_Varenna, Lake of Como_.
Italy at last! I have crossed the Alps and reached my goal, and now I
turn and look at that winding road which, for above two thousand feet,
traverses the steep mountain-side, and involuntarily a sadness steals
over me--that I am never to re-cross it! These same “last-times”
are very sorrowful things, all emblems as they are of that one great
“last-time” when the curtain falls for ever! Nor am I sorry when
this feeling impresses me deeply; nay, I am pleased that
indifference--apathy--have no more hold upon me. I am more afraid of
that careless, passionless temperament, than of aught else, and the more
as hour by hour it steals over me. Yesterday a letter, which once would
have interested me deeply, lay half read till evening; to-day, a very
old friend of my guardian’s, Sir Gordon Howard, has left his card: he is
ill the inn, perhaps in the next room, and I have not energy to return
his visit and chat with him over friends I am never to see again. And
yet he is a gallant old officer,--one of that noble class of Englishmen
whose loyalty made the boldest feats of daring, the longest years of
servitude, seem only as a duty they owed their sovereign. The race is
dying out fast.
What can have brought him to Italy? Let me see. Here is the Traveller’s
Book; perhaps it may tell something.
“Sir Gordon Howard, Officier Anglais,”--simple enough for a
Major-general and K.C.B. and G.C.H.--“de Zurich à Como.” Not much to be
learned from that. But stay! he is not alone. “Mademoiselle Howard.” And
who can she be? He never had a daughter, and his only son is in India.
Perhaps she is a grandaughter; but what care I? It is but another reason
to avoid seeing him. I cannot make new acquaintances now. He wants no
companions who must travel the road I am going! Antoine must tell me
when Sir Gordon Howard goes out, and I’ll leave my card then. I feel I
must remain here to-day, and I am well content to do so. This calm lake,
these bold mountains, the wooded promontory of Bellagio, and its
bright villas, seen amid the trees, are pleasant sights; while from the
ever-passing boats, with their white arched awnings, I hear laughter and
voices of happy people, whose hearts are lighter than my own.
If I could only find resolution for the task, too, there are a host
of letters lying by me unanswered. How little do some of those “dear
friends” who invite one to shoot grouse in the Highlands, or hunt in
Leicestershire, think of the real condition of those they ask to be
their guests! It is enough that you have been seen in certain houses of
a certain repute. You have visited at B------, and spent a Christmas at
G------; you are known as a tolerable shot and a fair average talker;
you are sufficiently recognised in the world as to be known to all men
of a very general acceptance, and no more is wanted. But, test this
kind of position by absence! Try, if you will, what a few years out of
England effect! You are as totally forgotten as though you belonged to
a past generation. You expect--naturally enough, perhaps--to resume your
old place and among your old associates; but where are they? and what
have they become? You left them young men about town, you find them now
among the “middle ages;” when you parted they were slim, lank, agile
fellows, that could spring into a saddle and fly their horse over a
five-bar rail, or pull an oar with any one. Now, they are of the portly
order, wear wider-skirted coats, trousers without straps, and cloth
boots; their hats, too, have widened in the leaf, so as to throw a more
liberal shade over broader cheeks; the whiskers are more bushy, and less
accurate in curl. If they ride, the horse has more bone and timber under
him; and when they bow to some fair face in a passing carriage there is
no brightening of the eye, but in its place a look of easier intimacy
than heretofore. These are not the men you left?--alas they are! A new
generation of young men about town has sprung up, who “know not Joseph,”
and with whom you have few, if any, sympathies.
So I find it myself. I left England at a time when pleasure was the mad
pursuit of every young fellow; and under that designation came every
species of extravagance and all kind of wild excess. Men of five
thousand a-year were spending twelve! Men of twelve, thirty! Every
season saw some half-dozen cross the Channel, “cleared out”--some, never
more to be heard of. Others, lingering in Paris or Brussels to confer
with their lawyer, who was busily engaged in compromising, contesting,
disputing, and bullying a host of creditors, whose very rogueries had
accomplished the catastrophe they grumbled at. Lords, living on ten
or twelve hundred pounds a-year were to be met with everywhere;
Countesses, lodged in every little town in Germany. The Dons of dragoon
regiments were seen a-foot in the most obscure of watering-places; and
men who had loomed large at Doncaster, and booked thousands, were
now fain to risk francs and florins among the flats of Brussels and
Aix-la-Chapelle. The pace was tremendous; few who came of age with
a good estate held out above two or three years. And if any listener
should take his place beside a group of fashionable-looking young
Englishmen in the Boulevard de Grand, or the Graben at Vienna, the
chances were greatly in favour of his hearing such broken phrases as,
“Caught it heavily!”--“All wrong at Ascot!”--“Scott’s fault!”--“Cleared
out at Crocky’s!”--“No standing two hundred per cent!”--“Infernal
scoundrel, Ford!”--“That villain Columbine!”--“Rascal Bevan!” and so on,
with various allusions to the Quorn hounds, the Clarendon, and Houlditch
the coach-maker.
Such was the one song you heard every where.
Now the mode--a better one I willingly own it--is “Young Englandism.”
Not that superb folly of white neckcloth and vest, that swears by
Disraeli and the “Morning Post,” but that healthier stamp, whose steps
of travel have turned eastward, towards the land of old-world wonders,
and who, instead of enervating mind and body at Ems or Baden, seek
higher and nobler sources of pleasure among the cities and tombs of
ancient Egypt. Lord Lindsay, for instance, what a creditable specimen
is he of his age and class! and Warburton’s book, the “Crescent and the
Cross,” how redeeming is such a production among the mass of frivolity
and flippancy the magazines teem with! These are the men who, returning
to England more intensely national than they left it, cannot be
reproached with ignorance in this preference of their native land above
every other. Their nationality, not built up of the leaders of the daily
newspapers, is a conviction resulting from reflection and comparison.
They are proud of England; not alone as the most powerful of nations,
but as that where personal integrity and truth are held in highest
repute--where character and reputation stand far above genius--and
where, whatever the eminence of a gifted man, he cannot stand above his
fellows, save on the condition that he is not inferior in more sterling
qualities. The young man setting out to travel can scarcely be sustained
by a better feeling than his strong nationality. He who sets a high
store by the character of his country will be slow to do aught that will
disgrace it. Of course I speak of nationality in its true sense; not
the affectation of John Bullism in dress, manner, and bearing--not the
insolent assumption of superiority to the French and Germans, that
some very young men deem English; but, a deep conviction that, as the
requirements of England are higher in all that regards fidelity to his
word, consistency of conduct, and more honourable employment of time
and talents than prevail abroad, he should be guardedly careful not to
surrender these convictions to all the seductions of foreign life and
manners.
I do not believe our country is superior to any foreign land in any one
particular so strikingly as in the capabilities and habits of our higher
orders. Such a class as the titled order of Great Britain, taking them
collectively, never existed elsewhere.
A German, with any thing like independence, lives a life of
tobacco-smoking and snipe-shooting. An Italian, is content to eke out
life with a _café_ and a theatre--lemonade and a “_liaison_” are enough
for him. The government of foreign states, in shutting out the men of
rank and fortune from political influence, have taken the very shortest
road to their degradation. What is to become of a man who has a
Bureaucracy for a government and Popery for a religion?
But what is the tumult in the little court-yard beneath my window? Ha!
an English equipage! How neatly elegant that low-hung phaeton! and
how superb in figure and style that pair of powerful dark-brown
thoroughbreds!--for so it is easy to see they are, even to the smart
groom, who stands so still before the pole, with each hand upon the bars
of the bits. All smack of London. There is an air of almost simplicity
in the whole turn-out, because it is in such perfect keeping. And here
come its owners. What a pretty foot!--I might almost say, and ankle,
too! How gracefully she draws her shawl around her! What! my friend Sir
Gordon himself? So, this is Mdlle. Howard! I wish I could see her face.
She will not turn this way. And now they are gone. How distinctive
is the proud tramp of their feet above the shuffling shamble of the
posters!
So, it is only a “_piccolo giro_” they are gone to make along the lake,
and come back again, to dinner. I thought I heard him say my name to his
valet, as he stepped into the carriage. Who knocks at the door? I was
right; Sir Gordon has sent to invite me to dine at six o’clock. Shall I
go? Why should I think of it? I am sick, low, weak, heart and body. Nay,
it is better to refuse.
Well, I have written my apology, not without a kind of secret regret,
for somehow I have a longing--a strange wish, once more, to feel the
pleasant excitement of even so much of society; but, like the hero of
the Peau de Chagrin, I dread to indulge a wish, for it may lead me more
rapidly down to my doom. I actually tremble lest a love of life, that
all-absorbing desire to live, should lie in wait for me yet. I have
heard that it ever accompanies the last stage of my malady. It is
better, then, to guard against whatever might suggest it. Pleasure could
not--friendship, solicitude, kindness might do so.