the amount of energy which
he can display. Energy was the secret of the success of Demosthenes; and
Cicero, with all his art, could not find a higher quality to recommend.
It must be confessed that modern statesmen have been too much in the
habit of disregarding this evident truth. Some of them—and we would
instance as a notable example the late Sir Robert Peel—might have
secured a far more enthusiastic following than they ever could boast,
but for their extreme and over-cautious frigidity. To this remark Lord
John Russell, who perhaps has had more opportunities than any other
living man of acquiring personal influence, is also peculiarly liable.
On the contrary, take the case of Lord Palmerston. He is not implicitly
trusted by any strong party in the state; and yet, in the House of
Commons, no man can produce a greater effect, or possesses a larger
personal influence. And why is this? Because he can carry an audience
along with him—because he is never frigid, never dull, never addicted to
circumlocution—because he possesses and exerts energy in a high degree;
and is, in truth, what few of his contemporaries can claim to be—an
orator. Read one of his speeches, and you see at once that it was not
concocted in the closet—that he had not stooped to polish sentences
beforehand, or to select language which should pass for a pattern of
composition. Mark, too, the variety of his style—how quietly and
playfully he disposes of a small matter—how, during debate and attack,
to use the language of Canning, he “silently concentrates the power to
be put forth on an adequate occasion.” No wonder that, when the occasion
arrives, he should extort admiration even from his adversaries. Very
different is the case with Mr Macaulay. Whatever be the subject, he
rises to lecture, and has his lecture thoroughly prepared. He is
speaking to-night, amidst the hum of the House of Commons, what he wrote
yesterday in the quiet seclusion of his chambers in the Albany. He had
no thought whatever of his audience; he was thinking simply of his
style. That he may adorn and heighten; but he cannot vary it at
pleasure. Ask him to pronounce a panegyric upon a deceased hero, and a
discourse upon a drowned mouse, and he will execute both in the same
strain. The victor in a hundred fields will not be celebrated in periods
more stately than the invader of a hundred cheeses. Simplicity is not
part of his nature—he must have recourse to rhetoric or be dumb.
Now, although this style may be tolerated in writing, it becomes very
tedious when adopted in public speaking. Dress up a mere commonplace
with the utmost skill and ingenuity, and yet, to the hearer, it retains
its original character. The way in which a thing is said, does not alter
the substance of the thing itself—the fine features cannot conceal the
emaciation of the body beneath. We have gone over several of the
speeches contained in this volume, for the purpose of ascertaining the
real value, power, and ingenuity of the arguments set forth; and we are
compelled to say, that in no one instance have we been able to discover
the trace of an independent thought, or of a purely original idea. Some
of them are unquestionably able speeches. Ask a man of high talent and
extensive information, like Mr Macaulay, to deliver a discourse upon any
possible theme, and he will do so in a manner which shall elicit shouts
of applause from a Mechanic’s Institute. Nay, he will be loudly cheered
even within the walls of Parliament, provided that a considerable
interval is allowed to elapse between each exhibition—because, as we
know from the history of Euphuism, fine language commands admiration,
and rounded periods are always grateful to the ear. Besides this, it
would be untrue, and highly unfair to Mr Macaulay to insinuate that he
cannot make proper use and disposition of such arguments as lie before
him. He states them well and adroitly; though, as we have already
hinted, frequently marring their effect by the extreme remoteness of his
illustrations. But neither our reading nor our recollection can furnish
us with one case in which Mr Macaulay has put forth an original view, or
disentangled himself from the general mass of debaters. In political
life or strife, he appears simply as a furbisher of old iron, a process
in which he certainly is expert; and he manages to make an exceedingly
rusty rapier pass for a tolerable Toledo. More he seldom attempts. His
speeches are often brilliant, in the same sense in which we apply the
epithet to fireworks; tolerably, though not strictly logical; always
sententious, rounded, and adapted to a mouthing delivery—but never
ardent, never eloquent, never calculated to excite enthusiasm. If mere
rhetoric could make an orator, Mr Macaulay ought undoubtedly to be the
first of the age. He has studied it on the same principle as did
Gorgias, who made it his boast that he could speak, and speak well upon
any given subject, even though he was not conversant with its details,
by aid of the commonplaces which he could dress up for the occasion.
Gorgias had some reputation during his lifetime, but he is now
remembered only on account of his extravagant boast. His works have long
since perished; and we do not think that the efforts of Mr Macaulay, as
an orator, will survive even so long as those of Gorgias.
If there had been, in this collection, one speech upon which we could
have dwelt with any feeling of artistic interest—one which we could have
withdrawn from the rest, to rank among the remarkable specimens of
British eloquence—we should not only have been delighted, but proud to
have selected it for eulogy. That which we have perused with the most
pleasure, on account of its sentiment and manly feeling, is the speech
delivered in 1846 upon the subject of the Ten Hours’ Bill. Regarded
merely as an oration, it may not be of high value; but it displays, in a
most pleasing light, the genuine kindness of his heart, his strong
sympathy with suffering, and his genuine hatred of oppression. Such
speeches are worthy of record, because they rank in the category of good
deeds and noble actions; and deserve to be remembered with gratitude as
exertions in the cause of humanity. We do not inquire now into the
abstract merit of the speeches of Wilberforce, nor does his fame depend
at all upon his oratorical skill. He has passed from the roll of
speakers to the catalogue of philanthropists; and instead of directing
the attention of youthful aspirants after public distinction to the
force of his style, or the energy of his expression, we pay homage to
his memory as the chief instrument, under Providence, of removing the
fetters from the slave. In like manner, notwithstanding certain
peculiarities which lead us rather to admire than to love, Mr Macaulay
has high claims to the public gratitude and respect. In open questions,
and those in which party considerations do not materially interfere, he
has always shown himself accessible to conviction, generous in his
views, and just in the expression of his sentiments. There are, among
living public men, some who are more genial and attractive; but there
are not many who are better entitled to our respect. Our criticism has
been framed utterly irrespective of politics. We cannot boast, at the
present day, of so large a list of men, either of genius or of high
talent, as to omit the opportunity of paying tribute, where tribute is
justly due. “I hope that I am,” says Mr Macaulay, in the last sentence
of his last recorded speech, “at once a Liberal and a Conservative
politician.” We hope so too; and we hope, moreover, that the avowal was
made—not because Lord Aberdeen and Lord Palmerston, Lord John Russell
and Mr Gladstone, Sir William Molesworth and Mr Sidney Herbert, have
agreed to lie down together—but because Mr Macaulay wishes henceforward
to emancipate himself from party trammels. It is certainly time that he
should do so. He has occupied a subordinate rank in the Whig regiment
longer than he ought to have done for his own reputation; and we are not
sorry to see this disclaimer put forth in so marked a manner at the very
end of his last publication. It is, like the reading of the closing line
of the Iliad in the famous manuscript copy, which the supporters of the
Cyclic theory point to as clearly indicative of further action, a phrase
fraught with meaning; and when the coalition is dissolved, as it soon
must be by the influence of a political thaw, we trust that Mr
Macaulay’s tendencies may indeed appear to be Conservative, without the
sacrifice of the true liberality which becomes the gentleman and the
scholar. We do not believe that the general verdict of the public upon
this collection will be of a different tenor from our own. But, after
all, Mr Macaulay has no great reason to repine because he has failed to
achieve a high place in the roll of British orators. His speeches will
not be quoted for their eloquence and power, as those of Burke, Grattan,
Erskine, and Canning are; but his history and essays, and even ballads,
will insure him a reputation not less extensive and enduring. We need
scarcely remind him that men who have attained high reputations as
statesmen, and been conspicuous as public speakers, have altogether
failed in their attempts to found a literary name. No one who has
perused the historical chapters composed by Fox, can regret that his
design proved abortive, and that the subject has been left to the more
brilliant and dexterous treatment of Macaulay. We cannot say with truth
that Lord John Russell’s literary efforts inspire us with an exalted
idea of the author’s powers—we are even of opinion that he would have
done well in abstaining from appearing before the public, either as a
dramatist, biographer, or editor. _Ne sutor ultra crepidam._ It is by
natural instinct that every man addresses himself to the occupation in
which he is qualified to excel; and that ambition which prompts men to
deviate from their destiny, and undertake tasks which are not congenial
to their feelings and sympathies, ought to be repressed. We cannot view
Mr Macaulay’s career without being convinced that nature designed him to
play his part as a literary man rather than as a politician. He has
indeed tacitly admitted that; for he has withdrawn himself very much of
late years from debate, preferring literary occupation to the excitement
of political strife. We are sorry that he has been induced to interrupt
his more interesting labours for the sake of undertaking this
collection; for, although the volume will find its way into many
libraries—as what volume that bore his name upon the title-page would
not?—it will be regarded hereafter with little interest, and may
possibly be cited as an instance of unsuccessful ambition. We repeat
that Mr Macaulay’s fame rests upon his writings, and that the
publication of his speeches is by no means calculated to extend or
heighten his intellectual reputation; though it cannot diminish the just
estimation in which he is held as a man.
FIFTY YEARS IN BOTH HEMISPHERES.[10]
The memoirs of a man of a singularly adventurous and speculative turn,
who, having entered upon the occupations of manhood early, and retained
its energies late, has prolonged the active period of his life to
upwards of half a century, who has been an eyewitness of not a few of
the important events that occurred in Europe and America between the
years 1796 and 1850, and himself a sharer in more than one of them, who
has been associated or an agent in some of the largest commercial and
financial operations that British and Dutch capital and enterprise ever
ventured upon, and has been brought into contact and acquaintance—not
unfrequently into intimacy—with a number of the remarkable men of his
time, can hardly, one would imagine, be otherwise than highly
interesting, if the author have but sufficient command of his native
tongue plainly to write down what his memory has retained, sufficient
discrimination and self-restraint to avoid dwelling upon details of too
trifling and egotistical a nature. Generally speaking, we have but
little confidence in the interesting qualities of German septuagenarian
autobiographers. Garrulity is the privilege of age, and German garrulity
is a grievous thing, particularly when it displays itself upon paper. In
Germany, where nearly everybody capable of grammar writes a book, even
though he have nothing to write about, elderly gentlemen, who really
have seen something worth the telling, are apt to imagine they can never
make too much of it, and instead of delighting us with the pure spirit,
drench us with a feeble dilution. Such was the case, we well remember,
with our old acquaintance, Baron von Rahden, whose military experiences
during the stirring period of 1813–14–15 we brought before our readers
now just seven years since, and who, instead of cutting short the
tolerably prolix history of his life and adventures at the date when
peace sheathed his sword, elaborated two other ponderous and very
wearisome volumes, scarcely relieved by an account of General Chassé’s
defence of Antwerp, and by sketches of a campaign in Catalonia, in which
the indefatigable and restless old fire-eater, unable to pass his latter
days in tranquillity, served under the orders of the Carlist general
Cabrera. There is more variety and vivacity in the book now before us
than in the baron’s interminable record, of which, however, it has in
some respects reminded us. Von Rahden, a soldier by profession and
inclination, gave us far too much of his proceedings in times of peace,
and dwelt at tedious length on garrison rivalries, his own unrewarded
merit, and German provincial topics. Mr Nolte, on the contrary, by
profession a man of peace, whose weapon is the pen, his field of battle
the Exchange, and his campaigns amongst cotton bales, whose tutelar
deity has been Mercury instead of Mars, and whose commanders and allies,
instead of the martial-sounding appellations of Blucher, Gneisenau, and
Chassé, have borne the pacific but scarcely less famous names of Hope,
Labouchere, and Baring, has mingled, in the rather complicated narrative
of his mercantile pursuits, triumphs, and disasters, much adventure both
by flood and field, in which he himself was personally engaged, and
displays, in the telling, not a little of the go-ahead spirit proper to
the people amongst whom he has passed a large portion of his life. He
has really seen a great deal, and his reminiscences, although here and
there his style of narrating them be trivial and in questionable
taste—whilst some of his long accounts of financial and commercial
operations will more particularly interest bankers and merchants than
the general reader—contain much that will attract all. In Germany the
first edition of his book has gone off at a gallop,—no small testimony
to its merits in a year during which present politics have been the
all-absorbing topic. We do not wonder at its popularity; for, besides
the mass of anecdote and historical recollections it comprises, the
author has contrived to give an interest to his individuality, by the
off-hand style in which he tells of his errors and of his triumphs, of
his many reverses and disasters, as well as of his rarer moments of
prosperity and success.
We should as soon think of attempting, within the compass of an article,
a digest of an encyclopædia as of Mr Nolte’s volumes. We should fill
half a magazine by merely tracing his itinerary. There never was such a
rolling stone. He treats the Atlantic as most men do Dover Straits, and
thinks no more of a few hundred leagues of land travel than a modern
Cockney of a run to Ramsgate. Whole years of his life must have been
passed on board ship, and behind post-horses. His book necessarily
partakes of the desultory nature of his career. It better bears dipping
into than reading from end to end.
Born at Leghorn, in the year 1779, of a German father, Mr Vincent
Nolte’s first reminiscence, of much interest to his readers, is
connected with the invasion of Italy by the French under Buonaparte. His
father had for some years left Italy, and settled in Hamburg, his native
place; but young Vincent, after being educated in Germany, was sent back
to Leghorn, to take his place as junior clerk in his uncle’s
counting-house, one of the most important in that city. He was in his
seventeenth year when, upon the last Saturday in June 1796, a courier
from the British minister at Florence brought news to the consul at
Leghorn that the French were approaching. There was great bustle amongst
the English merchants to get their property shipped, and place it and
themselves under the protection of Nelson’s squadron, then cruising off
the port. After unremitting labour, and favoured by the wind, the last
ships, with English goods on board, left the harbour at noon on Monday.
They had been but two hours gone, when it suddenly became known in the
city that the French were close at hand, advancing by the Pisa road, and
presently a party of cavalry galloped round the fortifications to the
_Porta Colonella_, and rode straight up to the fort, on which the Tuscan
flag waved. Suddenly those colours disappeared, and were replaced by the
French tricolor, displayed for the first time to the wondering eyes of
the Tuscans. Almost at the same moment the cannon of the fort thundered,
and sent some shots after those English vessels nearest to the
harbour—thus signalling to Nelson the entrance of the French. Young
Nolte, who had little love for the desk, whose wish it was to become a
painter, and who then, and all his life through, was ardent, impetuous,
and a lover of excitement, could sit still no longer, but ran out of the
respectable counting-house of Otto Franck & Co., consul for Hamburg,
&c., to stare at the invaders. At the head of a body of cavalry, a
horseman of remarkable beauty galloped up the street, and alighted at
the door of the Genevese banker, Dutremoul. It was Murat. This was
between two and three in the afternoon.
“At six in the evening, the news spread that General Buonaparte was at
the Pisa gate. No sooner did he learn that the English residents had had
time to escape with their property, than he broke into a violent rage.
At that moment Count Spannochi, attired in the ordinary uniform, a blue
coat, red waistcoat, and white breeches (the full-dress uniform
consisted of a white coat and red waistcoat and breeches), and,
surrounded by his officers, and by the chief authorities of the city,
advanced to welcome the general, who still sat upon his horse.
Buonaparte gave him no time to speak, but at once violently assailed
him. ‘How dare you,’ he cried, ‘appear before me thus? Do you not know
your duty? You are an insolent fellow, a traitor! You have let the
English escape; you shall pay for that. A court-martial shall sit
immediately. You are my prisoner—give up your sword!’ And Count
Spannochi disappeared. Buonaparte’s words were repeated to me that same
evening by my fellow-clerk, Giacomini, who had gone with the crowd
outside the Pisa gate, and had heard them. Next day we learned that the
governor had been sent under arrest to Florence, and that the French
general, Vaubois, commanded in his stead. Hardly had Buonaparte and his
staff reached the grand-ducal palace, when police-agents went round to
all the houses, ordering a general illumination, under heavy penalties
in case of disobedience. The only Leghorn newspaper that then existed
announced, upon the following day, the arrival of the victor of Lodi and
Arcola, adding, that the inhabitants had _spontaneously_ illuminated. I
then, for the first time, got a correct idea of a _spontaneous
illumination_, and was never afterwards at a loss to understand the
expression. At eleven o’clock the next morning, the foreign consuls
waited upon the general, who quickly dismissed them, when suddenly his
eye was attracted by my uncle’s red coat. ‘What is that?’ he cried. ‘An
English uniform?’ My uncle, taken quite aback, had just enough presence
of mind to reply, ‘_No, Padrone, questa e l’uniforme di Amburgo!_’ and
endeavoured, but in vain, to make his escape. Buonaparte burst forth
with a violent diatribe against everything that looked English, against
all who thought like Englishmen, or had anything to do with England.
‘Those English,’ he said, according to my uncle’s account to me upon his
return home, ‘shall get such a lesson as they have never yet had! My
road now lies to Vienna, then farther north, to destroy their nests in
Hamburg and elsewhere, and then to seek them in their own robbers’
den!’”
Young Nolte was bent upon seeing the hero of the day, who, before
attaining his eight-and-twentieth year, had played such havoc amongst
Austria’s veteran commanders, and, disregarding his uncle’s commands to
keep in-doors, and out of the way of the dense mob upon the _Piazza
d’Arme_, he again played truant, and stationed himself at the corner of
the palace, at whose entrance an open carriage awaited the French
general. His account of the impression he carried away of Napoleon’s
appearance has some originality. The peculiar expression, attributed by
him to the eyes, reminds one of the present French Emperor.
“At last there came out, accompanied by a number of officers, a little,
youthful-looking man, in a plain uniform, with a pale, almost a yellow
complexion, and long, lank, raven-black hair, hanging over his ears,
after the fashion of the Florida savages called _Talapouches_. That was
the hero of Arcola! Whilst he took the right-hand place in the carriage,
and whilst his aides-de-camp got in, I had a few moments to observe him
closely. There was a continued smile round his mouth, with which,
however, the man himself had evidently nothing to do, for the fixed
indifferent look of his eyes showed that the mind was busy elsewhere. I
never again beheld so remarkable an expression. It was the dull gaze of
a mummy, barring a certain beam of intelligence betraying the inward
life, but only by a faint and glimmering gleam. Macbeth’s words to
Banquo’s ghost, ‘There is no speculation in those eyes!’ would almost
have fitted here, had not previous and subsequent events sufficiently
shown what a spirit lurked behind those impressive orbs. The carriage
drove away—seven years elapsed before I again beheld that extraordinary
man. He left the town the next day. I must not omit to mention a
colossal and well-built officer, who stood, in a respectful attitude,
beside the carriage-door. This man, who had just been named town-major
of Leghorn, was the grenadier who, seven years previously, on the 14th
July 1789, led the storm of the Bastile, and was the first to scale its
walls, who afterwards, as General Hullin, was governor of Berlin after
the battle of Jena, and presided over the court-martial appointed to
try, or rather to shoot, the unfortunate Duke d’Enghien.”
The presence and proceedings of the French in Leghorn were alike odious
to the inhabitants, who found an important branch of their trade—that
with England—completely cut off, and who had to satisfy unceasing
demands for money and equipments. Large bodies of ragged, barefooted
troops continually entered the town, to quit it well shod and with new
uniforms. The republican cockade became an abomination in the eyes of
the Leghornese, who christened it _il pasticcino_—the little pie—and
wrote innumerable lampoons upon its wearers. Leghorn was converted into
a camp, and on a large altar in the middle of the _Piazza d’Arme_, a
statue of Liberty was erected, at the foot of which the popular
representatives, Garat and Salicetti, daily harangued the troops upon
parade. Business was at a standstill; Vincent Nolte deserted his desk
and roamed about the town, sketching the groups of foreign soldiers. And
even when things began to settle down, he would do nothing but ramble in
picture-galleries and make love to pretty Florentines, until at last his
uncle, despairing of his doing any good, wrote to his father that he was
on the high-road to perdition. This alarming piece of information
produced an instant summons to Hamburg, where, in the paternal
counting-house, the young scamp amended his ways and applied earnestly
to business, displaying great energy, industry, and capacity.
The year 1799 was a disastrous one for Hamburg. Within six weeks there
occurred upwards of one hundred and thirty failures for a total of
thirty-six millions of marks. The panic was universal, and trade was
shaken to its foundations. Mr Nolte’s house weathered the storm, but was
compelled, three years later, to suspend its payments in consequence of
the failure of the Leghorn establishment. The creditors received
eighty-five per cent, and the numerous friends of the unfortunate
merchant subscribed a capital of one hundred and twenty thousand marks
to start him again in business. Upon the list figured the well-known
name of Francis Baring, a former schoolfellow of the insolvent’s, for
the munificent sum of twenty thousand marks, upon which he positively
refused to receive interest. Thus supported, Mr Nolte again applied
himself to business. But he was then a man advanced in years and of
little enterprise, and his son, bold and ambitious, saw that he was not
likely to strike out new paths to wealth, whereas the old and ordinary
avenues to commercial profits were then closed, all over the European
continent, by the iron hand of Napoleon, that mortal foe to trade, and
contemner of its votaries. And as young Nolte could be of no use to his
father, who despised his views as the dreams of a stripling, bent upon
pleasure and unworthy of attention, he sought employment abroad. This he
found in the house of Labouchere and Trotreau at Nantes, where he
accepted an engagement for three years, to carry on the German and
English correspondence. And so, in his twenty-fifth year, he took leave
of his parents, with a heavy heart, he says, but without uneasiness as
to the future, and travelled, by way of Bremen, to Paris.
Mr Nolte’s arrival in the French capital coincided with the proclamation
of Napoleon as emperor, and with Moreau’s imprisonment on the charge of
a plot against the government and life of the First Consul. It was his
first visit to Paris—the period was interesting. He was so fortunate as
to find a friend who willingly undertook to be his cicerone, and a few
weeks flew rapidly by, during which, thanks to his guide’s familiarity
with places and persons, he acquired a better knowledge of both than he
would in as many months had he been left to himself; for it would have
served him little (except, perhaps, in the way of emptying his pockets)
that the doors of Frascati’s, then the favourite resort of the Parisian
fashionable world, were open to all who could pay for admission, and who
chose to roam through its gorgeous saloons and brilliantly illuminated
gardens, had he not had with him some one able to inform him that yonder
beautiful woman was Madame Recamier—yonder elegant young man, leaning
against the pedestal of a statue, the renowned ball-room hero Trénis—and
the one beyond him, with a music-book in his hand, the celebrated singer
Garat. But of all that Mr Nolte saw and heard, nothing made a deeper
impression upon him than the lively and universal interest taken in the
fate of Moreau. “Rarely,” he says, “was that name uttered by the middle
and lower classes without an expression of love and respect, and without
a curse upon his two implacable persecutors, the First Consul, and the
governor of Paris, General Murat, whose proclamations exhibited at every
street corner the name of Moreau in juxtaposition with the
words—‘Traitor to the Republic.’ Men could not and would not credit the
guilt of the distinguished general; and the Paris wits, never at a loss,
declared that there were but two parties in France, ‘_les moraux_
(Moreaus) _et les immoraux_’—a saying which one heard everywhere
repeated.” Condemned to banishment, the conqueror of Hohenlinden betook
himself, by way of Cadiz, to the United States, where Mr Nolte some
years afterwards met him, and made his acquaintance.
Mr Nolte was present at the first review passed by the new emperor, on
the Place du Carrousel at Paris. He was very desirous to get a near view
of the victorious general and successful adventurer, whom he had first
seen, seven years before, in the full flush of triumph at Leghorn. Two
officers of the Danish life-guards, with whom he had travelled from
Bremen, made interest for him with their ambassador, and procured him
admission to the gallery of the Louvre, a favour granted to few. “I saw
the great man of the day, surrounded by a brilliant staff, and by
uniforms of every kind, ride several times up and down through the
ranks, then gallop full speed along the front of the lines of cavalry
drawn up outside the inner court, amidst cries of ‘_Vive l’Empereur!_’
when suddenly his horse fell, and Napoleon rolled upon the ground, still
grasping the bridle tightly. In a few seconds he had mounted again, and
galloped on, before even a part of his staff, who quickly dismounted,
could go to his assistance. The newspapers said nothing of this
incident, and its ominous character struck me the more by reason of
their silence.”
The chief partner of the mercantile house into whose employment Mr Nolte
now entered, was a younger brother of the late P. C. Labouchere, of the
celebrated house of Hope of Amsterdam. Mr A. M. Labouchere was very
desirous to extend his connection and business with the United States,
but did not seem fully to appreciate the facilities for so doing
afforded him by his close alliance with the Hopes and Barings, whose
names appeared as references in the circulars of the Nantes house.
Nolte, whose energy and talent early earned him a considerable share of
his employer’s confidence, urged Mr Labouchere to send an agent to the
States to carry out his wishes, and offered to go himself, if no better
was to be found. He was told to put upon paper his ideas concerning
America, and concerning the advantages to be derived from a journey
thither. This statement he executed in a manner to excite the warm
approval of Mr Labouchere, who desired him to forward it to his brother
in Amsterdam. The reply was a summons to the Dutch capital. There the
elder Labouchere, who had formed a high opinion of Nolte from his
correspondence, unfolded to him a gigantic project, the mere sketch of
which bewildered him; and although not diffident of his own powers, he
declared that he did not hold himself sufficiently experienced to
undertake such responsibility, and felt that he should not be able to
come up to his employer’s expectations. “That is my business, and not
yours,” Mr Labouchere replied. “I have but one thing to recommend to
you, and that is, never to do aught that shall give you cause to blush
before me or before yourself.” This was lightening the load of
responsibility from which the young man shrank, and giving him fresh
confidence by showing him that others appreciated him more highly than
he did himself, and he no longer made objections. He was to go to the
United States, and for a few months merely to look around him and
acquire a knowledge of the country. Before entering, however, which he
does at great length, into an account of the important business about to
be confided to him, and into whose details he was not initiated until
some time afterwards, he gives an amusing chapter to a sketch of the
celebrated banker and contractor Ouvrard, from whose combinations the
proposed operation issued, and with whom Mr Nolte was well acquainted,
and had frequent intercourse at several periods of his life. The chapter
includes some curious traits and anecdotes of Napoleon, who, it is well
known, detested Ouvrard, and tyrannised over him, although he was more
than once obliged to seek his aid. Napoleon notoriously hated and
despised traders and bankers. “I do not like merchants!” he is reported
to have said—with that _brusquerie_ which, in a less man, would have
been designated as brutal ill-breeding—to the deputation from the
merchants of Antwerp that went to welcome him to the town; “a merchant
is a man who would sell his country for a three-franc piece!” He was
jealous of, or at least indignant at, Ouvrard’s enormous wealth, and the
influence it gave him—both of which he considered too great for any
private person to possess; but, according to Mr Nolte, who seems quite
conversant with the scandalous chronicles of any day during the last
half-century, there were other private causes of irritation, which most
of Napoleon’s biographers either were ignorant of, or thought it
unnecessary to mention, and which certainly are less out of place in the
present author’s far from prudish pages than they would be in a grave
biography. Ouvrard’s own Memoirs, published nearly thirty years ago,[11]
are now little remembered; and Mr Nolte is evidently indebted to them
for the outline of his sketch, as well as for several incidents and
anecdotes, but he has filled up details which the great speculator
thought proper to omit. The relative positions of Ouvrard and Napoleon,
at different periods of their lives, present the strangest contrasts.
When the former, quitting the army in which he had for a short time
served, applied himself with skill and success to commercial and
speculative operations, and quickly realised a fortune of several
millions of francs, Napoleon was so needy as to be desirous to avail
himself of a decree of the Committee of Public Safety, by which officers
were entitled to receive as much cloth as would make them a uniform. The
anecdote is well known. Napoleon’s application was rejected because he
was not just then employed, and he was very glad when Ouvrard, with whom
he had become acquainted at the house of the Director Barras, induced
Madame Tallien, whose lover the capitalist then was, to give him a
letter of recommendation to the commissary of the 17th military
division; a letter which procured young Buonaparte what he had great
need of—a new uniform. Subsequently, in Napoleon’s days of power and
magnificence, when he began to spite and squeeze Ouvrard, the latter
loved to tell this anecdote—a contrast with Talma, who had been
Napoleon’s intimate, and had often lent him money in his days of penury,
and who became ever more reserved in his communications and behaviour
the higher his friend ascended upon fortune’s ladder. To Ouvrard
Napoleon was unquestionably harsh, cruel, and unjust. His dislike to him
seemed to augment in a direct ratio with the magnitude of the gains
which the capitalist owed to the circumstances of the times, to his
great financial capacity, and to the vastness of his operations. Of the
extent of these and of his profits, we may form some idea from a passage
in Mr Nolte’s book, where he states positively that Ouvrard cleared six
hundred thousand pounds sterling by his contract for victualling the
Spanish fleet under Mazaredo when it lay at Brest, and afterwards at
Cadiz. But if his gains were large, his losses, arising chiefly from
Napoleon’s ill-will and despotic acts, were also heavy. During the
Egyptian campaign, the Directory borrowed ten millions of francs from
him, which he produced with the greatest ease. After Buonaparte’s return
and the fall of the Directory, the First Consul asked him for twelve
millions more. Ouvrard declined. The other Paris bankers were applied
to; they either could not or would not. The First Consul was
furious—doubly so when Ouvrard claimed repayment of the ten millions
lent to the Directory. He had him paid in assignments on the revenue of
the past year, which had all been expended. It was equivalent to a
repudiation of the debt. Soon afterwards, Ouvrard was arrested, under
pretext of fraud in his dealings with the government and supply of the
French navy. He was kept in strict confinement, his papers were sealed
up, and a committee of councillors of state was appointed to investigate
his affairs. Nothing could be substantiated against him, but it was
ascertained that his fortune, in landed property, money and French
_rentes_, (then worth but 15 per cent) amounted to twenty-seven millions
of francs. “On this occasion,” says Mr Nolte, quoting almost the words
of Ouvrard, “a discovery was made which deeply wounded the First
Consul—namely, that, during his absence in Egypt, Ouvrard had supplied
Josephine, who was an old friend of his, and who had remained at
Malmaison, with money. She had become his debtor to a considerable
amount. This circumstance, combined with the refusal of the twelve
millions, inspired Buonaparte with the most violent antipathy to
Ouvrard, at whose arrest all Paris (especially the bankers) was
indignant and loud in complaint. Collot, afterwards director of the
mint, who was one of the First Consul’s most intimate advisers, did not
scruple to tell him that it was beginning badly, thus to let all
apprehend that they might in their turn be the victims of such arbitrary
measures. ‘A man,’ replied Buonaparte ‘who possesses thirty millions,
and sets no value on them, is much too dangerous for my position.’”
Josephine and other influential personages interceded for Ouvrard, who
escaped the military tribunal with which Napoleon threatened him, and
was set at liberty, but remained under the surveillance of gens-d’armes.
This in no way prevented his continuing to receive with princely
hospitality at his château of Raincy (afterwards the Duchess of Berry’s)
the best society of Paris, and the most distinguished foreigners who
visited that capital—amongst others, Fox and Lord Erskine, who were his
guests after the peace of Amiens.
But we must take Mr Nolte away from Paris—which seems his favourite
city, but where he can never linger without getting scandalous—and
across the Atlantic. He sailed in July 1805, and reached New York in
forty-two days, then a marvellously rapid passage. The astonished owner
of the American ship “Flora” could hardly believe his eyes when he saw
her come into port before he had received advice of her arrival at
Amsterdam. Mr Nolte found the yellow fever in New York, and left the
place for a few weeks, but returned thither in time to witness the
arrival in the bay of a vessel from Cadiz, with General Moreau on board.
The drums beat, and the militia turned out and formed up in Broadway. As
each company had a different uniform—sometimes a very odd one—the effect
of the whole display was a good deal like that produced by a harlequin’s
jacket, which did not prevent the commander of the motley corps from
being prodigiously proud of his warriors, and asking Moreau—when he
landed, plainly dressed in a blue coat, and rode into the town, upon a
horse in waiting for him, amidst cheers and music, and surrounded by the
variegated staff of the militia—what he thought of the American troops?
Moreau replied that he had never in his life seen such soldiers—which he
probably never had. A similar reply has been since attributed to General
Bertrand, when he landed in the States some years ago, and a review was
held in his honour. The speculative spirit of the Yankees, who love to
combine business with pleasure, and to turn an honest dollar whilst
admiring a hero or listening to a Lind, slumbered not in 1805 any more
than in 1850. The same genius for advertisement which made a hatter pay
some hundred dollars for the best place at the Swedish Nightingale’s
concert, stimulated the promoters of one that was to be given, on the
night of General Moreau’s arrival, in the great hall of the City
Hotel—then the first in New York—to beseech his presence, and, as soon
as he had promised it, to placard his name. The crowd was tremendous.
Moreau, it was on all hands agreed, looked very little like a French
general, in his simple dress, without cocked hat, feather, or
embroidery—whereas General Morton, chief of the militia, had a most
martial aspect in his Washington uniform. He introduced to the French
leader all who chose, and there was a prodigious shaking of hands. Mr
Nolte was standing near the two generals when a Quaker was presented,
who shook Moreau’s hand heartily. “Glad to see you safe in America,”
quoth Broadbrim. “Pray, general, do you remember what was the price of
cochineal when you left Cadiz?” The hero of Hohenlinden shrugged his
shoulders and confessed his ignorance. It was not until some time
afterwards, in Philadelphia, that Mr Nolte became personally acquainted
with Moreau, whom he found, he says, “a mild, agreeable, but, in an
intellectual point of view, upon the whole, an insignificant and
uninteresting man. His manners were simple, and possessed a certain
naturalness which was attractive, but his conversation, or rather his
monologue—for we seldom had long dialogues—fettered the attention only
when its subject was that of his certainly highly remarkable and
distinguished military exploits. Then there was pleasure in listening to
him. Of Napoleon he scarcely ever spoke but as ‘the tyrant.’” The best
portrait—indeed, the only good one we are acquainted with—of Moreau,
that by Gérard, conveys quite the same idea here given of him by Mr
Nolte—that of a mild, amiable, but by no means a highly intellectual
man, with less of the military air and look about the head than perhaps
in any other distinguished general of the French republic or empire.
We do not purpose going into the details of Mr Nolte’s commercial
proceedings as one of Hope’s agents in America. They were connected with
Ouvrard’s well-known colossal plan for drawing specie from Mexico, in
whose treasury—owing to the interruption, by the war with England, of
intercourse between Spain and her colonies—seventy millions of dollars
had accumulated. The duties assigned to Mr Nolte compelled him to take
up his quarters at New Orleans, then in its infancy as a commercial
city, and in the worst possible repute. Louisiana, after belonging
alternately to France and Spain, and then to France again, had been but
recently sold to the United States, and three-fifths of the white
population of its capital were French by birth or extraction. New
Orleans then had about sixteen thousand inhabitants, one-third of whom
were slaves and coloured people. The character its citizens enjoyed in
the Northern States may be judged of by the following anecdote: A friend
of Mr Nolte’s, who had just formed an establishment at New Orleans,
finding himself at Boston, and seeing a vessel advertised to sail thence
for the former city, called upon the owner to ask him to consign the
ship to his house. Whereupon the owner told him in strict confidence
that he had just as much intention of sending his vessel to the moon as
to New Orleans, and that he had inserted the advertisement merely in the
expectation that amongst the persons applying for a passage he should
find a rascal who had defrauded one of his friends of a considerable
sum. “It is probable,” he added, “that he will try to get to New
Orleans, that being the natural rendezvous of all rogues and
scoundrels.” Not one of the eighteen or twenty commercial houses
existing at New Orleans when Mr Nolte first went there possessed capital
worth the naming, and a respectable character was nearly as great a
rarity as ready cash. Roguery, disguised under the polite name of
“cleverness,” was commonly practised and indulgently viewed. Juries and
authorities were corrupt, false witnesses easily purchased, and justice
was hard to obtain. In illustration of this state of things Mr Nolte
tells some curious stories, one in particular, in which the celebrated
American jurist Edward Livingston figures. “I well remember,” he says,
“the remarkable trial of a certain Beleurgey, the editor of one of the
first American newspapers which appeared in New Orleans, in 1806 and
1807, in French and English, under the name of _Le Telegraphe_. To
obtain money he had forged the signature of a rich planter, to whom,
when his crime was discovered, he wrote, confessing his guilt, and
earnestly entreating him not to prosecute him. The planter seemed
disposed to accede to his prayer, but the letter was already in the
hands of justice. How then did Livingston contrive, as Beleurgey’s
counsel and defender, to obtain his acquittal in spite of that damning
proof of his guilt? Davezac (Livingston’s brother-in-law and factotum)
brought forward witnesses who swore that they knew Beleurgey to be such
a liar that no word of truth had ever issued from his lips. ‘See here,’
then said Livingston to his French jury—‘it is proved that the man is
incapable of speaking the truth; the very confession is a lie, for none
but a madman would accuse himself. So that Beleurgey either has lied or
is out of his senses; in either case he knew not what he did, and cannot
be found guilty!’ And the jury acquitted him!” New Orleans was evidently
not a tempting place to settle in, for an honest man, with money to be
robbed of; but then, with conduct and judgment, there was money to be
made, and moreover Mr Nolte, as a mere agent for others, had no choice
but to abide there. Presently the arrival, in quick succession, of three
fast-sailing schooners from Vera Cruz, bringing half a million of
Mexican dollars to the address of Vincent Nolte, drew attention to the
young man whom previously few had heeded—save the French planters, to
whom his knowledge of their language was a recommendation. But now
boundless hospitality was shown him, no party was complete without him,
and for three months he passed a pleasant enough life, when suddenly the
yellow fever laid him on his back. Upon the morning of the third day
there appeared at his bedside one Zachary, the cashier of the Louisiana
bank, and one of the very limited number of honourable men in the city,
and gravely asked him if he had made his will. To this ominous inquiry
Mr Nolte replied by a negative and an interrogative. “No! Why?”—“Well,”
continued Zachary, “I suppose I need not tell you that you have got the
yellow fever, and that it is more than possible you will die tomorrow,
for the fourth is the critical day, which one does not generally get
over. You have large sums lying at the bank—larger sums than have ever
before been seen here—and, if you die, the capital will fall into very
unsafe hands. The persons appointed by the State to take charge of the
property of foreigners dying intestate, are not only undeserving of
confidence, but, to speak plainly, are downright rascals.” The sick
man’s reply was that he neither felt inclined nor intended to die. “And
as I am sure not to die,” he concluded, “I see no use in bothering my
head about my will.” Zachary looked hard at him. “Well, my dear Mr
Nolte,” he at last said, “since that is your mood, I too am certain you
will not die,”—a prognostic justified by the patient’s speedy recovery.
In the yellow fever, as in other maladies, a faint heart kills many.
We pass over several chapters and some years. They include a good deal
of interesting matter, and, of course, abundance of travelling;—a return
to Europe, and brief residences in various cities of the United States,
in London, Paris, Amsterdam, and Hamburg. On a voyage from the Havana to
Baltimore, Mr Nolte was wrecked upon the Carysford reef, which owes its
name to the total loss of the frigate Carysford in 1774; and he gives a
capital account of his sufferings and those of his ten companions on a
raft composed of three small spars, six oars, and a hencoop, half
immersed, and neglected by passing vessels, who took them for
shipwrecked Spaniards, and feared to succour them, lest, when rescued,
they should rise against their deliverers and take the ship into Cuba,
an act of ingratitude that had been recently perpetrated under similar
circumstances. A woodcut of the frail and curiously-constructed raft is
the only illustration the book contains. At Philadelphia, Mr Nolte, who,
it is to be observed, has been all his life an unlucky man, was run away
with in his tandem, and, jumping out, broke his leg, which, badly set by
two ignorant American Sawbones, occasioned him terrible suffering and
long confinement. His agency for Hope’s house at an end, and after
declining two advantageous offers of partnerships in Europe, one of
which he would perhaps have done wisely in accepting, he determined to
apply the very liberal sum he had received for his services to the
establishment of a commercial firm at New Orleans, in aid of which the
houses of Hope and Baring advanced him funds, opened him a credit, and
allowed him to put their names in his circular as his friends and
supporters. This brings us to the most interesting portion of his book.
Mr Nolte has a habit of interlarding his German, especially the scraps
of dialogue scattered through his volumes, with a great deal of English
and French, both of which languages he evidently understands as well as
his mother-tongue. To readers in the same case, this practice gives to
the book additional character and pungency; but to those to whom German
alone is familiar it will prove troublesome, since he does not subjoin
translations. As an instance of this, we will give his account of a
casual meeting with a man who has since become universally celebrated.
It was during his journey on horseback from Philadelphia to Pittsburg,
where he was to join a friend with whom he had entered into partnership,
and whence they were to proceed, with a couple of flat boats laden with
flour, two thousand miles down the Ohio and Mississippi to New Orleans,
there to form their mercantile establishment. Steam had not at that date
annihilated distance in America; there were no boilers bursting on the
rivers, or trains on railroads rattling through the States, and
travelling was slow work, particularly with goods. The voyage by flat
boats from Pittsburg to New Orleans was a forty or fifty days’ business.
On a cold December morning, after a solitary ride over Laurel Hill, the
highest of the Alleghanies, Mr Nolte halted, towards ten o’clock, at a
small tavern by the falls of the Juniata river, and asked for a solid
breakfast.
“The hostess showed me into a room, and said I might just take my food
with a strange gentleman who was seated there already. ‘He is quite a
stranger,’ she said. On stepping in, the man at once struck me as being
what is commonly called an odd fellow. He sat at a table, in front of
the fire, with a Madras handkerchief round his head, after the fashion
of a French sailor, or of labourers in a French seaport. I courteously
approached him, with the words: ‘I hope I don’t incommode you, by coming
to take my breakfast with you?’ The reply was: ‘No, sir!’ spoken with a
strong French accent, and sounding like ‘No, serre.’ ‘Ah!’ I continued,
‘_vous êtes Français_, Monsieur?’ ‘No, serre!’ was the reply; ‘ai em en
Henglieshmen’ (I am an Englishman). ‘Why,’ I continued, ‘how do you make
that out? You look like a Frenchman, and you speak like one.’ ‘I am an
Englishman, because I got an English wife,’ replied he, with the same
accent. Without further investigation of the matter, we agreed, over our
breakfast, to ride together to Pittsburg. He showed himself more and
more of an oddity, but at last admitted that he was a born Frenchman,
from La Rochelle, had been brought to Louisiana when a child, had grown
up in the sea-service, but had gradually become a real American. ‘Well,’
said I, ‘but how do you reconcile that with your quality of an
Englishman?’ To which he replied, in French at last: ‘_Au bout du
compte, je suis un peu cosmopolite; j’appartiens à tous les pays._’”
When we mention that all the dialogue in the above extract, with the
exception of one sentence, is, in the original, in the same languages in
which we here give it, and that such polyglot passages are of constant
occurrence throughout these volumes, it becomes evident that Mr Nolte
will sorely puzzle and tantalise such of his German readers as are
unacquainted with French, and with that composite Anglo-Saxon tongue for
which the learned German has declared his preference over all other
modern languages. The eccentric traveller was Audubon, the famous
ornithologist, who was also bound for New Orleans. On reaching
Pittsburg, no means of conveyance offered except Mr Nolte’s boat, and as
he had by this time discovered that the naturalist was not only an
accomplished draughtsman, but a good and amiable man, he offered him a
cot in his little cabin, a service which Audubon afterwards thankfully
recorded and acknowledged in the third volume of the text to his great
work on “American Ornithology.” Mr Nolte knew nothing of the object of
his guest’s journey until they reached Limestone, a small place in the
north-western corner of Ohio State. There they landed their horses,
intending to visit Lexington, and thence proceed to Louisville, where
Audubon expected to find his wife—the daughter of an Englishman named
Bakewell. “At Limestone,” says Mr Nolte, “we had hardly finished our
breakfast, when Audubon suddenly sprang up. ‘Now, then,’ he cried to me,
in French, ‘I must begin to lay the foundations of my establishment!’
Thereupon he took from his pocket a parcel of address-cards, a hammer,
and some small nails, and began nailing one of the cards upon the door
of the little tavern. It contained the words:
AUDUBON & BAKEWELL,
COMMISSION MERCHANTS.
PORK, LARD, AND FLOUR.
NEW ORLEANS.
So, said I to myself, you have found a rival before reaching your
journey’s end. But I felt little inclination to deal in the flesh of
swine, or apprehensive of very formidable opposition from my new
acquaintance. We rode on to Lexington, chief town of Kentucky, a
flourishing place, where I heard much talk of a certain highly-gifted
lawyer, who, during the elections for Congress, had distinguished
himself by his pugilistic prowess in the streets and taverns. This man,
who soon afterwards became more and more celebrated, was Henry Clay,
whose exterior was no way calculated to give a high idea of his
intellectual qualities, but who had already acquired great fame as an
orator.
“A horrible custom was at that time almost universal amongst the
inhabitants (for the most part rough and brutal people) of the Western
States. It was that of allowing the finger-nails to grow until they
could be cut into the shape of small sickles, which were used, in the
quarrels and fights that continually occurred, to scoop out the eyes of
an opponent. This barbarous art was called gouging. During our ride
through Kentucky, we saw several persons who wanted an eye, and others
who had lost both. The excitement then prevalent in the United States on
account of the misunderstanding with England, was much greater in the
western provinces than on the seaboard, and the feeling of irritation in
the former was very considerable. Passing through Frankfort on my way to
Louisville, I learned that the Kentucky State Legislature was just then
sitting, and I determined to witness its proceedings, in order to
compare it with the Territorial Legislature of Louisiana, which was
composed of the strangest mixture of born Americans, and of French and
Spanish creoles. Hardly had I entered the hall, when I heard a very
animated orator indulging in a violent diatribe against England. ‘We
must have war with Great Britain,’ he said. ‘War will ruin her commerce!
Commerce is the apple of Britain’s eye—there we must _gouge_ her!’ This
flower of rhetoric was prodigiously applauded, and I could not deny that
for a Kentucky audience it must have a certain poetical charm.”
Thus, sketching by the way a state of society which a lapse of forty
years has fortunately greatly altered for the better, Mr Nolte reached
Louisville. The Ohio had been for some days frozen, and his boats, with
his friend and partner, Hollander, were fast bound in the ice some
distance higher up the stream. “Three days afterwards, just as we sat
down to dinner, the whole house was violently shaken; glasses, plates,
and bottles fell from the table—most of the guests sprang up, with the
cry: ‘There is the earthquake, by jingo! There is no humbug about it!’
and ran out into the street. The commotion was soon over, and people
returned to their houses. Early next morning I learned that the shock
had broken up the ice on the river, and that several boats had come down
to Shippingport, a little town about a league off.” Among them were
Nolte’s craft, and he continued his journey, presently quitting the
clear transparent stream of the Ohio, and entering the slimy waters of
the Mississippi. In voyages of that kind it was customary to bring-to at
nightfall, and make fast the boats to the shore until next morning,
snags and sawyers rendering progress unsafe during the darkness. On the
evening of the 6th February 1812, the halting-place was hard by the
little town of New Madrid. About twenty boats, which had left
Shippingport together, were there assembled. “It was a bright moonlight
night,” says Mr Nolte; “at eleven o’clock my partner, Hollander, had
gone to bed, and I was sitting at a little table drawing a caricature of
President Madison—who had just published a flaming proclamation, calling
upon the nation to ‘put on armour and warlike attitude,’ but who was
said to be himself completely under petticoat government—when a terrible
report, like the sudden roar of cannon, echoed without, immediately
succeeded by innumerable flashes. The Mississippi foamed up like the
boiling water in a kettle, and then again receded with a rushing sound;
the trees of a little wood near to which we had moored our boats,
cracked, broke, and were overthrown. The terrible spectacle lasted for
several minutes: there seemed no end to the vivid lightning, to the
alternate rise and fall of the troubled water, and to the crash of
falling trees. Hollander, startled from his sleep, called out, ‘What is
that, Nolte?’ I could only tell him that I myself did not know, but took
it for an earthquake. I went on deck. What a sight! The river, which had
resumed its ordinary course, was covered with floating trees and
branches, borne rapidly along by the current. Of the town, only a few
very distant lights were to be seen. It was a real chaos. Our little
crew consisted of three sailors, whom want of employment, in consequence
of the embargo, had driven to Pittsburg, and of a river-pilot. They told
me that the other boats had all cut loose from the shore and floated on,
and asked me if we should not do the same. It struck me that if, under
ordinary circumstances, it was unsafe to proceed by night, it must be
doubly dangerous now that the river was covered with floating trees. And
so we remained where we were. The rising sun showed us the unfortunate
city of New Madrid more than three parts destroyed, and flooded, with
here and there one of the wretched inhabitants making his way out of the
ruins. Our boats were in the centre of a sort of island formed by
falling trees, and several hours passed before we could extricate
ourselves. At Natchez, which we reached on the thirty-second day, and
where we remained a week, we heard full particulars of the earthquake,
but we saw nothing of any of the boats that had surrounded us on the
evening of the 6th February. At New Orleans, the only sign perceived of
the commotion was a swinging to and fro of the chandeliers in the
ball-room, and the sickness and fainting of a great number of ladies.
This remarkable earthquake commenced in the north-west of Missouri
state, was felt more or less throughout Louisiana, and extended through
the Gulf of Mexico to Caraccas, where it played great havoc, destroying
nearly the whole city, and swallowing up or reducing to poverty forty
thousand persons. Nothing more was ever heard of the boats, and if we
had not remained stationary we should doubtless have shared their fate.”
After five years’ absence, Mr Nolte found New Orleans greatly increased
in size, but very little improved with respect to the character of its
inhabitants, who had added to their former bad qualities a taste for
lawsuits and chicanery, introduced amongst them by an immigration of
greedy advocates from the Northern States. Mr Nolte—who, as somebody
said of him, many years later, when he was an inmate of the Queen’s
Bench at the suit of the litigious and crack-brained ex-duke of
Brunswick, was all his life the plaything of misfortune, and whose best
concerted and most prudent plans were invariably marred by some
unforeseen incident or disaster—had no sooner taken and furnished a
house in the chief city of Louisiana than news came from Washington of
war having been declared against England—a crushing blow to our poor
adventurer’s well-founded hopes of extensive and profitable transactions
with the great European houses who wished him well and favoured his
enterprise. There was no help for it; he could but cross his hands and
pray for peace. The Mississippi was blockaded by British men-of-war. The
state of things at New Orleans resembled the intolerable monotony and
inactivity of a calm at sea, with the difference that the latter can
last but a few days or weeks, whilst the former might endure for years.
The only incidents that varied the monotony of life at New Orleans
during that war were of an unpleasant nature. In August 1812, a
frightful hurricane drove on shore eighteen of the ships in harbour, and
unroofed nearly the whole city. A few months later, Mr Nolte broke his
right arm at the elbow by a fall from his horse, and the limb ever
afterwards remained stiff and crooked. Party-spirit ran high; private
scandal, quarrels, and duels, were resorted to by the restless and
disreputable citizens of New Orleans as a refuge from ennui. This
portion of Mr Nolte’s book abounds in curious details. “The whole
neighbouring coast was kept in a state of alarm by the piracies of the
brothers Laffitte from Bayonne, by Jauvinet, Beluche, Dominique, Gamba,
and others, who might be seen promenading the streets of New Orleans in
broad daylight, and wholly unmolested. They had their friends and
connections and warehouses in the city, and sold, almost openly, their
stolen goods, especially English manufactures. But the slave trade was
their great resource. They captured Spanish and other slavers on the
high seas, and took them to their chief depôt, the little island of
Barataria on the coast near New Orleans, whither the planters, chiefly
of French extraction, went to purchase the slaves—for one hundred and
fifty or two hundred dollars, instead of six hundred or seven hundred,
which they would have paid in the market—and conveyed them to their
plantations, up the numerous _bayous_ or creeks intersecting that
district. And as the pirates would be paid in hard dollars, specie soon
began to be rare in the city.” Brought into contact, by certain banking
operations, with reckless and unscrupulous men, Mr Nolte managed to get
involved in a couple of duels, in which his stiff arm was of course
highly disadvantageous to him, and, with his usual good luck, he
received a bullet in his leg, which he still carries about with him. A
serious danger put a temporary end to these squabbles. An attack was
expected from the English, and General Jackson made his appearance at
New Orleans with fifteen hundred men, the most efficient amongst whom
were five hundred riflemen who had served with Jackson in the Indian
war, and were known as Coffee’s Brigade, from their commander’s name.
These were the fellows who picked off the British officers from behind
the cotton-bale barricades, of which the materials proceeded from Mr
Nolte’s stores. Trained in repeated encounters with the savages, they
were the sort of men Sealsfield has so vividly painted, totally ignorant
of military organisation and discipline, but inaccessible to fear,
perfectly cool in danger, of great presence of mind and personal
resource, and, above all, unerring marksmen. Mr Nolte, although his
stiff arm exempted him from service, did not choose to see his friends
go out to fight and himself remain behind—the less so that he was
already suspected of partiality to the English—and he joined the light
company of a battalion of militia, several of whose officers had served
under Napoleon. According to Mr Nolte’s account, Jackson, blustering,
presumptuous, and overweeningly self-confident, would have led his
militia and irregulars to certain destruction at the hands of the
well-drilled British troops, but for the advice given him by Livingston,
who acted as one of his aides-de-camp, to consult a French emigrant
major named St Gême, who had formerly been in the English service in
Jamaica, and now commanded a company in the battalion in which Mr Nolte
had enrolled himself. “This officer had been a great deal with Moreau,
when the latter, on a visit to Louisiana a few years previously, had
scanned, with the critical eye of a tactician, the position of New
Orleans and its capabilities of defence. St Gême rendered General
Jackson and the American cause the great service of making him
understand that, in the open field, the English would surround him and
his handful of inexperienced followers, who had but the name of
soldiers, would utterly rout and certainly capture them; and he pointed
out to him the M’Carthy canal as the position which Moreau had himself
fixed upon as the most defensible, especially for raw troops.” Mr Nolte,
who writes impartially, and without visible leaning either to English or
to Americans, praises Jackson for the self-command (a quality he did not
often display) with which he waived his own wishes in deference to the
opinion of the French general (he must have been mad to have disregarded
it), and abandoned plans which assuredly, if carried out, would have led
to the annihilation of his army and the capture of New Orleans.
Livingston, by whose representations he was induced to take counsel of
the French major, was a much better lawyer and statesman than warrior,
according to Mr Nolte, and showed himself but little where bullets were
flying. When the position decided upon was to be taken up and redoubts
built, the ground was found to be swampy and slimy, and the earth
unavailable for any sort of fortification, whereupon a French engineer
suggested the employment of cotton bales. The plan adopted, Jackson
would lose no time. “It was observed to him,” says unlucky Mr Nolte,
lugubriously, “that he certainly might have plenty of cotton in the city
for six or seven cents a pound, but its conveyance would cause a day’s
delay, whereas a barque, already laden with cotton, and whose departure
for the Havana had only been prevented by the arrival of the English
squadron, lay close to the shore. It had on board two hundred and
forty-five bales, which I myself had shipped just before the invasion,
and sixty others belonging to a Spaniard of New Orleans. I was
ill-pleased, when they could have had cheap cotton for six or seven
cents in the town, to see them land, from a ship all ready to sail, my
best quality, which had cost me ten or eleven cents, and I said as much
to Livingston, who was my usual legal adviser in New Orleans, and whom I
fell in with at Battery No. 3. He was never at a loss for an answer.
‘Well, Nolte,’ said he, ‘since it is your cotton, you will not mind the
trouble of defending it.’ A reply which was the foundation of the story
that, when the owner of the cotton complained of its seizure, Jackson
sent him a musket, with the message that upon no man was it so incumbent
to defend the bales as upon their owner, and that he therefore hoped he
would not abandon them.” Mr Nolte’s whole account of the operations at
New Orleans is clear and graphic, but that brief campaign has been so
often described that we are not induced to dwell at much length upon his
narrative, although it contains some passages that, proceeding from an
actor on the American side, possess particular interest. On the left
wing were the best sharpshooters of Kentucky and Tennessee, invisible in
the cypress wood, and loading their rifles with three or four buckshot
besides the bullet. Their good weapons and sure aim sent destruction
through the ranks of the English, who saw no foe, but beheld all their
officers picked off. The whole right flank of the English column was
raked by this deadly fire, whilst in front the American batteries kept
up an uninterrupted discharge. “From time to time,” says Mr Nolte, “when
the smoke blew aside, I and my company obtained a view over the
battle-field, and there we saw the whole English centre retreating,
throwing away their fascines, and a staff-officer on a black horse
gallop forward, his hat in his hand, which he angrily waved as if
threatening the flying column. Suddenly, struck by several bullets, he
fell backwards from his horse—some soldiers wrapped him hastily in
blankets and carried him off. We learned in the evening that the
staff-officer was the commander-in-chief, General Pakenham.” The fight
was soon over. As Mr Nolte justly observes, it was a butchery rather
than a battle. The Americans, completely sheltered, had but some thirty
men killed and wounded, whilst their opponents had to deplore the loss
of many hundred good soldiers, than whom none braver ever bore muskets,
but whose commander’s good fortune was, upon that occasion,
unfortunately not equal to his often-tried valour, and who, moreover,
was misled by false information.
Mr Nolte does ample justice to the coolness, energy, and resolution of
General Jackson, and shows that even the gasconades and exaggerations in
which he constantly indulged had their use, since he thereby deluded his
own people, and all the prisoners taken by the English concurred in such
formidable accounts of the forces at his disposal as could not fail to
influence the proceedings of the invaders. But after the affair of the
8th January, Jackson, prodigiously elevated by his triumph, was anxious
to assume the offensive. For the second time he was indebted to
Livingston for sound advice. “What would you have more?” said the
lawyer; “the city is saved; the English will not renew the attack.
Against troops like those, whose intrepidity amidst the most frightful
slaughter you yourself have witnessed, what is the use of exposing
yourself and your handful of men to be roughly handled, to the
diminution of your glory and at risk of valuable lives?” As in the case
of the position, the general took his aide-de-camp’s sensible advice,
and, as is not unusual, got the whole credit of adopting the only
rational course. Livingston, some of whose eulogists have made of him a
hero as well as a lawgiver, was seized, it appears from Mr Nolte’s
version of the campaign, with a bad colic on the evening of the 7th,
just after it became known that the English would attack next morning,
and retired into New Orleans, where he next day received news of the
action. An hour afterwards he was back in camp—the English and the colic
having retreated together. Another of Jackson’s volunteer aides-de-camp,
also a lawyer, was off into the city before daybreak on the 8th, without
even a pretext, and passed the morning riding about the streets,
shouting out that the foe was at hand, and calling upon all to arm and
hasten to the field—whereas all capable of bearing arms were in the
field, except a few skulkers like himself. No notice was taken of these
gentlemen’s shy behaviour, and Jackson, in his despatch, drawn up by
Livingston, thanked his military and voluntary aides-de-camp “for their
cool and deliberate bravery!”
The cotton bales used for the redoubts, and a quantity of blankets that
had been taken from Mr Nolte’s warehouse during his absence from the
city, gave rise to discussions which brought out the least favourable
side of Jackson’s character. Immediately after the embarkation of the
English, a commission was appointed to settle all claims. Mr Nolte’s was
for 750 blankets and 245 bales of cotton. The former he was allowed for
at the price of the day on which the English landed—namely, eleven
dollars a-pair; but when the order was submitted to Jackson for his
signature and ratification, he said that as the blankets had been taken
(almost forcibly) by the Tennessee riflemen, they should be paid for in
Tennessee notes—then worth 10 per cent less than New Orleans
paper-money. Mr Nolte was fain to submit to this shabby trick, worthy of
a Connecticut pedlar. As regarded his cotton he had much more trouble.
He produced the invoice, proving that he had bought it, two years
previously, at 10 cents a pound, from a well-known wealthy
cotton-grower. He claimed that price, with the addition of two years’
interest. During the whole of that time, it had never been lower than 10
to 11 cents a pound, and a few days before the landing of the English he
had bought some at 12½ cents. But when the British troops were on shore,
and close at hand, there was a panic; markets fell, the timid realised
at any price, and a small parcel of cotton of the same quality was sold
at 7 cents. When Mr Nolte’s claim was submitted to Jackson, he allowed
it, and said the cotton must be paid for at the price it would have
fetched upon the day the American troops marched out of the town. No
notice being taken of Mr Nolte’s written protest against such manifest
injustice, he went to Jackson, then in all the intoxication of his
triumph, and of the exaggerated homage paid him by his countrymen, and
very well disposed to exert the arbitrary power given him by the
military law he still quite unnecessarily maintained—a stretch of
authority for which it will be remembered that he was afterwards fined
by the civil tribunals. In reply to Mr Nolte’s representation and
remonstrance—
“‘Aren’t you very lucky,’ he asked, ‘to have saved the rest of your
cotton through my defence of the city?’
“‘Certainly, general,’ answered I, ‘as lucky as every other man in the
place, but with this difference, that it costs them nothing, and that I
have to bear all the loss.’
“‘Loss?’ cried the general, getting rather angry—‘loss? You have saved
everything!’
“I saw it was no use arguing with such an obstinate man, and remarked to
him that I only wanted compensation for my cotton, nothing more, and
that the best compensation would be to give me back the same quantity
and quality that had been taken from me; that I would appoint one
merchant, he another; they would agree as to quality, buy the cotton,
deliver it me, and he should pay for it.
“‘No, no, sir!’ replied Jackson; ‘I like straightforward business, and
that is too complicated. You must take 6 cents for your cotton. I have
nothing more to say.’
“I wanted to make the whole thing clear to him, but he cut me short:
‘Come, sir, come! Take a glass of whiskey-and-water; you must be damned
dry after all your arguing.’
“All I could do was to say: ‘Well, general, I did not expect such
injustice at your hands! Good morning, sir!’ And I went away. Three days
afterwards news came of the conclusion of peace, and the consequence was
an immediate rise of cotton to 16 cents, at which price I bought several
parcels. The committee of claims were embarrassed; they felt that it was
now impossible to fob me off with 6 cents. At last I was asked if I
would _now_ be content with payment of my invoice; and I agreed to be
so, since I must else have complained to Congress, and the affair might
have dragged on for years.”
Some pages are devoted by Mr Nolte to an appreciation of Old Hickory’s
character. He condemns his arbitrary and overbearing disposition, and
his cruelty to the unfortunate Indians, whom he so implacably and
perseveringly hunted down, but does justice to his shrewdness and other
good qualities, considering, however, that good luck had more to do than
commanding talent with the distinction and popularity he attained to in
the States—an opinion which we suspect to be now entertained by a very
large number of Jackson’s countrymen. Of the general’s tone and
manners—rough as those of a far-west woodsman—Mr Nolte gives some
humorous examples. After the action in front of New Orleans,
demonstrations innumerable were made in the hero’s honour. On his return
into the city, Mrs Livingston placed a crown of laurel upon his head,
which seemed considerably to embarrass the slayer of Seminoles, who took
it off as if it burned his brow; the ladies subscribed for a costly set
of jewels for Mrs General Jackson; and the principal inhabitants got up
a grand ball in the French Exchange. Mr Nolte, who had seen more public
festivities than most of the people of New Orleans, was a prominent and
active member of the committee.
“The upper part of the Exchange was arranged for dancing, the lower part
for supper, with flowers, coloured lamps, and transparencies. Before
supper, Jackson desired to go alone and take a view of the arrangements,
and I had to show him the way. On one of the transparencies, between the
arcades, were to be read the words: ‘Jackson and victory, they are but
one.’ The general turned round to me, in a more cordial manner than I
might have expected, and asked, ‘Why did you not say Hickory and
victory, they are but one?’ After supper the hero of the day gave us the
diverting spectacle of a _pas de deux_ between him and his wife—an Irish
emigrant of low origin and considerable corpulence, whom he had taken
away from a planter in Georgia. To see those two, the general a long
lean man with skeleton-like limbs, and his wife, a short thick specimen
of the female figure, dancing opposite to each other like half-drunken
Indians, to the wild tune of ‘Opossum up a gum tree,’ was truly one of
those remarkable spectacles which would be sought in vain in any
European ballet.”
During the second year of the war between England and the States, a fine
West Indiaman of 900 tons burthen, the “Lord Nelson,” was captured by
the Yankee privateer Saratoga, taken into New Orleans, and sold by
auction for a fourth of its value. Mr Nolte was the purchaser. Now that
the war was over, he loaded her with cotton and deerskins, altered her
name to the “Horatio,” and sailed for Nantes, with several passengers on
board. The ship was but just outside the mouths of the Mississippi, when
she spoke a vessel that had made an unusually short voyage from Havre,
and brought news of Napoleon’s landing at Cannes, rapid march through
France, and reinstallation in the Tuileries. Two Frenchmen, who were
amongst the passengers, and one of whom had served under the emperor,
were overjoyed. Presently it was discovered that the “Horatio” had not
enough ballast for her two thousand bales of cotton, and she put into
the Havana to supply the deficiency, thus somewhat lengthening her
voyage. Off the Scilly Islands she spoke the monthly packet from London
to New York. After the interchange of a little nautical information:
“What news from France?” roared Mr Nolte’s captain through his
speaking-trumpet. “The Duke of Wellington and the British army are in
Paris,” was the reply. “Where is Buonaparte?” “Fled—nobody knows where.”
And the two ships pursued their respective courses. The French
passengers would not believe a word of it. It was English news, they
said, manufactured in London; and they proved to each other, as clear as
sunlight, that it was physically and morally impossible the intelligence
should be true. It took the testimony of a French pilot, and the sight
of the white flag on the banks of the Loire, to convince them that
Napoleon had again fallen. The French population of New Orleans went yet
farther in their incredulity. The Buonapartist _Courrier de la
Louisiane_ analysed the news, and ingeniously proved that the pretended
victory of the Allies was merely a mask for a total defeat; that the
emperor had achieved one of his great triumphs, which should forthwith
be celebrated. And accordingly Napoleon’s bust, crowned with laurels,
was that evening carried in procession, by the light of hundreds of
torches, with several bands of music playing French national
airs;—premature rejoicings, which the confirmation of the defeat of the
French converted into profound consternation.
Paris, whither Mr Nolte hastened as soon as possible after landing, was
full of novelty and excitement, and the focus on which the eyes of
Europe were fixed. He devotes an interesting chapter to sketches of
“Paris after Waterloo.” Amongst the crowds of foreign uniforms were here
and there to be seen, he says, “spectral figures, in long blue coats
buttoned to the chin, spurred boots, and hats pressed down over their
eyes. These men, who cast such gloomy glances around them, were the
officers of the disbanded French army. The ribbon of the Legion of
Honour had disappeared from their button-hole, but it was easy to
recognise them by their flashing eyes and fierce expression when an
English uniform drew near. An accidental push or touch on the foot,
often unavoidable in a crowd, and they would burst out, in great
bitterness, with an angry—‘_Je suis Français, Monsieur!_’ or, ‘_No,
Padrone, questa e l’uniforme di Amburgo!_’ and if the ‘_Pardon,
Monsieur!_’ was not forthcoming, a quarrel was the almost inevitable
result. The police had the difficult task of keeping these remnants of
the French army out of Paris, but they were not very successful in so
doing. Notwithstanding the violent irritation of the French military,
which was kept under only by the strong hand, nobody in Paris went
amongst them more fearlessly than the Duke of Wellington, who showed
himself everywhere in a plain blue frock, with the English red scarf
round his waist, and a simple red and white feather in his cocked hat,
and usually rode about alone, followed only by a sergeant. Thus plainly
equipped and slenderly escorted, I saw him one morning ride into the
court of the Hotel de l’Empire, and ask for the celebrated London banker
Angerstein, who was stopping there.” Ney’s death, the restaurants and
coffeehouses then in vogue, and which were thronged with English and
Prussian officers, and grand reviews of the allied troops, are in turn
glanced at. At the review of the Russian guard, drawn up along the whole
length of the boulevards, Mr Nolte had a particularly good view of the
sovereigns. By favour of a colonel, with whom he had fallen into
conversation, he was allowed to remain within the line cleared by the
sentries, and close to the colonel’s horse. “Suddenly the three monarchs
came riding rapidly up, the Emperor Alexander in the middle, his eyes
directed to the ladies in the balconies and at the windows—on his right
the Emperor Francis, with a serious straightforward gaze—on his left
King Frederick-William III., who seemed to be examining the grisettes in
the crowd rather than the ladies at the windows. The staff, according to
the estimate of my obliging colonel, comprised more than a thousand
military men of all nations. As good luck would have it, the sovereigns
and their whole retinue paused in front of the regiment on my right, and
the colonel pointed out to me the Russian grand-dukes, the Austrian
archdukes, several Prussian princes, Wellington, Schwarzenberg, Blucher,
Platoff,” &c. &c. Of all the commanders then assembled in Paris, the
most dissatisfied was the American general, Scott (since noted for his
campaign in Mexico), who had been opposed to the English on the Canadian
frontier, had taken a fort or two, and was looked upon by his countrymen
as a military star of the very first magnitude—second only to Jackson,
and equal to any other warrior then extant. He had been sent to Europe
to increase his military knowledge and study the art of war, and reached
Paris fully convinced that all the great chiefs of the Continental
armies would hasten to greet and compliment him. “To his visible
vexation, he found himself completely mistaken. In the great military
meetings in the French capital, where Wellington, Blucher,
Schwarzenberg, Kutusoff, Woronzoff, and a host of other celebrities,
laden with stars and orders, were assembled—the long thin man, in his
blue coat without embroidery, and with only a pair of moderate-sized
epaulets, excited no attention. Scott could not get over the contrast
between the figure he had so recently cut in his native land, and the
insignificance he was condemned to in France, and he often exhibited
bitter and somewhat laughable ill-humour.” After a visit to the field of
Waterloo, Mr Nolte returns to America, on cotton speculations intent—of
which, and of Baring Brothers, he for some time discourses, until we are
not sorry to see the theme changed, and him back in Paris, passing a
Sunday at the country-house of _Maison sur Seine_, built by Louis XIV.,
and then just purchased from the French government by the banker Jacques
Laffitte, whom he found in his park, accompanied by two plainly-dressed
and plain-mannered Englishmen, who talked knowingly about cotton, and
whom he took for Manchester cotton-spinners. At dinner, to his surprise,
although Casimir Perrier and several deputies and Frenchmen of mark were
present, the places of honour were for the Englishmen. He made up his
mind that they must be very great people in the cotton-spinning
line—perhaps the first in Manchester—and that they must have large
credits on Laffitte’s house—that giving, not unfrequently, the measure
of the hospitality of Parisian bankers. Laffitte, who was a great
talker—given to discourse for hours together, with scarcely a break, and
with innumerable digressions totally irrelevant to the subject under
discussion—was loquacious as usual, and related many things that had
occurred during the Hundred Days. At that time Napoleon had sent for and
consulted him almost daily. Laffitte said that he had never been a
worshipper of Napoleon’s, but he then had opportunity of convincing
himself that the emperor possessed, in the highest degree, the art of
popularity. “‘He was very confidential with me,’ said Laffitte, ‘spoke
without reserve, and once made a striking remark concerning our nation.
“To govern the French,” he said, “one must have arms of iron and gloves
of velvet.”’ My readers may probably have heard this remark, but not the
reply immediately made by Madame Laffitte’s right-hand neighbour (one of
the Manchester cotton-spinners aforesaid). ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘that is very
true, but—he often forgot to put on his gloves.’ The remark was so apt
and true that all present laughed heartily. I asked my next neighbour
who the witty foreigner was, and learned that it was the Marquis of
Lansdowne.”
Involved in the commercial disasters of 1825–6, Mr Nolte left New
Orleans, sixteen years after his first establishment there, and went to
seek in Europe that fortune which had constantly eluded his grasp in the
States. His success in the Old World was little better than in the New.
In after years, he again more than once visited America, and engaged in
enormous cotton speculations, in which he burnt his fingers. Cotton
seems to have had for him the same irresistible attraction that dice
have for the veteran gambler. Although many of his misfortunes were the
result of circumstances neither to be foreseen nor guarded against, and
although we may suppose that he makes out the best case he fairly can,
the impression left by his book upon the reader’s mind is, that Mr
Vincent Nolte has been, to say the least, a very venturesome person, and
that his abilities and opportunities would have amply sufficed to insure
him ultimate affluence, had he been less impatient to acquire a large
and rapid fortune. On the other hand, he deserves credit for his
unflinching pluck, and for his elasticity under misfortune. When he left
New Orleans, he attempted to form a partnership at Havre, but in vain;
and he himself frankly admits that he was unsuccessful, because the
merchants with whom he would have associated himself were deterred by
his reputed taste for the vast and daring operations in which he had
been early initiated. The slow but sure gains of the steady trader he
never had patience to collect; the ordinary routine of commercial
affairs was to him wearisome and intolerable; he carried into the
peaceful paths of trade something of that venturesome and aspiring
spirit which, upon the battle-field, insures the soldier high
distinction or sudden death—a bullet or a marshal’s baton. We regret to
fear that it has led Mr Nolte, after his long and busy life, to no very
prosperous position; although he seems to preserve to the last the
spirit and vigour that have borne him through so many trying
vicissitudes. At the time now referred to, he was still in his prime,
and full of hope and confidence. From Havre he betook himself to his
favourite city of Paris, where, by the assistance and introduction of
his staunch friends the Barings, he was on the eve of concluding a
partnership for the establishment of a house at Marseilles. The
circulars were printed; Mr Nolte took a run to Hamburg, Holland, and
England, to visit commercial friends, and everywhere he met a kind and
encouraging reception. He reached Southampton, on his return to Paris,
two hours after the departure of the packet, and, with characteristic
impatience, rather than wait two days, hired an open boat, whose owner
undertook to land him at Havre early the next morning. It was a
moonlight night, and a fair wind at starting, but he was becalmed in the
Channel, and lay a whole day roasting in the sun. Upon the morning of
the 26th July 1830, he landed at Havre, and posted on to Paris. At Rouen
he remarked signs of uneasiness, and the troops were under arms; at
Courbevoie he received the first news of the fatal ordinances; outside
the Paris barrier, a few persons stopped his chaise, and tore the white
cockade from the postilion’s hat. Paris was enacting the most peaceful
and respectable of its numerous revolutions.
Mr Nolte witnessed the proceedings of the three days of July, and betook
himself to Marseilles, where he had scarcely commenced business when the
failure of the Irish-French bankers who were to advance the greater part
of the capital on behalf of his partner compelled him again to abandon
it, and once more to return to Paris. He had been on very intimate terms
with General Lafayette during that veteran revolutionist’s visit to the
United States in 1825, had travelled with him, acted as his banker,
rendered him some service, and shown him many attentions; for which he
deemed himself far more than compensated by the privilege of the
general’s society, and by the interest of his conversation. Alone with
him, in the cabin of the American steamer which the authorities of New
Orleans had allotted to the use of Washington’s old friend and comrade,
Lafayette spoke freely of his past life and present opinions, and Mr
Nolte was astonished by the revelation of plans which he would never
have suspected to have lingered in that venerable head—so soon, in all
probability, to be laid in the grave. The man who, at least as well as
any living, had had opportunities of judging the Bourbon
character—before and since the day when, upon the balcony at Versailles,
he kissed, in sign of peace and good understanding, the hand of the
defamed and martyred Marie Antoinette, amidst the acclamations of
assembled thousands, whose discontent the symbol and the promised return
of the royal family to Paris promptly, although but temporarily,
appeased—declared his conviction of its unworthiness. For the good of
France, in his opinion, she must expel the race of whom Talleyrand so
truly said, that they had forgotten nothing, and learned nothing.
“‘France cannot be happy under the Bourbons,’ said Lafayette, ‘and we
must get rid of them. It would be already done, had Laffitte chosen.’
“‘Indeed!’ I exclaimed; ‘how so?’
“‘It is not so long ago,’ continued the general, ‘that you will have
forgotten how two of the regiments of guards that were ordered to Spain
under the command of the Duke of Angoulême, halted in Toulouse, and
showed signs of raising the banner of revolt. The affair was quickly
suppressed, and kept as quiet as possible. But the plan was ripe! I knew
that from my private correspondence with several officers, and nothing
but money was wanting for a successful insurrection then to have
occurred. I addressed myself to Laffitte; he had scruples; he would and
he would not. At last I offered to carry the thing through without his
participation. On the first occasion when we are alone together—I said
to him—but as soon as possible, lay a million of francs in bank-notes
upon the chimney-piece—I will put them in my pocket without your
perceiving it. The rest you may leave to me! Laffitte hesitated, was
undecided, and at last declared he would have nothing whatever to do
with the affair. And so the whole project fell through!’
“I could not conceal my surprise. ‘Had I heard what you have just told
me from any other lips than yours, general,’ I said, ‘I would not have
believed a word of it.’ The general merely replied, ‘_C’etait pourtant
ainsi._’”
In 1830 Lafayette’s desire was fulfilled—not to its full extent, for he
wished the Bourbons to be replaced by a republic, partly because he
believed that form of government the best suited to render France happy
and prosperous, and partly because it would have best enabled him to
gratify his unbounded greed of popularity. But the Bourbons had fled,
and France had a citizen king and a national guard. Arms were required
for the latter, and Mr Nolte thought that their supply would be a
profitable business—quite in his way, because there was much money to be
made in a short time. Lafayette, besides being commander-in-chief of the
national guard, was the intimate friend of Gerard, Louis Philippe’s
first minister of war, in whose department the matter lay, and who was
desirous of making contracts for the supply of muskets. Mr Nolte betook
himself to Lafayette, who received him most cordially (embracing him, to
the infinite astonishment of his aide-de-camp, who had taken Nolte for
an Englishman), and gave him the strongest recommendation to Gerard; the
result of which was, that he obtained extensive contracts for the supply
not only of muskets, but of the _briquets_ or short Roman swords which
Soult, who succeeded Gerard at the war-office, introduced into the army,
and by which the mercenary old marshal—so his enemies affirmed, and
thousands to this day believe—himself pocketed no inconsiderable sum. Be
this true or not—and Soult’s proved rapacity at many previous periods of
his life gave but too much probability to the accusation—Mr Nolte had
occasion, whilst carrying out his contracts, which extended over a
considerable time, to note several instances of that venality of French
officials which rose to such a height under Louis Philippe’s reign as at
last to extend to his very ministers, and to constitute one of the
prominent causes of his dethronement. As early as 1831, Mr Nolte assures
us, itching palms were plenty in France, and that amongst personages of
no humble rank. But as far as military men were concerned, this was a
mere continuation of the traditions and usages of the Empire—that period
of unrefined sensuality and reckless extravagance, during which
Napoleon’s subalterns, following their leader’s unscrupulous example,
filled their pockets whenever and wherever they could, without much
regard to the delicacy of the means employed. Amongst the anecdotes
illustrative of this state of corruption to be found in Mr Nolte’s
Reminiscences, is one of a certain general officer, not named, whom he
thought it advisable to propitiate by a present. In this case, as in all
others of the kind in which he had to deal with men of good breeding and
position, the puzzle was how to administer the _douceur_ so that it
might be taken without embarrassment. Mrs Nolte, to whom her husband
communicated his difficulty, undertook to ascertain, through her
acquaintances, the tastes and partialities of the high functionary in
question. She discovered that he was very fond of snuff-boxes.
“This ascertained,” says Mr Nolte, “I chose a very handsome box, and
placed a bank-note in it, in such a manner that on opening the box the
amount, 1000 francs, must immediately catch the eye. Then I took the
first opportunity that presented itself, when my friend had recourse to
his own box for a pinch, to produce mine, as if for the same purpose. It
immediately attracted his attention. ‘That snuff-box is really in
excellent taste!’ he exclaimed. ‘Since it pleases you, general,’ I
replied, ‘oblige me by accepting it as a keepsake!’ He thanked me, took
the box, and at once opened it. I did not long remain in doubt as to the
manner in which my present would be received. ‘Aha!’ he cried, ‘but it
is right you should know that I am a great snuff-taker. A double pinch
never does any harm, my dear sir!’ and so saying, he pocketed the box.
The hint sufficed. On my return home, I enclosed a second thousand-franc
note, with my card, in an envelope, and sent it to him.”
Another officer of rank, a colonel of artillery, who had served under
Napoleon, and was then in command of the arsenal at Havre, made some
difficulty about receiving a much larger sum, offered him by Mr Nolte in
acknowledgment of important and gratuitous services, most kindly
rendered. He ended by pocketing the affront, when it was sent by Mr
Nolte under cover to his confidential servant, and probably, as an old
soldier of the Empire, he thought it quite equitable and honourable that
he should have his slice of the contractor’s gain. But he afterwards
made a most generous use of a portion of the sum. Poor Nolte, after
toiling hard for three years, during which time he delivered arms to the
amount of nearly eight millions of francs, fell amongst thieves, as too
often happened to him, and was swindled out of all his earnings. Some
time afterwards, when he was absent from Paris in pursuit of fresh
schemes, Colonel Lefrançois happened to hear that his wife was in
embarrassed circumstances, and immediately called upon her. “My dear
Madam,” he said, “I have received a great deal of money from your
husband, much more than I had any claim to—I have spent and squandered
the greater part of it, as one is wont to do with windfalls of that
kind. But now that you need it, it is my duty to return you what
remains. Here it is—do me the favour to accept it. You, your husband,
and your little family, will always be dear to me.” This trait contrasts
pleasingly with the numerous others, of a very contrary nature, to be
found in the record of Mr Nolte’s Parisian experiences and transactions.
These were of a nature to bring him into unavoidable—but, to him, in no
way discreditable—connection with various equivocal characters. Some of
his contracts were for secondhand muskets, which he employed agents to
seek in the brokers’ shops of Paris. Many of these agents were
recommended to him by the subordinate officials of the war-office.
Others he fell in with casually. Thus, in the month of December 1831, a
down-looking man, of unprepossessing exterior, accosted him on the
stairs of the artillery depot, in the Rue de Luxembourg, and offered his
services for the purchase of old muskets. Mr Nolte briefly replied, that
if he knew of a parcel of such weapons for sale, he would send to look
at them, and would buy them if price and quality suited. Accordingly,
several small parcels of arms were purchased of this man, whose name was
Darmenon, and whose flighty, uncertain manner always displeased Mr
Nolte, and made him think he must have done something that would not
bear daylight. On inquiry of the police, he learned that he was a
forger, who had served his time at the galleys. He could not, however,
on this account, make up his mind to refuse the unfortunate fellow’s
services, and so, perhaps, drive him again to crime, so he continued to
employ him, and Darmenon made himself very useful, and, moreover, gave
him constant information of the plans and movements of the malcontents
of the Faubourg St Antoine. Through him and other agents, Mr Nolte was
kept informed of the number of muskets daily brought into Paris, the
persons to whom they were delivered, and various other particulars. It
was rare that more than 100 or 120 came in at a time. One morning,
however, Darmenon informed his employer that 2600 had been brought in at
an early hour through the barrier of St Denis, and had been taken to the
faubourg of the same name. On reporting this at the ministry of war, Mr
Nolte received directions to purchase the whole lot immediately on
government account, and regardless of price. The purchase was effected,
but not without some competition, which he thought unlikely to proceed
from a merely mercantile motive, and on setting his agents to work, he
found that his competitors were the Legitimists, who had been very busy
for some time past. He became convinced, from this and other information
that reached him, that there was a plot in existence against Louis
Philippe, and he desired Darmenon to keep a sharp look-out, and inform
him of whatever came to his knowledge. The occupation seemed to the
taste of the ex-galley-slave, who reported, on the morning of the 1st
February, that several Carlist emissaries were at work in the Faubourg
St Antoine, that towards noon there would probably be a gathering of
workmen, who would raise the banner of Henry V., and that at ten o’clock
at night the conspirators would leave the house, No. 18 Rue des
Prouvaires, force their way into the Tuileries, where there was to be a
ball that evening, surround Louis Philippe, lead him away, and put him
to death. The conspirators, with whom Darmenon confessed himself to have
been long in the habit of intercourse, had offered him 6000 francs for
200 muskets, and had paid him 2000 francs in advance. These
circumstantial details, and the sight of the notes, convincing Mr Nolte
of the truth of the story, he jumped into his cab and drove to the
prefecture of police, then presided over by the notorious Gisquet. On
his way he called at the Bourse. There had been a sudden fall of 1½ per
cent, owing to alarming rumours and to heavy sales by the Carlists.
Gisquet, with whom Mr Nolte was acquainted, discredited, or affected to
discredit, the whole affair, but noted a few particulars, and politely
thanked his informant for the needless trouble he had given himself.
But, before seven o’clock that evening, Darmenon had the whole 6000
francs in his possession. The 200 muskets were to be sent for before ten
o’clock. Mr Nolte again hurried to Gisquet, and asked if he should
deliver them. “Yes,” was the reply; “a few at a time; I will have them
followed.” Mr Nolte gave the needful instructions, and was informed, the
next morning, by his storekeeper, that Darmenon had had seventeen
muskets delivered to him, and had been forthwith arrested. The Paris
papers of the 2d February announced that the police, with Mr Carlier
(then chief of the municipal guard, since prefect of police under the
Republic) at their head, had forced their way into the house, No. 18 Rue
des Prouvaires, at 11 o’clock on the previous night, and, after some
resistance, had captured the whole band of conspirators there assembled.
From the evidence on the trial, it appeared that Gisquet, incredulous to
the eleventh hour, was even then undecided what to do. He feared the
attack of the opposition press, ever ready to accuse the police of
fabricating the plots they discovered. Carlier at last put an end to his
perplexity, by violently exclaiming, “They are armed; we are of superior
force; we must enter the house and use our weapons!” An hour later this
was done; a municipal guard was killed, and Carlier himself received a
slight bullet-wound on the head.
When Marshal Soult, Mr Nolte tells us, learned that it was one of his
contractors who had led the way to the discovery of the plot, he was
displeased that he had not been first informed of it, instead of the
prefect of police. He was jealous of Thiers, then minister of the
interior, who, on his part, bore him no love. Soult would not have been
sorry to expose the inefficiency of his colleague’s police; Thiers,
owing to the course adopted by Mr Nolte, was enabled to make a boast of
its vigilance. All the merit of the affair was attributed to Gisquet,
who was promoted to the rank of officer of the Legion of Honour. And
when that worthy, after he was dismissed for his venality and scandalous
immorality, wrote his memoirs and attempted justification, he ascribed
the discovery of the plot of the Rue des Prouvaires entirely to his own
activity and zeal, and made no mention whatever of Mr Nolte.
A chapter of amusing gossip, headed “Reminiscences of the Artistic World
of Paris,” tempts us to linger, but the length to which this paper has
already extended admonishes us to pause. We conclude by extracting a
short anecdote, which we do not remember to have before heard, of that
eccentric genius, Horace Vernet. It was some time before the capture of
the Smala, his picture of which added so greatly to his reputation.
Vernet was in Marshal Bugeaud’s camp, where all the soldiers knew of his
presence, and one of them, who had promised to send his portrait to his
mother, went to him and asked him if he would undertake the work, and at
what price. Vernet’s reply was that he could not do it for less than a
twenty-franc piece. The soldier thought this rather a high figure, but
agreed to pay it, provided the likeness was perfect. This the painter
promised that it should be, and accordingly, when the picture was done,
it was exhibited in the camp, and the striking resemblance was
proclaimed by all the comrades of the original. Thereupon the soldier
paid the stipulated price, which Vernet quietly pocketed, observing that
an artist must live by the price of his work. On leaving the camp, two
days afterwards, he sent twenty napoleons to the captain of the
soldier’s company, for distribution to him and his brave comrades.
Seldom, either in print or in the flesh, have we fallen in with so
restless, versatile, and excursive a genius as Vincent Nolte, Esq., of
Europe and America—no more limited address will sufficiently express his
cosmopolitan domicile. The reader will perhaps imagine, after the
perusal of this tolerably desultory paper, that we have traced a
considerable portion of his journey through life. No idea was ever more
erroneous. We have only picked a little here and there, and have taken
scarcely any notice of the parts the author doubtless considers the most
important in his book, and which will certainly be read with strong
interest by bankers and merchants old enough to remember the mercantile
history of the first quarter of the present century. It is chiefly to
those intimate and personal commercial details that we attribute the
uncommon success Mr Nolte’s autobiography has had in its place of
publication, and in Germany generally. Independently of those, it
contains matter of interest and entertainment for all classes of
readers.
A SPORTING SETTLER IN CEYLON.[12]
One of the most striking features of the present age, with reference to
our own country, is to be found in that wonderful chain of steam
communication, which within the last few years we have seen gradually
linking together the British dominions, and which must girdle the globe
before it completely connects every portion of our vast empire. But if
it is a subject of national pride that our possessions are scattered so
widely over the face of the earth, the universal ignorance which
prevails respecting them in the mother country only becomes the more
incomprehensible and deeply to be deplored. Moreover, the comparatively
small amount of intelligence which has been brought to bear upon the
subject has been most partially and improperly distributed. The
_colonies_ of Great Britain have engrossed all the sympathies of the
home public. The _dependencies_ are utterly neglected, or, which comes
to much the same thing, consigned unreservedly to the tender mercies of
the Colonial Office.
However much may be regretted this marked preference in favour of the
colony, it is easily accounted for. An inviting and almost totally
uninhabited country of vast extent and genial climate, possessing a
fertile soil, and sources of unknown wealth, tempts a certain class of
the home community to quit for ever their native shores and risk their
fortunes in those distant lands, which henceforward possess an interest
in the eyes of those they have left behind, and create in them the
spirit of inquiry and enterprise. In the case of the dependency, no such
inducement exists. A tropical climate is a bugbear utterly appalling to
the intending emigrant. He shudders at the bare idea of passing the rest
of his existence in a temperature of 90°, exposed to the attacks of
cholera, fever, natives, and snakes. He has heard of fortunes having
been made in India, but he has never heard of children having been
brought up there, and so having failed in the attempt to get a
writership for his son, he pities the lot of those who are more
successful, does not bestow a second thought upon that continent to
which his country owes, in a great measure, her prosperity, and betakes
himself, with his wife and family, to the backwoods of Canada.
And if India is treated with such indifference, what must be the fate of
that large pear-shaped island at its southern extremity, perhaps more
easily recognised by the well educated as Taprobane than as Ceylon. To
be sure, Trincomalee (the white man’s grave) is a name familiar to their
ears, but the existence of Colombo, a city containing 60,000
inhabitants, and the seat of government, is altogether ignored, just as
the Cingalese themselves seldom hear of England, or are accustomed to
think of it only as the capital of London. The absence of any recent
popular work upon Ceylon may in some measure account for, while it
cannot quite excuse, this ignorance. And we should certainly deeply
commiserate any one who, in a moment of infatuation, attempted to
acquire his information from the work of Sir Emerson Tenant, which was
published about two years ago, entitled _Christianity in Ceylon_. Those
who are really interested in the subject of Christianity will find it
treated of there in a cold, unsympathising manner, calculated rather to
repel than to attract them. Indeed, the unfavourable reception which
this book has already met with, proves that the general public, but too
little mindful of Christianity at home, care as little for its
development in Ceylon as did Sir Emerson himself during his late
administration as Colonial Secretary of the island. Mr Baker has
evidently a much better appreciation of the popular taste, when, instead
of “Christianity,” he gives us “The Rifle and the Hound” in Ceylon; and
we entertain no doubt that the result will prove this satisfactorily
alike to himself and to his publishers.
We have, indeed, seldom perused a work with a keener relish than the one
we have just laid down. Our author has shown in it that he can wield his
pen as ably as he can handle his rifle, and in his exciting description
of wild sports in Ceylon, he gives the public a “view halloo” of the
game he is in sight of there, that must stir within him the soul of
every true sportsman. But the interest of Mr Baker’s book does not
consist so much in the telling and graphic manner in which he relates
his own adventures and hairbreadth escapes, as in the perfectly new
character in which he represents the island where he has now permanently
established himself, and where he seems to be enjoying existence in a
capacity hitherto untried in that tropical clime; for he is no
coffee-planter reconciling himself to a solitary existence in the jungle
by the hope of speedily realising what he terms “a comfortable
independence,” upon which to return to his native land—or Ceylon civil
servant, revelling in the prospect of retiring when he is grey-headed to
enjoy anything but a comfortable independence, viz. £500 a-year, or half
the highest salary that splendid service offers to unfortunate younger
sons. Nor is he stationed out here with his regiment, altogether
regardless, as a soldier ought to be, of a comfortable independence, and
anxious to keep his hand in for natives by shooting elephants. He is no
mere dilettante sportsman, endeavouring to recover the effects, and
dissipate the recollections, of half a dozen London seasons. He is a
_settler_—positively a settler in Ceylon. If our preconceived
impressions of this colony be true, what a sanguine temperament our
author must possess, to enable him to expose himself so cheerfully to
the attacks of fever and wild beasts for the rest of his life. There
certainly never was such an act of insanity perpetrated; he might as
well have emigrated to the infernal regions at once. We have no doubt
his friends told him so before he quitted the genial clime of his native
land. But before we condemn him so roundly, let us see where he has
pitched his tent, and what sort of answer he sends back to the inquiries
of these anxious friends of his.
“Here, then, I am in my private sanctum, my rifles all arranged in
their respective stands above the chimney-piece, the stag’s horns
round walls hung with horn-cases, powder-flasks, and the various
weapons of the chase. Even as I write, the hounds are yelling in the
kennel.
“The thermometer is at 62° Fahr., and it is mid-day. It never exceeds
72° in the hottest weather, and sometimes falls below freezing point
at night. The sky is spotless, and the air calm. The fragrance of
mignonettes, and a hundred flowers that recall Old England, fill the
air. Green fields of grass and clover, neatly fenced, surround a
comfortable house and grounds. Well-fed cattle of the choicest breeds,
and English sheep, are grazing in the paddocks. Well made roads and
gravel walks run through the estate. But a few years past, and this
was all wilderness.
“Dense forest reigned where now not even the stump of a tree is
standing; the wind howled over hill and valley, the dank moss hung
from the scathed branches, the deep morass filled the hollows; but all
is changed by the hand of civilisation and industry. The dense forests
and rough plains, which still form the boundaries of the cultivated
land, only add to the beauty. The monkeys and parrots are even now
chattering among the branches; and occasionally the elephant, in his
nightly wanderings, trespasses upon the fields, unconscious of the
oasis within his territory of savage nature.
“The still starlight night is awakened by the harsh bark of the elk;
the lofty mountains, grey with the silvery moonlight, echo back the
sound, and the wakeful hounds answer the well-known cry by a prolonged
and savage yell.
“This is ‘Newera Ellia,’ the sanatorium of Ceylon, the most perfect
climate of the world. It now boasts of a handsome church, a public
reading-room, a large hotel, the barracks, and about twenty private
residences.
“The adjacent country, of comparatively table-land, occupies an extent
of some thirty miles in length, varying in altitude from six thousand
two hundred to seven thousand feet, forming a base for the highest
peaks in Ceylon, which rise to nearly nine thousand feet.
“Alternate large plains, separated by belts of forest, rapid rivers,
waterfalls, precipices, and panoramic views of boundless extent, form
the features of this country, which, combined with the sports of the
place, render a residence at Newera Ellia a life of health, luxury,
and independence.”
So Mr Baker is not quite a maniac after all—in fact, his lines seem cast
in rather pleasant places; and, if we may draw our own inferences from
the brief description he gives us of his island home, the pleasures of
the chase are only resorted to as an agreeable variation from the
ordinary routine of his agricultural pursuits. He is a solitary specimen
in Ceylon of that race so highly respected in our own country, which
combines at once the sportsman, the farmer, and the gentleman.
It has ever been a matter of astonishment to us that no sportsman of the
Cinnamon Isle has before this been inspired by his romantic and
adventurous life to depict those scenes in which he has himself
revelled, so as to allow the public the gratification of participating,
although only in imagination, in wild sports of a nature as exciting and
hazardous as the manner in which they are prosecuted is novel and
enjoyable. We have not only explored, with Gordon Cumming, the interior
of South Africa, but have been bored to death by exhibitions in our own
country of the trophies which attest his courage and energy. Although we
have never visited the Far West, we are as familiar with the life of the
buffalo-hunter or prairie Indian as Washington Irving himself.—For did
we not live among trappers, with the inimitable Ruxton for our
companion, while we have only just returned from a solitary ramble with
Palliser. And so tired are we of shooting tigers and hunting boars in
India with the Cockney who goes out for a winter excursion, or the
“Company’s” lady who wishes to astonish her sisters at home, and disgust
her husband at “the station,” that we should infinitely prefer reading
the account in the county paper of the last run of the subscription
pack, to Mrs M.’s charming description of the Shickar at B——, and the
grand Tomasha with which it terminated. And, indeed, if we are accused
of giving too unfavourable an impression of Indian sport, it is because,
when we compare our own experiences of sport in Bengal with that in
Ceylon, we feel that the merits of the latter have been utterly ignored
and overwhelmed by a profusion of rubbishy, exaggerated pictures of
tiger-hunting and pig-sticking, half of which have been drawn, as a
sportsman can at once detect, by those who have never seen a tiger or a
wild boar before they gave us this account of their “fearful
adventures.” We certainly will maintain that sport in India is very far
inferior to sport in Ceylon, inasmuch as it is much more exciting to
shoot an elephant than to ride one. The insipidity of rocking about on
the back of an elephant, looking for a tiger among long grass, and
running away or not when you find one, as it suits the fancy of the
mahout or the elephant, is easily appreciated by those who have ever
indulged in the delectable amusement of stalking a “rogue,” with nothing
but a pair of rifle barrels and a pair of stout legs to trust to. We
engage to say, that if there were as much elephant-shooting in Ceylon as
there is tiger-shooting in India, the proportion of deaths in the former
country would be as ten to one. We will admit that “shickar”
arrangements are made on a much more magnificent and luxurious scale in
India than in Ceylon; but this is a very secondary consideration with
the true sportsman, and we certainly never enjoyed life more thoroughly
at any time than while making our jungle trips in those wild districts
in Ceylon which are so plentifully stocked with game. What an
independent existence was that! far from the haunts of men by some
secluded tank,—a monument of the industry and greatness of a race long
since passed away,—shadowed over by the lofty and graceful tamarind
tree, is pitched our snug little single-poled tent. Some camp-stools are
our seats by day, and fit into one another so as to form comfortable
beds; the small circular table is fixed to the tent-pole; the canteen,
some green native baskets containing our wardrobe, and a long range of
guns, complete the furniture. It is mid-day, and the occupants are
taking a _siesta_ in their pyjamas; the coolies are snoring where the
jungle forms the densest shade; the cook and servants have built a house
for themselves of branches, and are engaged in culinary occupations. No
sooner is the intense heat of mid-day past than we sally forth, working
steadily for about four hours; then comes the luxurious fare known well
to the Ceylon hunter. Our coolies and ourselves are alike dependent
entirely on our trusty rifles. We sometimes indulge in beer, but it is a
most extravagant practice—always, however, in a good cook. It is not yet
quite dusk: we dine in the open air. There is roast peafowl with buffalo
tongue, venison pasty and jugged hare, with a curry of jungle fowl, with
pigs’ fry, if we are not otherwise well supplied; but, as a general
rule, wild boar is to be avoided, especially if dead elephants are
abundant in the vicinity. Presently the full moon in the cloudless sky
throws the shadows long and sharp over our encampment, and we prepare
for night-work. Our tent is quite concealed from the tank to which we
now repair: it is about three-quarters dry, and the water is not more
than half a mile in circumference. There are two round holes prepared
for our reception close to the water’s edge, of sufficient depth to
conceal the occupants. All through the night, with the moon looking
calmly down upon us, brightly reflected in the waters of the tank, we
watch. As it is early yet, there are plenty of buffaloes still to be
seen. Soon large herds of deer come down to drink; they are quite
unsuspicious, and pass to and fro within a few yards of the loaded
rifles. Then the sharp bark of the elk rings through the still air, and
a noble buck walks knee deep into the water, and a moment afterwards the
doe more timidly follows. Large sounders of pigs grunt about constantly.
After midnight, more important game appears, and rouses the eager
sportsmen to more vigorous action; whether we have made a bag or not
depends upon whether there are elephants in the neighbourhood. If there
are, they will now be heard crashing through the jungle. They come very
slowly, and the excitement is intense; they keep stopping by the way,
and beating about with their trunks. We are getting very impatient—they
never will come! At last, one after another, they stalk across the open
in the clear moonlight; a large herd is soon splashing, and bubbling,
and roaring in the muddy water. They are out of shot, and we are obliged
to stalk them, for moonlight shooting is deceptive, and we have put lime
on the sight of the guns—a precaution, by the way, we do not hear that
Mr Baker adopted when shooting by moonlight. We no sooner fire than the
uproar and noise of the retreating elephants are tremendous: they seldom
charge at night, the whole transaction being too sudden and mysterious;
but the crashing of the jungle, as the terrified herd sweeps through it,
is inconceivable. An hour or two before daybreak chetahs and bears come
stealthily down and stay for a moment, and are gone again. In the course
of one night, in the northern part of Ceylon, we have literally seen and
fired at every description of the game we have just enumerated. At
daybreak we swallow a quantity of warm strong coffee, and only return
when the barrels of our rifles become too hot to hold, unless, indeed,
we are absolutely on the track of an elephant, and then the blazing sun
itself is despised. On our way home we discharge our rifles at the scaly
backs of innumerable alligators that bask open-mouthed upon the sloping
bank, but never with the hope of getting, though sometimes of killing,
one. We have occasionally put a ball between the greaves of their
armour, but can testify most assuredly (although Mr Baker seems to doubt
it) that an alligator’s back will turn a rifle ball at twenty yards, as
upon one occasion the ball from a friend’s rifle lodged in a tree above
us, although he was standing at a distance of about a hundred yards off,
and the alligator at which he had fired was in a totally opposite
direction. And so the days fly past, and our trip is at an end, while
our appetite for excitement and adventure remains unappeased; but we are
soon reconciled to the change from the rough jungle-life to the comforts
of civilisation, for with them we combine the invigorating air of the
mountains, and sport of another kind. The tent is exchanged at Newera
Ellia for the warm thatched cottage, with its rustic porch covered with
sweet-pea and honeysuckle, and well-furnished carpeted rooms, where a
comfortable wood-fire crackles upon every hearth, and sheds its grateful
influence upon the party gathered round it, and which is composed of the
most diverse materials. Bengal civilians, who were supposed to be dying
when they left the Sandheads, are narrating with no little satisfaction
their exploits in the morning’s elk-hunt; officers from Colombo, and
middies from Trincomalee, are eagerly canvassing the prospects for the
morrow; coffee-planters, tourists, and Ceylon officials, have become
excellent friends on short acquaintance, and are all burning to
distinguish themselves. At 5 A.M. it requires some courage to emerge
from beneath a couple of warm blankets: the ground is covered with a
thick hoar-frost, and fingers long accustomed to wield a pen in some
Indian cutcherry can scarcely hold the reins. Enterprising ladies, with
very red tips to their noses, join the party, and the meet is a gay and
animated scene. But we must not follow the fortunes of the hunt—our
reminiscences have already led us beyond the orthodox limits of a
review—and we shall gladly turn to Mr Baker for a description of those
sports which he, in common with ourselves, so highly appreciates. We
would first, however, say a few words more in reference to the lovely
spot in which he has taken up his abode, and of which he has
unfortunately given us a very meagre account.
The few Englishmen of a lower class in society who have found their way
to Newera Ellia are thriving well; they are, for the most part,
discharged soldiers, or persons whose original object, in coming to
Ceylon, was to superintend coffee plantations. English blacksmiths,
carpenters, shoemakers, or tailors, are all sure of plenty of
employment; while storekeeping, or taking charge of the residences of
those government functionaries who are fortunate enough to possess them,
is a profitable occupation. The great drawback to extensive settling in
Newera Ellia, is the absence of a permanent market. At some seasons of
the year the plain is overflowing with civilians and military men from
the lower provinces, or from the continent of India, who flock to enjoy
its bracing climate; at other times visitors are few and far between,
and the produce must be transported in bullock-carts to Kandy or
Colombo.
The nearest coffee plantations are situated in Dimboola, seven or eight
miles distant, the elevation of the plain being too great for the growth
of the berry. All the ordinary productions of our kitchen-gardens are to
be procured in abundance, and delicious strawberries may here be grown,
to recall to the acclimatised Company’s servant the long-forgotten
tastes of his native land. There can be no doubt that when the merits of
Newera Ellia become better known they will be more highly appreciated,
while its proximity to India will then insure those who have settled
there a speedy and profitable return for their outlay.
We regret that the scope and tenor of Mr Baker’s work do not admit of a
full account of his farming experiences, which must have been both novel
and interesting. His sketches of scenery are graceful and life-like,
evincing a warm susceptibility and a cultivated mind—qualities which
must ever distinguish the thorough sportsman from a mere butcher on a
large scale. “To a true sportsman,” says our author, “the enjoyment of a
sport increases in proportion to the wildness of the country.” The
deliberate manner in which Mr Baker awaits the furious charge of a rogue
elephant, with his rifle on full cock, wrapped in the contemplation of
the beauties of nature, is truly appalling to us uninitiated Westerns;
and, indeed, at these critical moments he is ever most enthusiastic—a
very Izaak Walton of Nimrods.
“There is a mournful silence in the calmness of the evening, when the
tropical sun sinks upon the horizon, a conviction that man has left
this region undisturbed to its wild tenants. No hum of distant voices,
no rumbling of busy wheels, no cries of domestic animals meet the ear.
He stands upon a wilderness, pathless and untrodden by the foot of
civilisation, where no sound is ever heard but that of the elements,
when the thunder rolls among the towering forests, or the wind howls
along the plains. He gazes far, far into the distance, where the blue
mountains melt into an indefinite haze; he looks above him to the
rocky pinnacles which spring from the level plain, their swarthy
cliffs glistening from the recent shower, and patches of rich verdure
clinging to precipices a thousand feet above him. His eye stretches
along the grassy plains, taking at one full glance a survey of woods,
and rocks, and streams; and imperceptibly his mind wanders to thoughts
of home, and in one moment scenes long left behind are conjured up by
memory, and incidents are recalled which banish for a time the scene
before him. Lost for a moment in the enchanting power of solitude,
where fancy and reality combine in their most bewitching forms, he is
suddenly roused by a distant sound, made doubly loud by the
surrounding silence—the shrill trumpet of an elephant.”
This is a good specimen of our author in his softer moods; but we must
hurry on to more stirring scenes. Some seven or eight years ago Mr Baker
visited Ceylon on a sporting tour, and the first part of his volume is
devoted to an account of his adventures upon that occasion. He
subsequently returned to Ceylon, and, making Newera Ellia his permanent
headquarters, he enjoyed elk-hunting at his own doors; and, having
profited by former experience, made his elephant-shooting excursions in
a deliberate and well-organised manner. His battery consisted “of one
four-ounce rifle (a single barrel) weighing twenty-one pounds, one long
two-ounce rifle (single barrel) weighing sixteen pounds, and four
double-barrelled rifles, No. 10, weighing each fifteen pounds.” The No.
10 double barrels did most execution, and were twelve-grooved, carrying
a conical ball of two ounces and a half. It is certainly a popular
delusion to suppose that smooth bores are better than these for
elephant-shooting. We have already enumerated the varieties of game at
which this formidable battery is directed.
About eighty miles to the north-east of Kandy, the lake of Minneria lies
embosomed amid the most luxuriant vegetation, presenting a sheet of
water twenty miles in circumference; and here, far distant from the
haunts of men, surrounded by some of the loveliest scenery which Ceylon
can boast, Mr Baker introduces us to his first buffalo. Our author’s
brother is the only companion of his sport; they have just arrived in
the island, and consequently are complete novices in its wild sports. No
sooner do they reach Minneria than, carried away by the excitement of
such close proximity to their noble game, they sally forth to attack a
herd of buffaloes, improperly supplied with ammunition. A bull charges
and is wounded, the herd retreats, and our author, leaving his brother
to extinguish the wounded bull, follows another, who disdains a rapid
flight. He is at length overtaken, and as he faces about to his pursuer,
Mr Baker puts two balls into his chest at fifteen paces, without effect,
“save that his eye, which had hitherto been merely sullen, was now
beaming with fury, but his form was motionless as a statue.” This is
decidedly startling—more startling still to find that there is not
another ball left. It was now the bull’s turn. “I dared not turn to
retreat, as I knew he would immediately charge, and we stared one
another out of countenance.” For a quarter of an hour Mr B. stares
fiercely but hopelessly at his maddened antagonist, then a bright
thought flashes across him:—
“Without taking my eyes off the animal before me, I put a double
charge of powder down the right-hand barrel, and tearing off a piece
of my shirt, I took all the money from my pouch, three shillings in
sixpenny pieces, and two anna pieces, which I luckily had with me in
this small coin for paying coolies. Quickly making them into a rouleau
with the piece of rag, I rammed them down the barrel, and they were
hardly well home before the bull again sprang forward. So quick was it
that I had no time to replace the ramrod, and I threw it in the water,
bringing my gun on full cock in the same instant.”
His brother now comes up:—
“It was the work of an instant. B. fired without effect. The horns
were lowered, their points were on either side of me, and the muzzle
of the gun barely touched his forehead when I pulled the trigger, and
three shillings’ worth of small change rattled into his hard head.
Down he went, and rolled over with the suddenly checked momentum of
his charge. Away went B. and I as fast as our heels would carry us,
through the water and over the plain, knowing that he was not dead but
only stunned.”
We have generally found in the course of our own short experience that
there was nothing for meeting a charge like a little ready money, but
this is squaring accounts with a vengeance. In a moment more Mr Baker
must inevitably have paid the debt of nature—he paid 3s. 6d. instead,
and we will venture to say he never before spent that sum more quickly
or satisfactorily to himself. Upon the following day our two sportsmen
are charged by a herd, and again narrowly escape destruction.
“Although,” says Mr Baker, “I have since killed about two hundred wild
buffaloes, I have never witnessed another charge by a herd. This was an
extraordinary occurrence, and fortunately stands alone in
buffalo-shooting.” Mr Baker only thinks it necessary to select from his
extensive buffalo-shooting experiences those occasions which involved
considerable personal hazard, and exhibited, at the same time, the
extraordinary courage and instinct of the animal. Unless
buffalo-shooting be followed up as a sport by itself, the real character
of the animal must remain unknown. “Some will fight and some will fly,
and no one can tell which will take place—it is at the option of the
beast. Caution and good shooting, combined with heavy rifles, are
necessary. Without heavy metal the sport would be superlatively
dangerous, if regularly followed up.” Mr Baker places great confidence
in, and is not a little proud of, his heavy rifles, and he gives some
wonderful instances of his performances with them, which fully justify
his high estimate of their capabilities. The last day’s work on the
occasion of his subsequent visits to Minneria is worthy of record. He
begins by knocking over a bull at three hundred and fifty-two paces,
then a cow from horseback at a long range, and a bull at about four
hundred yards. These are mere experiments; presently he comes to closer
quarters. A young bull is hidden in a thick cover, and our author rides
in to dislodge him:—
“I beat about to no purpose for about twenty minutes, and I was on the
point of giving it up when I suddenly saw the tall reeds bow down just
before me. I beard the rush of an animal as he burst through, and I
just saw the broad black nose, quickly followed by the head and horns,
as the buffalo charged into me. The horse reared to his full height as
the horns almost touched his chest, and I fired as well as I was able.
In another instant I was rolling on the ground, with my horse upon me,
in a cloud of smoke and confusion.
“In a most unsportsmanlike manner (as persons may exclaim who were not
there), I hid behind my horse as he regained his legs. All was
still—the snorting of the frightened horse was all that I could hear.
I expected to have seen the infuriated buffalo among us. I peeped over
the horse’s back, and, to my delight and surprise, I saw the carcass
of the bull lying within three feet of him. His head was pierced by
the ball exactly between the horns, and death had been instantaneous.
The horse having reared to his full height, had entangled his hind
legs in the grass, and he had fallen backwards without being touched
by the buffalo, although the horns were close into him.”
On his way home, after this disagreeable rencontre, Mr Baker falls in
with a small herd of five, and drops both bulls and an infuriated cow,
the latter in the act of charging, at a distance of fifteen paces. The
two remaining cows and a calf are killed in their retreat, and Mr Baker
is strolling home satisfied with a bag of ten buffaloes, when he
suddenly stumbles upon a herd of elephants. These beat an immediate
retreat. But singling out a fine bull, Mr Baker drops him severely
wounded with the four ounce, and, taking his second gun, he runs up just
in time to catch him as he is half risen.
“Feeling sure of him, I ran up within two yards of his head, and fired
into his forehead. To my amazement, he jumped quickly up, and with a
loud trumpet he rushed towards the jungle. I could just keep close
alongside him, as the grass was short, and the ground level, and being
determined to get him, I ran close to his shoulder, and, taking a
steady shot behind the ear, I fired my remaining barrel. Judge of my
surprise,—it only increased his speed, and in another moment he
reached the jungle: he was gone. He seemed to bear a charmed life. I
had taken two shots within a few feet of him that I would have staked
my life upon. I looked at my gun. Ye gods! I had been firing _snipe
shot_ at him. It was my rascally horsekeeper, who had actually handed
me the shot-gun, which I had received as the double-barrelled
ball-gun, that I knew was carried by a gun-bearer. How I did thrash
him! If the elephant had charged instead of making off, I should have
been caught, to a certainty.”
This is a judgment upon him evidently for boasting too much of his
battery. The abundance of game at Minneria, however, is not to be
compared to the enormous sports which Mr Baker finds in the almost
unexplored country beyond Hambautotte. “Here the deer were in such
masses that I restricted myself to bucks, and I at length became
completely satiated. There was too much game. During a whole day’s walk
I was certainly not five minutes without seeing either deer, elk,
buffaloes, or hogs.”
Gradually our sportsman gets still more particular; he refuses tempting
shots, and goes out simply in search of large antlers. None appearing of
sufficient size he does not fire, and only kills buffaloes if they look
vicious, and he can get a charge out of them. Notwithstanding this
dainty shooting, he comes home one morning to breakfast, at eight
o’clock, with three fine bucks and two buffaloes in his bag. Altogether
we cannot charge Mr Baker with indiscriminate slaughter. A thorough
sportsman, he is a humane man; but if we may so phrase it, he is a
little too conscientious in his sport. He gives us glimpses of much that
is interesting in his search after game; but, because it is unconnected
with the matter in hand, he hurries us away upon the track of a rogue
elephant or a buffalo, and will not allow us to linger for a moment upon
those fairy scenes which he has himself conjured up, or to inquire more
deeply into subjects of interest he has himself suggested. We should
have liked to have heard a little more of the Veddahs, for instance; but
the district they inhabit is the finest part of Ceylon for sport, so of
course we must not expect to be told about wild men when there are wild
beasts in the case. We have, however, a brief description of the manners
and habits (or rather want of habits) of the animal:—
“The Veddah in person is extremely ugly; short, but sinewy; his long
uncombed locks fall to his waist, looking more like a horse’s tail
than human hair. He despises money; but is thankful for a knife, a
hatchet, or a gaudy-coloured cloth, or brass pot for cooking. The
women are horribly ugly, and are almost entirely naked. They have no
matrimonial regulations, and the children are squalid and miserable.
Still these people are perfectly happy, and would prefer their present
wandering life to the most luxurious restraint. Speaking a language of
their own, with habits akin to those of wild animals, they keep
entirely apart from the Cingalese. They barter deer-horns and
bees’-wax with the travelling Moormen pedlars in exchange for their
trifling requirements. If they have food they eat it; if they have
none they go without until by some chance they procure it. In the mean
time they chew the bark of various trees, and search for berries,
while they wend their way for many miles to some remembered store of
deer’s flesh and honey, laid by in a hollow tree.”
They are expert trackers, but are not so skilled in the use of bows and
arrows as savages usually are. Without any fixed place of residence,
they wander over their beautiful country, always finding abundance to
eat and drink, while the warm temperature renders any description of
clothing superfluous. Upon another occasion, Mr Baker, in search of
elephants, stumbles upon the ruins of Mahagam. As he is unsuccessful in
finding any game, he gives us a short description of what remains of
this ancient city, the first records of which date back to the year 286
B.C.
“We were among the ruins of ancient Mahagam. One of the ruined
buildings had apparently rested upon seventy-two pillars. These were
still erect, standing in six lines of twelve columns: every stone
appeared to be about fourteen feet high by two feet square, and
twenty-five feet apart. This building must therefore have formed an
oblong of three hundred feet by one hundred and fifty. Many of the
granite blocks were covered with rough carving; large flights of
steps, now irregular from the inequality of the ground, were scattered
here and there; and the general appearance of the ruins was similar to
that of Pollanarua, but of smaller extent. The stone causeway which
passed through the ruins was about two miles in length, being for the
most part overgrown with low jungle and prickly cactus. I traversed
the jungle for some distance, until arrested by the impervious nature
of the bushes; but wherever I went the ground was strewed with squared
stones and fallen brickwork overgrown with rank vegetation.”
At Pollanarua the ruins are still more interesting, and our author is
evidently just becoming romantic when his reveries are disturbed in a
manner inexcusable even in a sportsman. He is strolling through shady
glades, and moralising over palaces which have crumbled into shapeless
mounds of bricks: “Massive pillars, formed of a single stone some twelve
feet high, stand in upright rows throughout the jungle here and there
over an extent of miles of country. The buildings which they once
supported have long since fallen, and the pillars now stand like
tombstones over vanished magnificence.” While Mr Baker is wandering amid
these ruins, meditating upon the touching mementoes by which he is
surrounded, of a race long since passed away—
“Comes gliding in with lovely gleam,
Comes gliding in serene and slow,
Soft and silent as a dream,
A solitary doe.”
Instead of quoting Wordsworth, what does Mr Baker do? “I was within
twenty yards of her before she was aware of my vicinity, and I bagged
her by a shot with a double-barrelled gun. At the report of the gun a
herd of about thirty deer which were concealed among the ruins rushed
close by me, and I bagged another doe with the remaining barrel.” Really
Mr Baker should be ashamed of bagging does right and left amid pillars
which stand as tombstones over vanished magnificence; or, if it was the
effect of an impulse irresistible at the moment, the placid reader
should be spared the sudden shock which such an admission is likely to
cause.
The most extensive ruins are strewn over all this country, those of
Anarajapoura, comprising a surface of two hundred and fifty-six square
miles, being the most celebrated. Numerous tanks attest the existence of
a dense population, where now elephants and buffaloes roam unmolested.
The tank at Doolana, a secluded spot, is a favourite resort for single
or rogue elephants; and here Mr Baker and his brother find a notorious
pair, and determine upon their destruction. The difficulty of following
an elephant through the dense forests of Ceylon is so great that the
assistance of native trackers is often absolutely necessary. In this
instance, unfortunately, even the trackers mistake the direction, and
our two sportsmen are standing hopelessly near a wall of impenetrable
jungle, into which the elephants had been seen to retreat, wondering how
they are ever to achieve the desired end, when, says Mr Baker,
“I suddenly heard a deep guttural sound in the thick rattan within
four feet of me; in the same instant the whole tangled fabric bent
over me, and, bursting asunder, showed the furious head of an elephant
with uplifted trunk in full charge upon me.
“I had barely time to cock my rifle, and the barrel almost touched him
as I fired. I knew it was in vain, as his trunk was raised. B. fired
his right-hand barrel at the same moment without effect from the same
cause. I jumped on one side and attempted to spring through the deep
mud: it was of no use; the long grass entangled my feet, and in
another instant I lay sprawling in the enraged elephant’s path within
_a foot_ of him. In that moment of suspense I expected to hear the
crack of my own bones as his massive foot would be upon me. It was an
atom of time. I heard the crack of a gun; it was B.’s last barrel. I
felt a spongy weight strike my heel, and, turning quickly heels over
head, I rolled a few paces and regained my feet. That last shot had
floored him just as he was upon me; the end of his trunk had fallen
upon my heel. Still he was not dead, but he struck at me with his
trunk as I passed round his head to give him a finisher with the
four-ounce rifle, which I had snatched from our solitary gun-bearer.
“My back was touching the jungle from which the rogue had just
charged, and I was almost in the act of firing through the temple of
the still struggling elephant when I heard a tremendous crash in the
jungle behind me similar to the first, and the savage scream of an
elephant. I saw the ponderous fore-leg cleave its way through the
jungle directly upon me. I threw my whole weight back against the
thick rattans to avoid him, and the next moment his foot was planted
within an inch of mine. His lofty head was passing over me in full
charge at B., who was unloaded, when, holding the four-ounce rifle
perpendicularly, I fired exactly under his throat. I thought he would
fall upon me and crush me, but this shot was the only chance, as B.
was perfectly helpless.
“A dense cloud of smoke from the heavy charge of powder for the moment
obscured everything. I had jumped out of the way the instant after
firing. The elephant did not fall, but he had his death wound: the
ball had severed his jugular, and the blood poured from the wound. He
stopped, but, collecting his stunned energies, he still blundered
forward towards B. He, however, avoided him by running to one side,
and the wounded brute staggered on through the jungle. We now loaded
the guns; the first rogue was quite dead, and we followed in pursuit
of rogue number two.”
He had received his death wound, and was found dead in the jungle a day
or two afterwards. We have no doubt a large proportion of those who take
up Mr Baker’s book, will read this, and many other similar adventures
which it contains, in a spirit of profound scepticism. Of course, we
cannot vouch for their credibility otherwise than by saying that, from
our own experience and our knowledge of the experience of others, we
believe not only in the possibility, but in the probability of scenes
such as those described by Mr Baker frequently occurring in a long
course of elephant-shooting. When a man can show three hundred or four
hundred tails adorning the walls of his room, he may fairly expect us to
consider them as vouchers for his own good faith; and carpet sportsmen
may laugh as they please, but they will find, if they have got the pluck
to try to procure similar ornaments, that elephants don’t generally
allow their tails to be cut off without fighting for them, and that the
mild specimen in the Zoological Gardens is not altogether to be taken as
a type of the race generally.
“I have often heard people exclaim,” says Mr Baker, “upon hearing
anecdotes of elephant-hunting, ‘poor things!’
“Poor things, indeed! I should like to see the very person who thus
expresses his pity going at his best pace with a savage elephant after
him: give him a lawn to run upon if he likes, and see the elephant
gaining a foot in every yard of the chase, fire in his eye, fury in
his headlong charge; and would not the flying gentleman who lately
exclaimed ‘poor thing!’ be thankful to the lucky bullet that would
save him from destruction?
“There are no animals more misunderstood than elephants; they are
naturally savage, wary, and revengeful, displaying as great courage
when in their wild state as any animal known. The fact of their
natural sagacity renders them the more dangerous as foes.”
Of course, in describing a series of rencontres, involving so much
personal peril as must necessarily be the accompaniment of
elephant-shooting, there is much scope for exaggeration, and the more
marvellous a story really is, the more susceptible it is of colouring;
so that, unless the narrator be continually on his guard, he may
insensibly be drawn, by the exciting nature of the incidents he
recounts, into a way of relating them which smacks so strongly of undue
embellishment, that the ignorant reader is disposed to discredit those
facts themselves which, had he possessed personal experience, he would
not have hesitated to accept. “Often,” says Mr Baker, who anticipates
such unlearned criticism, “have I pitied Gordon Cumming, when I have
heard him talked of as a palpable Munchausen by men who never fired a
rifle or saw a wild beast except in a cage, and still these men form the
greater proportion of the readers of these works.” And we are assured by
our author that he has carefully abstained from working up his scenes
for the sake of effect—that, in fact, if he has erred at all, it is in
under-drawing them. Now, although we would not for a moment be supposed
to discredit any one of the accounts which he gives us of his
adventures, we cannot do Mr Baker the injustice to agree with him in
this, and we consider ourselves competent judges, although we may not
have been present. In looking over the illustrations which grace the
work, and which are spiritedly done, there appeared to us one fault, if
fault it may be called; our author and his friends always seem to be
shooting with air-guns—there is a remarkable absence of any smoke. Now,
without meaning in the least to infer that Mr Baker has transferred it
from the pictorial representations of those scenes of which its presence
would have been the appropriate ornament to the descriptions of them,
which would suffer seriously from such an addition, we only remark that
he has occasionally given a handle for that sort of criticism, which we,
in common with himself, so much deprecate. We wish, for instance, that
his measurements of distance in moments of extreme peril had been a
little more vague than they are. A striking instance of the precision
with which our author calculates distance occurs in the course of one of
his elephant hunts; after a long combat with a rogue, he is obliged to
throw away his heavy rifle and take to his heels.
“I had about three feet start of him, and I saw with delight that the
ground was as level and smooth as a lawn; there was no fear of
tripping up, and away I went at the fastest pace that I ever ran
either before or since, taking a look behind me to see how the chase
went on. I saw the bullet-mark in his forehead, which was covered with
blood; his trunk was stretched to its full length to catch me, and was
now within two feet of my back: he was gaining on me, although I was
running at a tremendous pace. I could not screw an inch more speed out
of my legs, and I kept on, with the brute gaining upon me at every
stride. He was within a foot of me, and I had not heard a shot fired,
and not a soul had come to the rescue. The sudden thought struck me
that my brother could not possibly overtake the elephant at the pace
at which we were going, and I suddenly doubled short to my left into
the open plain, and back towards the guns. The rogue overshot me. I
met my brother close to his tail,” &c. &c.
We remember hearing that Major Rogers once dodged between an elephant’s
legs; but Major Rogers’ presence of mind was nothing to Mr Baker’s, who
could deliberately calculate his distance when at full speed, and who,
joyously trotting on with an elephant’s trunk first three, and then two
feet from his back, does not think it worth while to double until the
distance is decreased to twelve inches. It is quite possible that the
elephant’s trunk was in most unpleasant proximity to the
fugitive—indeed, a sporting friend of ours once had his cap taken off by
a rogue in full chase, and after all fairly outran his pursuer—so that
_we_ do not doubt that Mr Baker had an uncommonly near shave, and was
excessively glad to find his brother at his pursuer’s tail; but this is
just _the tone_ of description that gives rise to doubts in the minds of
those who do not happen ever to have run away from an elephant.
It may be said that the same remark is applicable to the accounts we
have of the powers of the four-ounce. There is an elephant killed stone
dead at one hundred and twenty yards; a buffalo at six hundred, if not
eight hundred. These are both unprecedented shots; but as sixteen
drachms is a common charge with Mr Baker, and as we certainly never used
a rifle heavy enough to bear a charge of _an ounce_ of powder, we are
not in a position to question them. Moreover, when we consider the
performances of the Minié, we are inclined to regard them as quite
possible, although distance, if not actually measured, must always be
very much a matter of opinion. However, in reading this narrative of
adventure, the experience of an intrepid sportsman, it must be
remembered that only those incidents are selected for relation which
were most remarkable or attended with the greatest risk. They are a
collection of the most perilous moments of a life of peril, and we have
simply to add up the long catalogue of those who have fallen victims in
Ceylon to that sport which Mr Baker so ardently pursues, to perceive its
danger; and so far from denying the possibility of those hairbreadth
escapes which startle us in every page of this work, we should then be
induced rather to wonder that its author still lives to tempt that
Providence by which he has hitherto been so wonderfully preserved.
But we must not allow the rifle an undue share of our attention. Mr
Baker has as good reason to be proud of his hounds as of his rifles, and
there is a greater novelty to the English sportsman in hunting elk at
Newera Ellia than in shooting elephants or buffaloes at Minneria. A buck
elk—the Samber deer of India—stands about fourteen hands high at the
shoulder, and weighs about six hundred pounds: he is in colour dark
brown, with a mane of coarse bristly hair of six inches in length; the
rest of his body is covered with the same coarse hair of about two
inches in length. His antlers are sometimes upwards of three feet long,
but seldom have more than six points. He is a solitary animal; when
brought to bay he fights to the last, and charges man and hound
indiscriminately, a choice hound being often the price of victory. The
country in which he is hunted is the mountainous district in Ceylon; for
though he is to be found in almost every part of the island, the sport
is only prosecuted at an elevation which varies from four thousand to
seven thousand feet above the sea. The sharp, bracing climate of Newera
Ellia, while it agrees admirably with the hounds, enables the sportsman
to undergo that prolonged and violent exercise on foot which the sport
involves, and which would be utterly out of the question in the low
country.
The principal features of the highlands of Ceylon being a series of wild
marshy plains, forests, torrents, mountains, and precipices, a peculiar
hound is required for elk-hunting. Upon the occasion of Mr Baker’s
second visit, he arrived with a pack of thorough-bred foxhounds. These
he soon found were quite a mistake; they invariably open upon the scent
at a great distance, and after warning the elk too soon, they stick to
him too long, and ultimately fall victims to chetahs or starvation, the
penalty of inexperienced perseverance. The offspring of crosses with
pointers, bloodhounds, and half-bred foxhounds, are the right stamp for
the sport; while the Australian lurcher proves often of immense service
upon the open. The hero of Mr Baker’s pack was a Manilla bloodhound of
enormous strength and indomitable pluck. The performances of old Smut
are worthy of a volume to themselves; and if his master could appreciate
the merits of his favourite hound when alive, he proves himself an
historian well qualified to do justice to his memory. The reader will
also be proud to make the acquaintance of Killbuck, Bran, and Lena, who
prove themselves good dogs and true. About sixteen miles from Newera
Ellia, lie the Horton Plains, situated at an elevation of seven thousand
feet above the level of the sea. They are perfectly uninhabited; and
here it is that Mr Baker introduces us to his favourite sport. He and
his friends have taken up their abode in a snug corner of the plains,
where they have built for themselves a hunting-lodge and kennel. They
are within hail of civilisation, but they depend almost entirely upon
the dogs for sustenance, combined with the efforts of a perfect Soyer of
a cook.
“This knight of the gridiron was a famous fellow, and could perform
wonders; of stoical countenance, he was never seen to smile. His whole
thoughts were concentrated in the mysteries of gravies, and the magic
transformation of one animal into another by the art of cookery: in
this he excelled to a marvellous degree. The farce of ordering dinner
was always absurd. It was something in this style. ‘Cook!’ (_Cook
answers_) ‘Coming sar!’ (_enter cook_).—‘Now, cook, you make a good
dinner; do you hear?’ _Cook_: ‘Yes, sar: master tell, I make.’—‘Well,
mulligatawny soup.’ ‘Yes, sar.’—‘Calves’ head, with tongue, and
brain-sauce.’ ‘Yes, sar.’—‘Gravy omelette.’ ‘Yes, sar.’—‘Mutton
chops.’ ‘Yes, sar.’—‘Fowl cotelets.’ ‘Yes, sar.’—‘Beefsteaks.’ ‘Yes,
sar.’—‘Marrow-bones.’ ‘Yes, sar.’—‘Rissoles.’ ‘Yes, sar.’ All these
various dishes he literally imitated uncommonly well, the different
portions of an elk being their only foundation.”
During a trip of two months at the Horton Plains, Mr Baker killed
forty-three elk, which was working the pack pretty hard. At Newera Ellia
the game, though not quite so plentiful, is sufficiently abundant to
satisfy any reasonable sportsman, and an extract of three months’
hunting, at his own door, from our author’s game-book, shows a return of
eleven bucks, seventeen does, and four hogs.
Though the sport of elk-hunting is most exciting, the recital of
elk-hunting experiences must ever be somewhat monotonous: there is so
little room for varied incident. The hunter follows the music of his
pack over the open, at a long swinging trot, and bursts his way through
the dense jungle, and down the steep bank to the foaming torrent, in the
midst of which the elk is keeping the hounds at bay:—
“There they are in that deep pool formed by the river as it sweeps
round the rock. A buck! a noble fellow! Now he charges at the hounds,
and strikes the foremost beneath the water with his forefeet; up they
come again to the surface,—they hear their master’s well-known
shout,—they look round and see his welcome figure on the steep bank.
Another moment, a tremendous splash, and he is among his hounds, and
all are swimming towards their noble game. At them he comes with a
fierce rush. Avoid him as you best can, ye hunters, man, and hounds!”
This reminds us of an amusing experience of our own, under somewhat
similar circumstances. The master of one of the packs at Newera Ellia,
in those days a good specimen of a Ceylon Nimrod, and an old elk-hunter,
was anxious to show a naval friend of his the sport in perfection. We
happened to be of the party, and before long our ears were rejoiced with
that steady chorus which always tells of a buck at bay. Away we dashed
through the thorny jungle, and arrived at the edge of a deep black pool,
in which the elk was swimming, surrounded by the entire pack. Another
moment and we should have formed one of the damp but picturesque group,
when our naval friend, who had been left a little in the rear, unused to
such rough work, came up torn and panting. It suddenly occurs to Nimrod,
just as he is going to jump in, that it is hardly civil to his guest to
secure to himself the sportsman’s most delicious moment; he feels the
sacrifice he is making as, with a forced blandness, and an anxious
glance at the buck, he presses his hunting-knife into Captain F.’s hand,
saying, “After you, sir, pray.” “Eh! after me; where?—you don’t mean me
to go in there, do you?” “Certainly not, if you would rather stay here;
in that case be so good as give me the knife, as there is no time to be
lost.” “Oh, ah!—I didn’t understand;—how very stupid! Go in—oh
certainly: I shall be delighted;” and in dashed the gallant captain with
his two-edged blade gleaming in the morning sun. For a second the waters
closed over him, then he appeared spluttering and choking, and waving
aloft the naked steel preparatory to going down again; it was plain that
he could not swim a stroke, and it cost us no little trouble to pull out
the plucky sailor, who took the whole thing as a matter of course, and
would evidently have gone anywhere that he had been told. It is a
difficult matter to stick an elk while swimming, as the hide is very
thick, and the want of any sufficient purchase renders an effective blow
almost impossible. There is also a great risk of being struck by the
elk’s fore-legs, while impetuous young dogs are apt to take a nip of
their master by mistake. A powerful buck at bay is always a formidable
customer, and the largest dogs may be impaled like kittens if they do
not learn to temper their valour with discretion.
“The only important drawback,” says Mr Baker, “to the pleasure of
elk-hunting is the constant loss of dogs. The best are always sure to
go. What with deaths by boars, leopards, elk, and stray hounds, the pack
is with difficulty maintained. Poor old Bran, who, being a thorough-bred
greyhound, is too fine in the skin for such rough hunting, has been sewn
up in so many places that he is a complete specimen of needlework;”
while Killbuck and Smut, the hero of about four hundred deaths of elk
and boar, have terminated their glorious careers. Killbuck was pierced
by the sharp antlers of a spotted buck, after a splendid course over the
plains in the low country. If the bay of the deer is not so good as that
of the elk, the enjoyment of riding to your game renders deer-coursing a
far more agreeable sport than elk-hunting. Unfortunately for Killbuck
his buck came to bay as pluckily as any elk, and had pinned the noble
hound to the earth, before his master, who had been thrown in the course
of a reckless gallop, could come up to the rescue. But the boar is the
most destructive animal to the pack, and a fierce immovable bay, in
which every dog joins in an impetuous chorus, is always a dreaded sound
to the hunter, who knows well that tusks, and not antlers, are at work.
The following description of a boar at bay will give some idea of the
scene that then occurs:—
“There was a fight! The underwood was levelled, and the boar rushed to
and fro with Smut, Bran, Lena, and Lucifer, all upon him. Yoick to
him! and some of the most daring of the maddened pack went in. The
next instant we were upon him mingled with a confused mass of hounds;
and throwing our whole weight upon the boar, we gave him repeated
thrusts, apparently to little purpose. Round came his head and
gleaming tusks to the attack of his fresh enemies, but old Smut held
him by the nose, and, although the bright tusks were immediately
buried in his throat, the stanch old dog kept his hold. Away went the
boar covered by a mass of dogs, and bearing the greater part of our
weight in addition, as we hung on to the hunting-knives buried in his
shoulders. For about fifty paces he tore through the thick jungle,
crashing it like a cobweb. At length he again halted; the dogs, the
boar, and ourselves were mingled in a heap of confusion. All covered
with blood and dirt, our own cheers added to the wild bay of the
infuriated hounds, and the savage roaring of the boar. Still he fought
and gashed the dogs right and left. He stood about thirty-eight inches
high, and the largest dogs seemed like puppies beside him; still not a
dog relaxed his hold, and he was covered with wounds. I made a lucky
thrust for the nape of his neck. I felt the point of the knife touch
the bone; the spine was divided, and he fell dead.
“Smut had two severe gashes in the throat, Lena was cut under the ear,
and Bran’s mouth was opened completely up to his ear in a horrible
wound.”
But the boar sometimes comes off victorious; and the death of poor old
Smut has never been revenged. He was almost cut in half before Mr Baker
reached the bay, which lasted for an hour. At the end of that period,
Smut, gashed with many additional wounds, was expiring, and three of the
best remaining dogs were severely wounded; the dogs were with difficulty
called off the victorious monster; and Mr Baker records, with feelings
of profound emotion, the only defeat he ever experienced, and which
terminated fatally to the gallant leader of his pack.
The usual drawbacks and discomforts attendant upon a new settlement
having been overcome, our author assures us that Newera Ellia forms a
delightful place of residence. But it must not be supposed that, on the
occasion of his second visit to Ceylon, he confined himself to
elk-hunting and agriculture. He is frequently tempted from his highland
home to the elephant country, which is only about two days’ journey
distant; and the latter part of his volume abounds with exciting
descriptions of new encounters with rogues, involving the usual amount
of personal hazard; and lest the too ardent pursuit of this fascinating
sport seems scarcely to justify the apparent cruelty it involves, it
must be remembered that it is not more cruel to kill a large animal than
a small one, though this is a distinction we are too apt to make; and
when the large animal is also often destructive to life and property,
its slaughter is not only justifiable, but commendable in those who are
disposed to risk their lives for the benefit of the public and their own
gratification.
Indeed, so extensive are the ravages committed by elephants, that a
price is offered by government for their tails; since, however, the
procuring of tails has become a fashionable amusement among Europeans,
the reward has been reduced to the miserable sum of 7s. 6d. The Moorish
part of the community were the recognised elephant-slayers, so long as
there was profit to be made by these means. They now devote themselves
almost entirely to the capture of elephants alive for the purpose of
exportation to India. Mr Baker gives an amusing account of having
assisted to catch an elephant. He started with his brother and thirty
Moormen, armed with ropes, towards a herd of seven, of whose presence in
the neighbourhood intelligence had been received. Upon coming in sight
of the herd, one was selected for capture. Mr Baker and his brother and
their gun-bearers, taking the wind, advance under cover of the jungle to
open the ball. This they do in style, bagging six elephants in almost
the same number of minutes. The seventh starts off in full retreat with
the multitude at his heels. At last an active Moorman dexterously throws
a noose of thick but finely twisted hide rope over one of his hind-legs.
Following the line which the unconscious elephant trails after him like
a long snake, they wait until he enters the jungle, and then
unceremoniously check his further progress by taking a double turn round
a tree.
“Any but a hide rope of that diameter must have given way; but this
stretched like a harp-string, and, at every effort to break it, the
yielding elasticity of the hide threw him upon his head, and the
sudden contraction after the fall jerked his leg back to its full
length.
“After many vain but tremendous efforts to free himself, he turned his
rage upon his pursuers, and charged every one right and left; but he
was safely tied, and we took some little pleasure in teasing him. He
had no more chance than a fly in a spider’s web. As he charged in one
direction, several nooses were thrown round his hind-legs; then his
trunk was caught in a slip-knot, then his fore-legs, then his neck,
and the ends of all these ropes being brought together and hauled
tight, he was effectually hobbled.
“This had taken some time to effect (about half an hour), and we now
commenced a species of harness to enable us to drive him to the
village.
“The first thing was to secure his trunk by tying it to one of his
fore-legs; this leg was then fastened with a slack rope to one of his
hind-legs, which prevented him from taking a longer stride than about
two feet; his neck was then tied to his other fore-leg, and two ropes
were made fast to both his fore and hind legs; the ends of these ropes
being manned by thirty men.”
He was then driven to the village, and three days afterwards was
sufficiently tamed to be mounted. His value was then about £15.
Mr Baker at last becomes as dainty in his elephant-shooting as we have
already found him in the deer country. Where elephants are abundant he
despises a herd, and confines himself to rogues, where they are
procurable, always singling out the most vicious-looking, and this must
in some measure account for the redundancy of adventure in his
narrative. For though elephant-shooting is always attended with some
risk, the comparative extent of this depends entirely upon the manner in
which the sport is pursued. If tails are the desiderata, then a herd in
a nice open jungle presents the best chance of obtaining a supply with
the least possible amount of personal danger; but if sport is really
sought, then a rogue upon the open is certain to afford enough to
satisfy the most ardent Nimrod that ever drew trigger. The fatigue of
elephant-shooting is something inconceivable to those who have not for
six or eight consecutive hours laboured under a tropical sun with a
heavy rifle,—the barrels of which are so hot that they can scarcely be
touched,—over wide plains, and through long grass, matted over hidden
rocks and tangled jungle, with an underwood of the twining bamboo and
thorny mimosa. It is only the most intense excitement that could carry a
man through fatigue such as this; and a prize worthy of all that he has
undergone is needed to reward him for the day’s work. Under these
circumstances, it is clear that, the more imminent the peril, the more
satisfactory is the sport considered. There would be very little
gratification in toiling all day in a temperature of 130°, if there was
no opportunity presented of risking one’s life. Mr Baker’s enjoyment
must have reached its climax when he was actually wounded by an
elephant’s tusk. This indeed compensated for much hardship and
discomfort. It happened in this wise:
About two days’ journey from Newera Ellia is situated a large tract of
country called the Park. This is the most favourite resort of Ceylon
sportsmen, as elephants are generally abundant. The scenery is
beautiful, of a character which may be inferred from the name it now
bears among Europeans. It is of vast extent, watered by numerous large
rivers, and ornamented by rocky mountains, such as no English park can
boast. The lemon grass grows over the greater part of this country to a
height of ten or twelve feet, and large herds of elephants wander
through it, the crowns of their capacious brown heads, or the tips of
their trunks, tossed occasionally into the air, alone attesting their
presence.
A number of these appearing over the waving grass, delight the eyes of
Mr Baker and his brother one morning as they sally forth from their
night encampment with their usual deadly intent. Upon discovering the
daring intruders, the herd, consisting of ten, rally round the two
leaders, whose deep growls, like rumbling peals of thunder, is the call
in time of danger. Our author and his brother immediately advance
towards the dense mass, nothing daunted by so imposing an array. A part
of the herd beat a retreat, but five charge viciously; they are dropped
in as many successive shots, the last at a distance of only ten paces;
four more are slain in retreat, a faithless mother alone escaping, whose
little charge, so unusually deserted, Mr Baker captures, by taking hold
of his tail and trunk, and throwing him on his back. Those who have seen
an unweaned elephant calf will admit this to be no very difficult feat.
Having secured the infant, and left him in charge of his brother and the
gun-bearers, Mr Baker returns to seek his legitimate trophies in the
shape of tails.
“I had one barrel still loaded, and I was pushing my way through the
tangled grass towards the spot where the five elephants lay together,
when I suddenly heard Wallace shriek out, ‘Look out, sir! Look out!—an
elephant’s coming!’
“I turned round in a moment; and close past Wallace, from the very
spot where the last dead elephant lay, came the very essence and
incarnation of a ‘rogue’ elephant in full charge. His trunk was thrown
high in the air, his ears were cocked, his tail stood high above his
back as stiff as a poker, and, screaming exactly like the whistle of a
railway engine, he rushed upon me through the high grass with a
velocity that was perfectly wonderful. His eyes flashed as he came on,
and he had singled me out as his victim.
“I have often been in dangerous positions, but I never felt so totally
devoid of hope as I did in this instance. The tangled grass rendered
retreat impossible. I had only one barrel loaded, and that was
useless, as the upraised trunk protected his forehead. I felt myself
doomed; the few thoughts that rush through men’s minds in such
hopeless positions flew through mine, and I resolved to wait for him
till he was close upon me before I fired, hoping that he might lower
his trunk and expose his forehead.
“He rushed along at the pace of a horse in full speed; in a few
moments, as the grass flew to the right and left before him, he was
close upon me, but still his trunk was raised and I would not fire.
One second more, and at this headlong pace he was within three feet of
me; down slashed his trunk with the rapidity of a whip-thong, and with
a shrill scream of fury he was upon me.
“I fired at that instant; but in the twinkling of an eye I was flying
through the air like a ball from a bat. At the moment of firing I had
jumped to the left, but he struck me with his tusk in full charge upon
my right thigh, and hurled me eight or ten paces from him. That very
moment he stopped, and, turning round, he beat the grass about with
his trunk, and commenced a strict search for me. I heard him advancing
close to the spot where I lay as still as death, knowing that my last
chance lay in concealment. I heard the grass rustling close to the
spot where I lay; closer and closer he approached, and he at length
beat the grass with his trunk several times exactly above me. I held
my breath, momentarily expecting to feel his ponderous foot upon me.
Although I had not felt the sensation of fear while I had stood
opposed to him, I felt like what I never wish to feel again while he
was deliberately hunting me up. Fortunately I had reserved my fire
until the rifle had almost touched him, for the powder and smoke had
nearly blinded him, and had spoiled his acute power of scent. To my
joy I heard the rustling of the grass grow fainter; again, I heard it
at a still greater distance; at length it was gone.”
“There could not,” says our author naïvely, “be a better exemplification
of a rogue than in this case.” The knowing way in which he had remained
patiently concealed, while his enemies expended their ammunition and
energies upon the herd, and the sudden and furious manner in which he
came upon them, while unsuspectingly appropriating the tails of his
brethren, quite justifies this opinion of Mr Baker’s. He escapes
triumphantly, as he deserves to have done, and leaves Mr Baker to
contemplate his wounded leg for some days, during which he is unable to
move. We must do our author the justice to say that he seeks his revenge
as soon as he is able to put his foot to the ground, and a few days
afterwards we find him chasing a herd, until he says “my leg, which had
lost all feeling, suddenly gave way, and I lay sprawling on my face,
incapable of going a step farther. I had killed four elephants; it was
very bad luck, as the herd consisted of eleven, but my leg gave way when
most required.” If Mr Baker is not satisfied, we are. We shall not,
therefore, follow him through the exciting details of a jungle trip,
with which he concludes his most interesting work, and from which he and
his two companions, the Hon. Mr Stuart Wortley and Mr E. Palliser,
return in three weeks, with a bag of fifty elephants, five deer, and two
buffaloes. We have said enough to indicate to the reader in search of
excitement by his fireside where it is to be found—more than enough to
tempt the enthusiastic sportsman to exchange for a season the comforts
of home for the wild stirring life of the elephant-hunter; and we may
venture to assure him that he will ever recur with delight to the
enjoyment and rough luxury that a jungle trip alone affords, and he will
be ready to adopt, as we do ourselves, the concluding words of our
author:
“The well-arranged tent, the neatly spread table, the beds forming a
triangle around the walls, and the clean guns piled in a long row
against the gun-rack, will often recall a _tableau_ in after years, in
countries far from this land of independence. The acknowledged sports
of England will appear child’s play; the exciting thrill will be
wanting, when a sudden rush in the jungle brings the rifle on full
cock; and the heavy guns will become useless mementos of past days,
like the dusty helmets of yore, hanging up in an old hall. The belt
and the hunting-knife will alike share the fate of the good rifle, and
the blade, now so keen, will blunt from sheer neglect. The slips,
which have held the necks of dogs of such staunch natures, will hang
neglected from the wall; and all these _souvenirs_ of wild sports,
contrasted with the puny implements of the English chase, will awaken
once more the longing desire for the ‘Rifle and the Hound in Ceylon.’”
GRAY’S LETTERS.[13]
We do not intend upon the present occasion, however legitimate the
opportunity, to trespass long upon the patience of our readers, in
discussing the merits or demerits of Gray’s poetical style. Some few
remarks we are tempted to make, chiefly of a conciliatory character; but
we shall very rapidly pass on to his Life and Letters, which are the
more immediate subject of the book before us. In critical debates upon
English poetry, the name of Gray has been often a rallying point for the
disputants: he has been held up as a bright example by one party, and by
another, as a salutary warning to all youthful aspirants. “Of all
English poets,” says Sir James Mackintosh, “he was the most finished
artist. He attained the highest degree of splendour of which poetical
style seems to be capable.” We all know what Wordsworth thought of the
splendour of this poetical style, and how severely he and others have
dealt with it.
Poetry is a very difficult subject to reason about; and the more
refined, and the more bold, and the more complex the associations of
thought in which it deals, the more difficult does it become to prove,
by any process of argument, that it is good or bad. As little can you
teach a man to _enjoy_ poetry, to discover it when it lies before him,
by any rules, or process of reasoning, analytic or synthetic, as you
could teach a man by the same methods to _write_ poetry. For there is
always in the more subtle kinds of poetry an element of _unreason_;
plain truth is somewhere set at defiance; and who can possibly draw the
line, or say precisely to what extent imagination, under the sway of
feeling or sentiment, shall be allowed to transgress on the palpable
verities of our senses, or our better judgment? How can reason decide
exactly, where reason herself shall be set aside in favour of emotion?
Emotion, after all, must have her voice in the matter; and the final
result must be some uncertain compromise between them.
We will draw an illustration of our meaning from no vulgar critic. The
refined taste of Mr Landor will be at once admitted; nor will he lie
open to the objection often brought against our northern critics, that
they are too metaphysical or analytic in their strictures upon
metaphorical language. We extract the two following annotations, from
his conversation between himself and Southey, on two several passages in
_Milton’s Paradise Lost_. They will aptly illustrate the difficulty
which every one will encounter who has to reason upon the right and
wrong of a poet’s imagination.
“What a beautiful expression is there in verse 546, which I do not
remember that any critic has noticed—
‘Obtain the brow of some _high-climbing_ hill.’
Here the hill itself is instinct with life and activity.”
Agreed: it is a beautiful expression; and if any one insists that a hill
does not climb, but is a thing to be climbed upon, we pronounce him a
blockhead for his pains. Nevertheless the blockhead has palpable truth
upon his side. The hill does not climb in fact, and there is no process
we know of by which it can be made to climb in his imagination. Now for
our second comment—
“‘Sage he stood,
With Atlantean shoulders fit to bear
The weight of mightiest monarchies.’
Often and often have these verses been quoted without a suspicion how
strongly the corporeal is substituted for the moral. However Atlantean
his shoulders might be, the might of monarchies could no more be
supported by them than by the shoulders of a grasshopper.”
Here, Mr Landor takes part with plain matter-of-fact against that play
of poetic imagination, which often succeeds in making one deep and
harmonious impression out of incongruous materials, merely by the
dexterous rapidity with which these are passed before the mind. We
confess to have admired the bold, vague, instantaneous, transitory
combination of physical with moral properties, which we have in these
celebrated lines. The monarchies do not rest directly on the
“shoulders,” but on the sage man with these broad shoulders, and the
epithet “Atlantean,” by suggesting immediately a mythological person,
has already half allegorised the figure. The shoulders which are for an
instant brought before the mind’s eye, have never supported any less
honourable weight than that of a whole world. Mr Landor, however, may be
right; we are not disputing the correctness of his criticism; we are
only pointing out the inherent difficulties of the subject. Mr Landor
may be right; but what answer would he give to the man of plain
understanding who did not comprehend how a hill could climb, and who
should insist upon it, that a mound of earth could no more be “instinct
with life and activity” than broad shoulders could help a man to govern
well?
Turning over the pages of a work of Meinherr Feuchtersleben on Medical
Psychology, we met with the remark, that the effort to enjoy or attend
to some of our finer sensations was not always followed by an increase
in those pleasurable sensations. Thus, he says, we distend our nostrils
and inspire vigorously when we would take our fill of some agreeable
odour, and yet certain of the more refined scents escape us by this very
effort to seize and appropriate them. Passing by a bed of violets, the
flowers themselves perhaps unseen, how charming a fragrance has hit upon
the unwarned sense! Turn back, and strenuously inhale for the very
purpose of enjoying it more fully, the fairy favour has escaped you. It
floated on the air, playing with the sense of him who sought not for it;
but quite refusing to be fed upon voraciously by the prying and dilated
nostril. Something like this may be observed in the case of poetical
enjoyment. The susceptible reader feels it, though he sought it not, and
the more varied the culture of his mind, the more likely is he to be
visited by this pleasure; but it will not be captured by any effort of
hard, vigorous attention, or the merely scrutinising intellect. The
poetry of the verse, like the fragrance of the violet, will not be
rudely seized; and he who knits his brow and strains his faculty of
thought over the light and musical page may wonder how it happens that
the charm grows less as his desire to fix and to appropriate it has
increased.
When, therefore, we discuss the merits of a poetical style, we enter
upon a subject on which we must not expect to reason with strict
certainty, or arrive at very dogmatic conclusions. To the last some
minds will find a glorious imagination, where others will perceive only
a logical absurdity. We can only come, as we have said, to some
compromise between reason and emotion. They meet together in the arena
of imagination, and must settle their rival claims as they best can.
That Gray was a true poet surely no one will deny. Who has bequeathed,
in proportion to the extent or volume of his writings, a greater number
of those individual lines and passages which live in the memory of all
men, and are recognised as the most perfect expression of a given
thought or sentiment that our British world has produced? But such lines
and passages rarely bear the stamp of the poet’s mannerism. They would
not have gained their universal acceptation if they had. Highest
excellence is all of one style. That manner which constitutes the
peculiarity of Gray, and which distinguishes him from other poets, we
certainly do not admire, and we will give the best reasons for our
dislike to it that we are able.
Poetry we have somewhere heard defined as “passionate rhythmical
expression;” and, if our memory fail us, and we do not quote correctly,
we nevertheless venture to promulgate this as a very sufficient
definition. It is passionate rhythmical expression; and it becomes
imaginative because it is passionate. Every one knows that strong
feeling runs to metaphor and imagery to express itself; or, in other
words, that a predominant sentiment will gather round itself a host of
kindred ideas held often together by almost imperceptible associations.
In proportion as the mind is full of ideas or remembered objects, will
be the complex structure which will grow out of this operation. It is
not, therefore, because a strain is complex, ornate, or full of
learning, that it ceases to be spontaneous or natural. If Milton rolls
out thought after thought, gathered from the literature of Rome or
Greece, the verse may be quite as natural, quite as genuine an
expression of sentiment as any ballad in the _Percy Reliques_. But what
is desired is, that, learned or not, the strain have this character of
spontaneity, _that it be the language in which some mortal has verily
and spontaneously thought_. We do not mean, of course, that the style
should not be corrected by afterthought, but the corrections should be
made in the same spirit, the language moving from the thought and
passion of the man. Now, there is much of Gray’s writing of which it
cannot be said that the language or imagery flows by any such
spontaneous process; in which we are perpetually reminded of effort and
artifice, which, as it never _came from_, so it can never go home
straightway to any human soul.
We might venture even to take for an instance the popular line—
“E’en in our ashes live their wonted fires.”
This quotation has obtained a general currency: “ashes” and their
“fires” bear each other out so well, that the careless reader has no
doubt the meaning is all right. Yet we suspect that very many quote the
line without any distinct meaning whatever attached to it. And for this
reason,—no Englishman would ever naturally have expressed the sentiment
in this language. Men, at least some men, are careful where they shall
lay their bones; they would sleep amongst their fathers, their
countrymen, their children; some seek a retired spot; some where friends
will congregate; some choose the sun, and some the shadow. They endue
the dead clay that will be lying under the turf with some vague
sentiment of feeling—with some residue of the old affections. Would any
Englishman, impressed with such a feeling, go back in imagination to
classic times, when the body was burnt, and speak of “ashes” which never
will exist, rather than of the slumbering corpse which his eye must be
following, as he speaks, into the earth? Here is the whole stanza:—
“On some fond breast the parting soul relies,
Some pious drops the closing eye requires,
E’en from the tomb the voice of nature cries,
E’en in our ashes live their wonted fires.”
It is altogether, it will be seen, a very elaborate structure. Gray was
a genuine lover of nature; yet he would rather make a patchwork out of
poetical phrases, and the traditional imagery of the poets, than place
himself in the scene he meant to describe, and watch in imagination the
effects it would produce upon him. The critics have remarked that, in
the opening stanzas of the _Elegy_, events are described as
contemporaneous which must have been successive. We have sunset in one
stanza:—
“Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight.”
And in the next, we have advanced into the perfect moonlight:—
“Save that from yonder ivy-mantled tower
The moping owl does to the moon complain,
Of such as, wandering near her secret bow’r,
Molest her ancient solitary reign.”
It may be argued, indeed, that time does not stand still with the poet;
and that, as he lingered in the churchyard, twilight had given way to
midnight. But we are afraid that the true answer is simply this—that the
ivy-mantled tower, the moon, and the owl, were, at all events, to be
introduced as fit accompaniments of the scene; and that no question was
ever asked how they would harmonise with the sunset view of distant
fields, that we had glanced at just before.
“Hark, how each giant oak, and desert cave,
Sighs to the torrent’s awful voice beneath!”
That one who loved mountains, and frequented them, should put a string
of unmeaning words like these into the mouth of his Welsh bard! There is
absolutely _nothing_ in them. Give your Welsh harper the finest ear
imaginable, and put him on what mountain you will, what “desert caves”
will he hear sighing in response to giant oaks, and these again to the
torrent beneath?
“O’er thee, oh King! their hundred arms they wave,
Revenge on thee in hoarser murmurs breathe.”
The oaks waving in wrath “their hundred arms,” is a fine frenzy enough;
but it is spoilt again by the “hoarser murmurs breathe,”—words in which
no man ever thought.
Instances of this artificial manner of building up the rhyme, it would
be superfluous to multiply. Let us rather drop a hint against carrying
our strictures to an undue degree of severity. There is, especially, a
running charge of plagiarism brought against Gray, and all such
_composite_ poets, which is altogether unfair. If they have formed their
style in the study of other poets, it follows that they must repeat the
phrases of their predecessors; but, if they do this in the expression of
a new thought of their own, such use of their language must not be
described as plagiarism. A critic before us thus comments on some lines
in the _Elegy_:—
“Their furrow oft the _stubborn glebe_ has broke;
How jocund did they drive their _team a-field_,
How bent the woods beneath their _sturdy stroke_.”
“This stanza is made up of various pieces inlaid. ‘Stubborn glebe’ is
from Gay; ‘drive a-field’ from Milton; ‘sturdy stroke’ from
Spencer.”[14] Now, there is not one of these expressions which does not
here fall very properly into its place; and a writer familiar with
poetic diction would make use of them without any reference to the
authors from whom they might have been, in the first place, received.
Indeed, it would be quite impossible for any one to compose in this
_mosaic_ fashion; nor is there any end to the charges of plagiarism that
might, on this principle, be brought. If such expressions as “sturdy
stroke,” and “drive a-field,” are to be traced to the ownership of some
predecessor, one does not see how one is to move at all. The language of
the country, like its arable land, is all appropriated. In the passage
here commented on, the critic needed not have stopped where he did. “How
jocund,” he might have added, is from Fletcher, and “how bent the
woods,” from Dryden; and then only consider if these three lines were
composed after such a fashion, what a wonderful piece of workmanship
they must be! Whilst we are as hostile as any to laborious, conscious
artifice, or the mere repetition of traditional phrases and images, we
must deprecate a species of criticism which would shut out the poet from
his legitimate resources, deter him from the careful study of his
predecessors, and either drive him into a poor, timid, barren style of
composition, or else induce him to seek the praise of originality by
coining new words and fantastical expressions.
We must now address ourselves to the work before us, _The Correspondence
of Gray and Mason_, as here presented to us by the careful editorship of
Mr Mitford.
Mr Mitford has by his editorial offices for ever associated his own name
with that of the poet Gray. In the Aldine edition of his works he
performed the good office of restoring the genuine text of Gray’s
letters, which his first biographer, Mason, had so singularly garbled.
For this and other good services of the same kind the public were
already indebted to Mr Mitford. He has now, we presume, completed his
labours on this subject by the publication of _The Correspondence of
Gray and Mason_ in the form Mason himself had preserved it, with copious
notes explanatory of all things necessary to be known, and some which,
we are happy to think, are not quite necessary items in the sum of human
knowledge.
The publication of this octavo volume in its separate form was, we
suppose, inevitable. The course of editorial labours will not run smooth
any more than any other courses. In due order of things, Mr Mitford,
when he prepared his edition of _Gray’s Letters_ for the press, should
have had the materials which form this volume put into his hands; he
could then have incorporated in his book such additions to the letters
of Gray as are to be found here; he could have avoided reprinting a
considerable number of them, and might have given us such of the letters
of Mason (none others are of the least value) as throw light upon the
biography and writings of the poet Gray. But this natural order of
things was not to be permitted. It was, we must presume, after the
Aldine edition had been printed that the manuscript of Mason came under
his inspection. Thus this large new volume was judged indispensable,
although it is manifestly destined to a very brief existence; and, in
spite of its luxury of type, and its neat livery of green and gold, must
be absorbed, its personality entirely lost, in the next and more
complete edition of the works of Gray.
When Mason prepared the letters of his distinguished friend for
publication, he was not sufficiently unreasonable to thrust many of his
own upon the notice of the reader; but he took care to preserve
carefully in a manuscript volume the correspondence of both parties, or
at least such portions of his own letters as he thought were creditable
to himself. This manuscript volume he bequeathed to his friend Mr
Stonhewer; from him “it passed,” Mr Mitford tells us in his preface,
“into the hands of his relative, Mr Bright of Skeffington Hall,
Leicestershire. When, in the year 1845, the library of Gray was sold by
the sons of that gentleman, then deceased, this volume of Correspondence
was purchased by Mr Penn of Stoke Park, and by him was kindly placed in
my hands for publication.”
Mr Mitford has not only judged it worthy of a separate publication, but
has bestowed the utmost pains in preparing it for the press. His
industrial annotation strikes us with a sort of wonder. We are amazed at
the pertinacity of research, all the more laudable, we presume, because
the prize held forth was of such almost inappreciable value. “So you
have christened Mr Dayrolles’ child,” says Mr Gray to the Rev William
Mason, and passes on, regardless, to other matter—to something
pertaining to the then Chancellor of the Exchequer. Not so the
conscientious editor. Who is this Mr Dayrolles? and why has the
christening of his child by the Rev. William Mason been glanced at by
the poet? Forthwith a ransacking amongst all memoirs; we are referred to
_Chesterfield’s Letters_, Maty’s edition, and Lord Mahon’s edition, and
_Walpole’s Miscellaneous Letters_; and at length, in a manuscript
memorandum (so far do we extend our researches), we find the bit of
scandal: this “Mr Dayrolles’ child” is not the child of Mr Dayrolles at
all, but of one Mr Stanhope; and to this it was that, we are told, “Mr
Gray silently pointed.”—P. 129.
It is not always that we get even such a result. Sometimes we have a
long list of references, with some dates and facts, dry as a parish
register. Here is a note on a certain Mr Cambridge.
“On Mr Cambridge and his habits of conversation, see ‘Walpole’s
Letters to Lady Ossory,’ vol. i. pp. 132, 140, 410; vol. ii. p. 242;
Walpole to Mason, vol. i. p. 235; and ‘Nichol’s Literary
Illustrations,’ vol. i. p. 130; and ‘Rockingham Memoirs,’ vol. i. p.
215, for his letter to Lord Hardwicke, in June 1765. In conversation
he was said to be full of entertainment, liveliness, and anecdote. One
sarcastic joke on Capability Brown testifies his wit, and his
_Scribleriad_ still survives in the praises of Dr Warton; yet the
radical fault that pervades it is well shown in _Annual Review_, ii.
584.”—P. 184.
Even the “one sarcastic joke” we are not permitted to hear; but we are
kindly told in what volume of the _Annual Review_ we shall find the
“radical fault,” pointed out of a satire that lives only “in the praises
of Dr Warton.” One more instance we must select, that our readers may
form some just appreciation of the indefatigable research of our learned
editor. The name of Sir Richard Lyttleton being mentioned, we are
invited to the perusal of the following note:—
“Richard Lyttleton, K.B. He married the Lady Rachel Russell, sister of
John Duke of Bedford, and widow of Scrope Egerton, Duke of
Bridgewater. He was first page of honour to Queen Caroline; then
successively Captain of Marines, Aide-de-Camp to the Earl of Stair at
the battle of Dettingen, and Deputy Quartermaster-General in South
Britain, with the rank of Lieut.-Colonel and Lieut.-General, &c. He
was fifth son of Sir Thomas, fourth baronet and younger brother of
George, First Lord Lyttleton.—See some letters by him in ‘Chatham
Correspondence,’ vol. ii. p. 173, &c. He was Governor of Minorca in
1764, and subsequently Governor of Guernsey.—See ‘Walpole’s Misc.
Letters,’ iv. pp. 363, 424. He died in 1770. _His house, in the Harley
Street corner, 1 Cavendish Square_, was bought by the Princess Emily,
and was afterwards Mr Hope’s, and then Mr Watson Taylor’s.—See
‘Grenville Papers,’ i. pp. 49, 249; and ii. pp. 442, 449. _When in
Minorca, he was involved in some dispute with Samuel Johnson, who held
a situation under him._—See reference to it in ‘Walpole’s Letters to
Lord Hertford,’ Feb. 6, 1764.”
All this, we doubt not, is very praiseworthy; but where is it to end? A
learned man writing to another learned man, says, in honest blunt
vernacular, “Have you seen Mr Thomson?” and passes on to other matter.
Is the heart of an editor to beat within him till he has discovered who
this Thomson was, and everything discoverable about him—what house he
lived in, and whom he quarrelled with? This Thomson is mentioned only
once, and we have nothing of him but his name. The more mysterious,
seems the indefatigable editor to think; and the more meritorious, if
from so slight a clue he can succeed in identifying this defunct
Thomson. Whereupon a ransacking of all libraries and innumerable
references,—see this, see that! see, see! We wonder if there is any one
man in Great Britain, not an editor, so laboriously idle as to climb the
steps of a library to _see_ after all these surprising discoveries.
Books, it seems, are used by different persons for very different
purposes. Some build up theories of all sorts with them; children take
them out of the book-case, and build houses and castles with them,
perhaps almost as substantial; the good monks in one of the monasteries
of the Levant, Mr Curzon tells us, used them as mats, or cushions, to
protect their bare feet from the cold pavement of the chapel; and
others, again, pull them about, and toss over the leaves with restless
agitation—to find who Mr Thomson was! Of the two last, we infinitely
prefer the quiet serviceable employment of them by the monks whom Mr
Curzon visited.
“There is a pleasure in poetic pains”—there must be a charm in labour
editorial that only editors can know. There is withal, it seems, a
gravity of duty, a weight of responsibility, which they only can duly
appreciate. We are happy to hear, that in proportion to the dulness is
the virtue of their labours. “To give some personality,” says our
present editor in his preface, “_to names, most of them new, even to
those who are acquainted with the common biographies of Gray_, has been
found, from the lapse of time, a matter of some difficulty; and success
has only been attained by the assistance of various friends. To have
passed over this part of the task would have been unsatisfactory, and
considered _a dereliction of duty_!” It is added, with a little
inconsistency, that the persons whose names are here heard for the first
time, “formed the select and intimate society of one who was not
remarkable for the facility with which his acquaintance was gained.”
What intimate friend have we here added to the well-known list? But let
us grant that the mantle of the poet ennobles all it touches, does the
Reverend William Mason also rank among the inspired?—for we find that
his letters are edited with the same reverential care.
We shall be answered, that if we do not think highly of the immortal
author of _Elfrida_, and _Caractacus_, and _The English Garden_, others
do. Mr Mitford does. “The place in his library was pointed out to me,”
he pathetically tells us, “where Mason usually sate and wrote. _His
poetical chair_—sedes beata—_was kindly bequeathed to me; and I have
left it by will to the Poet Laureate of the day, that it may rest
amongst the sacred brotherhood!_” What an announcement for Mr Tennyson
to read! What will he do with the chair when it comes? A superstitious
man would hardly venture to sit in it. Who knows what spirit of
drowsiness may be still clinging about it?
If we have been provoked into any impatient remarks on this excess of
editorship, we would at the same time express—as we feel—an undiminished
respect for Mr Mitford. He is a literary veteran who has performed many
a good service. We would rather retract every word, and beg that every
expression be set down to mere petulance on our part, than be thought
wanting in personal respect to one who has well earned his reputable
position in the world of letters. But we cannot help ourselves; we must
“tell the tale,” as the tale tells itself to us.
Of the few additions made in the present volume to the letters of Gray,
those which congratulate Mason on his clerical promotion, and on his
marriage, are amongst the most sprightly and entertaining. The following
extracts may be new to our readers:—
“DEAR MASON,—It is a mercy that old men are mortal, and that dignified
clergymen know how to keep their word. I heartily rejoice with you in
your establishment, and with myself that I have lived to see it—to see
your insatiable mouth stopped, and your anxious periwig at rest and
slumbering in a stall. The Bishop of London, you see, is dead; there
is a fine opening. Is there nothing further to tempt you? Feel your
own pulse, and answer me seriously. It rains precentorships; you have
only to hold up your skirts to catch them.” * * *
“DEAR DOCTOR,—I send your reverence the lesson, &c. No sooner do
people feel their income increase than they want amusement. Why, what
need have you of any other than to sit like a Japanese divinity, with
your hands folded on your fat belly, wrapped, and, as it were,
annihilated in the contemplation of your own _copuses_ and revenues?”
His felicitations upon his friend’s marriage are not always
distinguished for their delicacy. With full allowance for the difference
of the times, we still encounter a certain coarseness we should not have
expected in the fastidious Gray. But the following is a very charming
letter:—
“DEAR MASON,—_Res est sacra miser_ (says the poet), but I say it is
the happy man that is the sacred thing, and therefore let the profane
keep their distance. He is one of Lucretius’ gods, supremely blest in
the contemplation of his own felicity, and what has he to do with
worshippers? This, mind, is the first reason why I did not come to
York; the second is, that I do not love confinement, and probably by
next summer may be permitted to touch whom, and where, and with what I
think fit, without giving you any offence; the third and last, and not
the least perhaps, is, that the finances were at so low an ebb that I
could not exactly do what I wished, but was obliged to come the
shortest road to town and recruit them. I do not justly know what your
taste in reasons may be since you altered your condition, but there is
the ingenious, the petulant, and the dull; any one would have done,
for in my conscience I do not believe you care a halfpenny for reasons
at present: so God bless ye both, and give ye all ye wish, when ye are
restored to the use of your wishes.
“I am returned from Scotland charmed with my expedition: it is of the
Highlands I speak; the Lowlands are worth seeing once, but the
mountains are ecstatic, and ought to be visited in pilgrimage once
a-year. None but those monstrous creatures of God know how to join so
much beauty with so much horror. A fig for your poets, painters,
gardeners, and clergymen, that have not been among them; their
imagination can be made up of nothing but bowling-greens, flowering
shrubs, horse-ponds, Fleet-ditches, shell grottoes, and Chinese rails.
Then I had so beautiful an autumn—Italy could hardly produce a nobler
scene—and this so sweetly contrasted with the perfection of nastiness,
and total want of accommodation, that Scotland only can supply! Oh,
you would have blessed yourself! I shall certainly go again.”
“DEAR MASON,—I rejoice; but has she common sense? Is she a
gentlewoman? Has she money? Has she a nose? I know she sings a little,
and twiddles on the harpsichord, hammers at sentiment, and puts
herself in an attitude, admires a cast in the eye, and can say
_Elfrida_ by heart. But these are only the virtues of a maid. Do let
her have some wife-like qualities, and a double portion of prudence,
as she will have not only herself to govern but you also, and that
with an absolute sway. Your friends, I doubt not, will suffer for it.
However, we are very happy, and have no other wish than to see you
settled in the world. We beg you would not stand fiddling about it,
but be married forthwith.”
It is impossible, and indeed would be doing injustice to the editor, to
regard this present volume in any other light than as a supplement to
his edition of the Works of Gray. We must beg leave, therefore, to
revert briefly to the life and letters as they are set forth in this
preceding publication. It so happens that Mr Mitford was not fortunate
even here in the order and method in which his materials reached him,
and were consequently arranged. Fresh accessions came in at the latest
hour; a fifth volume was to be added, in which there was much
repetition; whole letters being reprinted that had already appeared in
their place in the previous volumes. Sometimes also an interesting fact
is slipped into an appendix, where it may chance to have escaped the eye
of all but very attentive readers.
One such fact arrested our own attention, and is a fact of great
significance. To some of our readers we may be rendering a welcome
service by bringing it forward. We are referred to Sir Egerton Brydges
as the authority for it.
Few lives, even of literary men, are said to have been more devoid of
incident than Gray’s; yet it is probable that, if we could lift the
curtain from his domestic life during the period of his youth, we should
find that it was disturbed enough, and of such a nature as must have
left deep traces in the subsequent character of the man. Gray, it will
be remembered, was (to adopt the language of Horace Walpole) “the son of
a money scrivener by Mary Antrobus, a milliner in Cornhill, and sister
to two Antrobus’s who were ushers of Eton School. He was born in 1716,
and educated at Eton College, chiefly under the direction of one of his
uncles, who took prodigious pains with him, which answered exceedingly.
From Eton he went to Peter House at Cambridge,” &c. &c. So in all
biographies glides on the simple account of his career. Nothing is said
of that home in Cornhill, or wherever it was in the City.
But now, some years ago, at a sale of books belonging to one Isaac Reid,
there was purchased a manuscript volume of law cases, written out very
probably by some studious pupil, for his future behoof and instruction.
Amongst these law cases was one drawn up by the mother of Gray, or by
some one on her part, and laid formally before counsel for his opinion.
It reveals in its one solitary statement the history of years; it tells
of domestic discord of the harshest character, and this brought on and
imbittered by pecuniary difficulties. Whilst young Gray was studying at
Peter House, Cambridge, his mother was drawing up the following case for
the opinion of counsel.
CASE.
“Philip Gray, before his marriage with his wife (then Dorothy
Antrobus, and who was then partner with her sister Mary Antrobus),
entered into certain articles of agreement”—(permitting, in short, the
said Dorothy Antrobus to continue the said partnership for her own
sole and separate use.)
“That in pursuance of the said articles, the said Mary, with the
assistance of the said Dorothy her sister, hath carried on the said
trade for near thirty years, with tolerable success for the said
Dorothy. That she hath been at no charge to the said Philip; and
during all the said time hath not only found herself in all manner of
apparel, but also for all her children to the number of twelve, and
most of the furniture of his house; and paying £40 a-year for his
shop, _almost providing everything for her son, whilst at Eton school,
and now he is at Peter House at Cambridge_.
“Notwithstanding which, _almost ever since he hath been married_, he
hath used her in the most inhuman manner, by beating, kicking,
pinching, and with the most vile and abusive language; that she hath
been in the utmost fear, and danger of her life, and hath been obliged
this last year to quit her bed and lie with her sister. _This she was
resolved, if possible, to bear; not to leave her shop of trade for the
sake of her son, to be able to assist in the maintenance of him at the
University, since his father won’t._
“There is no cause for this usage unless it be an unhappy jealousy of
all mankind in general (her own brother not excepted); but no woman
deserves or hath maintained a more virtuous character: or it is
presumed, if he can make her sister leave off trade, he thinks he can
then come into his wife’s money, but the articles are too secure for
his vile purposes.
“He daily threatens he will pursue her with all the vengeance
possible, and _will ruin himself to undo her and his only son_; in
order to which he hath given warning to her sister to quit his shop
where they have carried on their trade so successfully, which will be
almost their ruin: but he insists she shall go out at Midsummer next;
and the said Dorothy, his wife, in necessity must be forced to go
along with her to some other house and shop, _to be assisting to her
said sister in the said trade, for her own and her son’s support_.
“But if she can be quiet, she neither expects nor desires any help
from him: but he is really so very vile in his nature, she hath all
the reason to expect most troublesome usage from him that can be
thought of.”—Vol. i. Appendix B.
Then follow some questions, and the answer of Counsel, which it is not
necessary to extract. What must have been the effect of such domestic
scenes as are here disclosed to us, on the sensitive mind of Gray, may
be partly guessed. Nor need we be surprised that the college youth at
Peter House, and the associate of Horace Walpole, early contracted a
habit of silence upon the events of his own life. Bonstettin, whom he
took so cordially to his friendship, says, “Je racontais à Gray ma vie
et mon pays, mais toute sa vie à lui était fermée pour moi. _Jamais il
ne me parlait de lui._ Il y avait chez Gray entre le present et le passé
un abîme infranchisable. Quand je voulais un approche, de sombre nuées
venaient le couvrir.”—Vol. V., Notes, p. 181.
We understand now why Gray held his mother in so much esteem, and why
the father was rarely spoken of, while her name was never mentioned to
the latest day without a trembling of the voice; why there was found at
his death, still unopened, in his room, the chest containing her
wearing-apparel: he had never dared to open it, or had never reconciled
himself to part with its contents. To his mother he owed his education
and the position he occupied in life—a greater debt than even that life
which she twice gave. He was the only one of twelve children who
survived. The rest died in their infancy, as we are told, “from
suffocation produced by a fulness of blood;” and this strange family
destiny would have befallen Gray also, but that his mother “removed the
paroxysm which attacked him, by opening a vein with her own hand.”
The chief incident of Gray’s life, so far as biographers have been able
to record it, is his intimacy with Walpole;—his journey with him upon
the Continent, and the rupture that took place between them. Of this
quarrel we find an explanation in a note which is by no means honourable
to Walpole. Entertaining a suspicion that Gray had spoken ill of him to
some friends in England, he clandestinely opened and re-sealed one of
Gray’s letters. After this, there was “little cordiality between them.”
We should think not, for, short of a crime, could one man be guilty
towards another of a more dishonourable action? But we are not satisfied
with the authority on which this explanation is given. The account will
be found in a note, vol. ii. p. 175. We have only that sort of hearsay
evidence which lawyers have universally agreed in rejecting. A Mr Isaac
Reed makes a private memorandum (some time after the conversation) of
what a Mr Roberts, of the Pell office, had told him. This is not
sufficient authority for what, we presume in the time of Walpole as well
as our own, would be regarded as a grave charge, if brought against a
gentleman. Of Mr Roberts, of the Pell office, and how he heard the
story, we are told nothing. Mr Isaac Reed merely says of him “that he
was likely to be well informed.”
The quarrel, its cause and its reconciliation, are, perhaps, now of very
little moment, but the intimacy with Walpole must always remain as one
of the most important facts in the life of Gray. For what is the
character which Gray reveals to us? In few words, it is the incongruous
combination of the sensitive poet and man of letters, with the
affectation and levity of a man of the world. This latter phase of his
character must have owed much of its development to his early
intercourse with the son of a prime-minister, and one whose wit and
pleasantry would fully justify and explain an influence over his graver
companion. Gray was a man who had a heart, and had learnt to hide it
under the affectation of indifference; neither could he have been
without the stirrings of a noble ambition; but he had taught himself
that it was a prettier thing to graft the man of letters on the refined
gentleman, than to give himself, heart and soul, to some intellectual
enterprise. He thinks, or he can write, that “Literature, to take it in
its most comprehensive sense, and include everything that requires
invention or judgment, or barely application and industry, seems indeed
drawing apace to its dissolution;” but he makes no serious effort to
arrest this dissolution. What is the literature of a country but the
efforts of such men as he? There was a younger contemporary, one Gibbon,
then turning over the same classic pages as himself, who was soon to add
to the literature of England a History which would display more learning
and more eloquence than had ever before been united together.
Antiquarian as he was, what epoch has he illustrated for us? Zoologist,
botanist; he corrects the latinity of Linnæus! He makes notes
innumerable—notes on Strabo, notes on Plato; the text of what author has
he amended or explained for us? When appointed Professor of History, he
does not even write a single lecture.
“The political opinions of Gray, H. Walpole says, he never rightly
understood;” and his biographer adds that his religious opinions lie in
a certain obscurity. Some writers “not favourable to the cause of
Christianity,” have ranked him, it seems, amongst freethinkers: orthodox
and pious friends have no doubt whatever about his orthodoxy or his
piety. The perusal of his Letters never led us, for a moment, to rank
him amongst unbelievers; but if any one should suggest that he had not
thought on the subject with sufficient earnestness even to be a doubter,
we might be disposed to acquiesce in this explanation. He lived in a
time when there was little earnestness of thought, and he was not of
that energetic nature which rises above the influence of the age. He was
scandalised at Rousseau and Voltaire because they were disturbers of the
peace: one is not sure that there was a deeper feeling in his hostility
towards them. The manner in which a person is _written to_ is often as
significant as the manner in which he himself writes. Throughout their
correspondence, the Rev. William Mason never alludes to his clerical
profession in any one respect but as a means of living well and
comfortably in the world—as a career in which promotion and good living
are to be encountered. The credit of this quite secular tone must be
divided between the correspondents: perhaps in the greater measure to
the elder and more influential of the two.
These correspondents were, no doubt, excellent friends; but Gray never
speaks to a third person in a very flattering manner of Mason. He is
disposed always to deny any very close intimacy. He appears to have said
to himself, Men will laugh at us two poets, communing upon verse, and
flattering each other _upon the muse_; they will make me out also no
better than a poet; whereas I am gentleman by profession and poet by
accident. Writing to Walpole, he says, “I like Mr Aston Hervey’s Fable,
and an ode by Mr Mason, a new acquaintance of mine.” Of this new
acquaintance he had written to Warton, more than two years before, in
the following strain: “Mr Mason is my acquaintance; I liked that ode
very much, but have found no one else that did. He has much fancy,
little judgment, and a good deal of modesty. I take him for a good and
well-meaning creature; but then he is really in simplicity a child, and
loves everybody he meets with; he reads little or nothing, writes
abundance, and that with a design to make his fortune by it.” In another
place he says of him that he “has not, properly speaking, anything one
can call a passion about him, except a little malice and revenge.” Such
phrases as these occur in his correspondence with Warton and Brown: “I
do not hear from Mason;” “You think us great correspondents, but,” &c.
To us it seems that he really liked the younger poet, who more, perhaps,
than any other man he knew, sympathised with him on the poetical side of
his character; but then he did not like to be grouped with him, in the
eyes of the wits and the worldlings. They will compare us, and associate
us, and think us rival candidates for popular applause.
We see this morbid sense of ridicule betray itself in his publication of
his poems. He insists upon it that the poems shall be published as mere
illustrations of the drawings of Bentley, which accompanied them. The
book met with applause, and the _Elegy_ became at once a popular
favourite. He seems, in a letter to Warton, to reprove and to repudiate
this abundant praise. “I should have been glad that you and two or three
more people had liked them, which would have satisfied my ambition on
this head amply.” For all this, when he published the _Bard_, and other
odes which, from their nature, appealed still more to the select few, he
was not a little nettled because “the town” found them obscure.
In his manner and carriage, Gray is described as being cold and
fastidious to an offensive degree. A contemporary and admirer, Rev.
William Cole, says, “I am apt to think the characters of Voltaire and Mr
Gray were similar. They were both little men, very nice and exact in
their persons and dress, most lively and agreeable in conversation,
except that Mr Gray was apt to be too satirical, and both of them full
of affectation.” And then contrasting him with Dr Farmer, he thus
describes the two men: “The one (Dr Farmer) a cheerful, companionable,
hearty, open, downright man, of no great regard to dress or common forms
of behaviour; the other (Gray) of a most fastidious and recluse distance
of carriage, rather averse to sociability, but of the graver turn; nice,
and elegant in his person, dress, and behaviour, even to a degree of
finicalness and effeminacy.”—Vol. i., Appendix. The contrast here drawn
between Gray and Dr Farmer, suggests to us the dissimilarity and mutual
distaste which existed between Gray and a still greater contemporary, Dr
Johnson. They repelled each other far more by diversity of manner than
by opposition of opinion. Gray refused to be personally acquainted with
Johnson. Passing him in the streets of London, he whispered to the
companion with whom he was walking, “There is the Great Bear! there goes
Ursa Major!” and accompanied the words with a sort of shrinking and
recoil. It is well known that the antipathy was mutual. The judgment
passed upon Gray in the _Lives of the Poets_ is the harshest and the
least equitable criticism throughout that work. One cannot help
admitting, however, that, if Gray had written the life of Johnson, there
would have been a piece of criticism produced still less equitable. Gray
is rarely just to any of his contemporaries. He seldom admires, and the
little praise he bestows is distributed most capriciously. He speaks as
highly of Lyttleton’s Monody as of the Odes of Collins. He mentions
Sterne but coldly, and when he would be complimentary, always selects
his _Sermons_! You would say that a certain superciliousness has been
creeping over and into the very heart of the man.
But now change the point of view, and from this the world-aspect turn to
the poetic side of the character. It was not a heartless man who wrote
the _Elegy_ and the _Bard_, who was the friend of West, who in later
times was the friend of Bonstettin, who at all times could find society
in meditation, and companionship in beauties of nature. The Letters of
Gray are too well known to render it necessary for us to make extracts
from them, to show how often a vein of deep feeling runs through a
half-playful style of diction. His pathos touches us still more, whether
he is describing nature, or speaking of himself and of his friends, from
the restraint he has evidently put upon his own enthusiasm, or his own
tenderness. The “melancholy Gray” was a far higher being than the witty
and Walpolian Gray; and it is the blending of the two together that has
made the singular charm of the Letters.
If evidence were wanted to prove that there existed uncorrupted in the
mind of Gray springs of pure and genuine feeling, we should find that
evidence in his attachment to Bonstettin. This young foreigner, by his
own ardent temper, had broken down all those cold artificial barriers in
which it is said the poet habitually intrenched himself. Gray had taken
lodgings for him at Cambridge, near his own rooms, and they spent the
evenings together, reading the Greek poets and philosophers. When
Bonstettin returned to his native country, Switzerland, Gray felt the
loss of his friend in a manner which he does not seek even to disguise,
but expresses with unaffected warmth:—
“_Cambridge, April 12, 1770._
“Never did I feel, my dear Bonstettin, to what a tedious length the
few short moments of our life may be extended by impatience and
expectation, till you had left me: nor ever knew before with so strong
a conviction how much this frail body sympathises with the inquietude
of the mind. I am grown old in the compass of less than three weeks,
like the Sultan in the Turkish tales, that did but plunge his head
into a vessel of water, and take it out again, as the standers-by
affirmed, at the command of a Dervise, and found he had passed many
years in captivity, and begot a large family of children. The strength
and spirits that now enable me to write to you are only owing to your
last letter, a temporary gleam of sunshine. Heaven knows when it may
shine again. I did not conceive till now, I own, what it was to lose
you, nor felt the solitude and insipidity of my own condition before I
possessed the happiness of your friendship.
* * * * *
“But enough of this—I return to your letter. It proves at least that,
in the midst of your new gaieties, I still hold some place in your
memory; and, what pleases me above all, it has an air of undissembled
sincerity. Go on, my best and amiable friend, to show me your heart
simply, and without the shadow of disguise, and leave me to weep over
it, as I now do, no matter whether from joy or sorrow.”
“_April 19, 1770._
“Alas! how do I every moment feel the truth of what I have somewhere
read, ‘Ce n’est pas le voir, que de s’en souvenir’; and yet that
remembrance is the only satisfaction I have left. My life now is but a
conversation with your shadow—the known sound of your voice still
rings in my ears—there, on the corner of the fender, you are standing,
or tinkling on the pianoforte, or stretched at length on the sofa. Do
you reflect, my dearest friend, that it is a week or eight days before
I can receive a letter from you, and as much more before you can have
my answer; and that all that time I am employed, with more than
Herculean toil, in pushing the tedious hours along, and wishing to
annihilate them: the more I strive, the heavier they move, and the
longer they grow. I cannot bear this place, where I have spent many
tedious years, within less than a month since you left me. I am going
for a few days to see poor Nicholls,” &c., &c.
“_May 9, 1770._
“I am returned, my dear Bonstettin, from the little journey I made
into Suffolk, without answering the end proposed. The thought that you
might have been with me there, has imbittered all my hours. Your
letter has made me happy, as happy as so gloomy, so solitary a being
as I am, is capable of being made. I know, and have too often felt,
the disadvantages I lay myself under; how much I hurt the little
interest I have in you, by this air of sadness, so contrary to your
nature and present enjoyments; but sure you will forgive, though you
cannot sympathise with me. It is impossible for me to dissemble with
you: such as I am I expose my heart to your view, nor wish to conceal
a single thought from your penetrating eyes.”
These are not the letters of a youth; they are the outpourings of the
mature man. How grossly do we err indeed when we think that youth is the
especial or exclusive season of friendship, or even of love. In the
experience of many it has been found that the want of the heart, the
thirst for affection, has been felt far more in manhood than in youth.
It was so, perhaps, with Gray. We are not disposed to think that there
was any peculiar merit in Bonstettin to justify this overflow of
sentiment. But the heart of the man was full, and his was the hand that
shook the mantling cup till it ran over.
We have already quoted a part of a brief account which Bonstettin gives
of Gray—that account proceeds thus: “Je crois que Gray n’avait jamais
aimé,—c’était le mot de l’énigme. Gray avait de la gaieté dans l’esprit,
et de la mélancolie dans le caractère. Mais cette mélancolie n’est qu’un
besoin non satisfait de la sensibilité.” That Gray had never loved, is
an explanation which would better suit the novelist than the more sedate
biographer. Nevertheless, M. Bonstettin gives us something to reflect
upon. It is well said that Gray had gaiety in his mind, but sadness at
his heart; and who can tell how far that sadness was due to repressed or
unoccupied affection?
We had intended to offer to our readers some rather copious extracts
from Gray’s Letters, to illustrate the several phases of his character;
but space would be wanting, and perhaps, the Letters being sufficiently
known, this labour would be needless. Unfortunately, a few brief
detached extracts would not serve our purpose. We cannot help remarking,
indeed, the false impression often created by just such partial
extracts. A sentence which itself is the product only of a momentary
feeling, and which is neutralised, perhaps, in the very next page, is
made to express a permanent sentiment of the writer. “Be it mine,” says
Gray at one moment, “to read eternal new romances of Marivaux and
Crébillon;” and this quotation has been so often repeated, that a person
who had not read the Letters might imagine that Gray was a most
exemplary reader of novels. How very different a kind of reading
occupied his hours we need not say. He was apt, indeed, to represent
himself as an idler, but there was something of affectation in this—an
affectation not unfrequent amongst literary men, who represent
themselves as more indolent than they are, because they know people will
be expecting some ostensible result of their industry, or because they
desire this result to wear the appearance of an easy and a rapid
performance. The much marvelling Mr Mason, with his round open eyes that
see nothing, he too has his manner of quotation. “‘To be employed is to
be happy,’ said Gray; and if he had never said anything else, either in
prose or in verse, he would have deserved the esteem of all posterity!”
So a discovery as old as Solomon, as old as man, is assigned to Mr Gray!
Yet if a grateful posterity should turn to the very letter from which
this quotation is made, they would find that Gray was not the most
energetic nor the most complete preacher on his own text. He felt, as
every one not a savage or an idiot must feel, that employment was an
imperative necessity; but he often seems driven to the expedient of
finding employment for the sake of employment. Now if he had devoted
himself to some one literary task, of more or less utility to the world,
and wrought steadily for its accomplishment, he would have carried his
philosophy and his happiness one step farther. Next to living solitary,
the great error of his career was that he had not adopted, either as
poet or historian, some large and useful task.
_Printed by William Blackwood & Sons, Edinburgh._
-----
Footnote 1:
_Life in Abyssinia; being Notes collected during Three Years’
Residence and Travels in that Country._ By MANSFIELD PARKYNS. In Two
Volumes. London: 1853.
Footnote 2:
A young Mahommedan, now resident at Adoua, was robbed one night of the
scalp of one side of his head.—PARKYNS, ii. 293.
Footnote 3:
_Blackwood’s Magazine_ for September 1851.
Footnote 4:
“Τὸ μὲν οὖν κολακεύειν, αἰσχρόν, τὸ δὲ ἐπιτιμᾶν, ἐπισφαλές· ἄριστον δὲ
τὸ μεταξὺ, τουτέστι τὸ ἐσχηματισμένον.”—_Dem. Phal. de Elocutione._
Footnote 5:
Not such asphaltum as is now commonly used; he had a method of
preparing it to render it innocuous.
Footnote 6:
We owe it to Mr Stansfield to say, that had the authority we quoted
given, with Mr Stansfield’s answers, the subsequent explanation of
them, we should not have used such an expression as that he “confessed
an astonishing indifference.” We therefore quote his explanation. He
is asked, (_Question_ 3628,) “You have stated that you have not
studied these pictures in the National Gallery much; that you were not
very conversant with the works of the old masters; and that you had
not studied those pictures in particular; so you, from your previous
knowledge of them, feel competent to give an opinion whether or not
they have been injured in the minute details to which reference has
been made? Yes. I think I may; because when I spoke of my ignorance, I
did it in reference to my not possessing the information that I know
many gentlemen belonging to the Academy have. I should refer to Mr
Dyce at once as a very great authority, and also to Sir Charles
Eastlake himself. I have not their experience in Italian works of art,
but still the pictures that are before us I have looked at with
admiration, and I know that if there is any material injury done to
them I should detect it as soon as any one.”
Footnote 7:
Gen. x. 3; Ezek. xxvii. 14, xxxviii. 6; Herod, iv. 5.
Footnote 8:
_Histoire de la vie de Hiouen-thsang, et de ses voyages de l’Inde,
depuis l’an 629 jusqu’en 645._ Par Hoei II. et Yen-thsong. Traduite du
Chinois par Stanislas Julien. Paris: 1853.
Footnote 9:
_Speeches of the Right Honourable_ T. B. MACAULAY, _M.P._ _Corrected
by himself._ London, 1854.
Footnote 10:
_Funfzig Jahre in beiden Hemisphären._ Reminiscences of a Merchant’s
Life. By VINCENT NOLTE. 2 volumes. Hamburg: Perthes-Besser. London:
Williams and Norgate. 1853.
Footnote 11:
_Memoires de G. J. Ouvrard._ Paris, 1826.
Footnote 12:
_The Rifle and the Hound in Ceylon._ By S. W. BAKER, Esq. London:
1854.
Footnote 13:
_The Correspondence of_ THOMAS GRAY _and_ WILLIAM MASON, _with Notes
and Illustrations._ By the Rev. JOHN MITFORD, Vicar of Benhall.
GRAY’S _Works._ Aldine Edition.
Footnote 14:
GRAY’S _Works_, Appendix, vol. i. p. 112.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
Page Changed from Changed to
171 αἰχρόν, τὸ δὲ ἐπιτιμᾷν, αἰσχρόν, τὸ δὲ ἐπιτιμᾶν,
ἐπισαφλές· ἄριστον δὲ τὸ μεταξὺ, ἐπισφαλές· ἄριστον δὲ τὸ μεταξὺ,
τουτέστι τὸ ἐχηματισμένον—Dem. τουτέστι τὸ ἐσχηματισμένον—Dem.
Phil. Phal.
178 not dry brush, a glaze, and he hot dry brush, a glaze, and he
may may
188 A judge sate in the centre of A judge sat in the centre of
1. Typos fixed; non-standard spelling and dialect retained.
2. Used numbers for footnotes, placing them all at the end of the last
chapter.
3. Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.
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