aspect is most charming: most fascinating: most delicious. Shut in by
high mountains capped with perpetual snow; and dotting a rich carpet of
the softest turf, overshadowed by great trees; they seem so many little
havens of refuge from the troubles and miseries of great towns. The
cleanliness of the little baby-houses of inns is wonderful to those who
come from Italy. But the beautiful Italian manners, the sweet language,
the quick recognition of a pleasant look or cheerful word; the
captivating expression of a desire to oblige in everything; are left
behind the Alps. Remembering them, I sigh for the dirt again: the brick
floors, bare walls, unplaistered ceilings, and broken windows."
We met at Brussels; Maclise, Jerrold, myself, and the travellers; passed
a delightful week in Flanders together; and were in England at the close
of June.
FOOTNOTES:
[94] In a previous letter he had told me that history. "Apropos of
servants, I must tell you of a child-bearing handmaiden of some friends
of ours, a thorough out and outer, who, by way of expiating her sins,
caused herself, the other day, to be received into the bosom of the
infallible church. She had two marchionesses for her sponsors; and she
is heralded in the Genoa newspapers as Miss B--, an English lady, who
has repented of her errors and saved her soul alive."
[95] "I feel the distance between us now, indeed. I would to Heaven, my
dearest friend, that I could remind you in a manner more lively and
affectionate than this dull sheet of paper can put on, that you have a
Brother left. One bound to you by ties as strong as ever Nature forged.
By ties never to be broken, weakened, changed in any way--but to be
knotted tighter up, if that be possible, until the same end comes to
them as has come to these. That end but the bright beginning of a
happier union, I believe; and have never more strongly and religiously
believed (and oh! Forster, with what a sore heart I have thanked God for
it) than when that shadow has fallen on my own hearth, and made it cold
and dark as suddenly as in the home of that poor girl you tell me of. . . .
When you write to me again, the pain of this will have passed. No
consolation can be so certain and so lasting to you as that softened and
manly sorrow which springs up from the memory of the Dead. I read your
heart as easily as if I held it in my hand, this moment. And I know--I
_know_, my dear friend--that before the ground is green above him, you
will be content that what was capable of death in him, should lie
there. . . . I am glad to think it was so easy, and full of peace. What can
we hope for more, when our own time comes!--The day when he visited us
in our old house is as fresh to me as if it had been yesterday. I
remember him as well as I remember you. . . . I have many things to say,
but cannot say them now. Your attached and loving friend for life, and
far, I hope, beyond it. C. D." (8th of January, 1845.)
[96] "A Yorkshireman, who talks Yorkshire Italian with the drollest and
pleasantest effect; a jolly, hospitable excellent fellow; as odd yet
kindly a mixture of shrewdness and simplicity as I have ever seen. He is
the only Englishman in these parts who has been able to erect an English
household out of Italian servants, but he has done it to admiration. It
would be a capital country-house at home; and for staying in
'first-rate.' (I find myself inadvertently quoting _Tom Thumb_.) Mr.
Walton is a man of an extraordinarily kind heart, and has a
compassionate regard for Fletcher to whom his house is open as a home,
which is half affecting and half ludicrous. He paid the other day a
hundred pounds for him, which he knows he will never see a penny of
again." C. D. to J. F. (25th of January, 1845.)
[97] "Do you think," he wrote from Ronciglione on the 29th January, "in
your state room, when the fog makes your white blinds yellow, and the
wind howls in the brick and mortar gulf behind that square perspective,
with a middle distance of two ladder-tops and a background of Drury-lane
sky--when the wind howls, I say, as if its eldest brother, born in
Lincoln's-inn-fields, had gone to sea and was making a fortune on the
Atlantic--at such times do you ever think of houseless Dick?"
[98] He makes no mention in his book of the pauper burial-place at
Naples, to which the reference made in his letters is striking enough
for preservation. "In Naples, the burying place of the poor people is a
great paved yard with three hundred and sixty-five pits in it: every one
covered by a square stone which is fastened down. One of these pits is
opened every night in the year; the bodies of the pauper dead are
collected in the city; brought out in a cart (like that I told you of at
Rome); and flung in, uncoffined. Some lime is then cast down into the
pit; and it is sealed up until a year is past, and its turn again comes
round. Every night there is a pit opened; and every night that same pit
is sealed up again, for a twelvemonth. The cart has a red lamp attached,
and at about ten o'clock at night you see it glaring through the streets
of Naples: stopping at the doors of hospitals and prisons, and such
places, to increase its freight: and then rattling off again. Attached
to the new cemetery (a very pretty one, and well kept: immeasurably
better in all respects than Pere-la-Chaise) there is another similar
yard, but not so large.". . . In connection with the same subject he adds:
"About Naples, the dead are borne along the street, uncovered, on an
open bier; which is sometimes hoisted on a sort of palanquin, covered
with a cloth of scarlet and gold. This exposure of the deceased is not
peculiar to that part of Italy; for about midway between Rome and Genoa
we encountered a funeral procession attendant on the body of a woman,
which was presented in its usual dress, to my eyes (looking from my
elevated seat on the box of a travelling carriage) as if she were alive,
and resting on her bed. An attendant priest was chanting lustily--and as
badly as the priests invariably do. Their noise is horrible. . . ."
[99] "Thackeray praises the people of Italy for being kind to brutes.
There is probably no country in the world where they are treated with
such frightful cruelty. It is universal." (Naples, 2nd. Feb. 1845.)
Emphatic confirmation of this remark has been lately given by the Naples
correspondent of the _Times_, writing under date of February 1872.
[100] The reader will perhaps think with me that what he noticed, on the
roads in Tuscany more than in any others, of wayside crosses and
religious memorials, may be worth preserving. . . . "You know that in the
streets and corners of roads, there are all sorts of crosses and similar
memorials to be seen in Italy. The most curious are, I think, in
Tuscany. There is very seldom a figure on the cross, though there is
sometimes a face; but they are remarkable for being garnished with
little models in wood of every possible object that can be connected
with the Saviour's death. The cock that crowed when Peter had denied his
master thrice, is generally perched on the tip-top; and an
ornithological phenomenon he always is. Under him is the inscription.
Then, hung on to the cross-beam, are the spear, the reed with the sponge
of vinegar and water at the end, the coat without seam for which the
soldiers cast lots, the dice-box with which they threw for it, the
hammer that drove in the nails, the pincers that pulled them out, the
ladder which was set against the cross, the crown of thorns, the
instrument of flagellation, the lantern with which Mary went to the
tomb--I suppose; I can think of no other--and the sword with which Peter
smote the high priest's servant. A perfect toyshop of little objects;
repeated at every four or five miles all along the highway."
[101] Of his visit to Fiesole I have spoken in my LIFE OF LANDOR. "Ten
years after Landor had lost this home, an Englishman travelling in
Italy, his friend and mine, visited the neighbourhood for his sake,
drove out from Florence to Fiesole, and asked his coachman which was the
villa in which the Landor family lived. 'He was a dull dog, and pointed
to Boccaccio's. I didn't believe him. He was so deuced ready that I knew
he lied. I went up to the convent, which is on a height, and was leaning
over a dwarf wall basking in the noble view over a vast range of hill
and valley, when a little peasant girl came up and began to point out
the localities. _Ecco la villa Landora!_ was one of the first half-dozen
sentences she spoke. My heart swelled as Landor's would have done when I
looked down upon it, nestling among its olive-trees and vines, and with
its upper windows (there are five above the door) open to the setting
sun. Over the centre of these there is another story, set upon the
housetop like a tower; and all Italy, except its sea, is melted down
into the glowing landscape it commands. I plucked a leaf of ivy from the
convent-garden as I looked; and here it is. 'For Landor. With my love.'
So wrote Mr. Dickens to me from Florence on the and of April 1845; and
when I turned over Landor's papers in the same month after an interval
of exactly twenty years, the ivy-leaf was found carefully enclosed, with
the letter in which I had sent it." Dickens had asked him before leaving
what he would most wish to have in remembrance of Italy. "An ivy-leaf
from Fiesole," said Landor.
[102] One message sent me, though all to whom it refers have now passed
away, I please myself by thinking may still, where he might most have
desired it, be the occasion of pleasure. ". . . Give my love to Colden,
and tell him if he leaves London before I return I will ever more
address him and speak of him as _Colonel_ Colden. Kate sends _her_ love
to him also, and we both entreat him to say all the affectionate things
he can spare for third parties--using so many himself--when he writes to
Mrs. Colden: whom you ought to know, for she, as I have often told you,
is BRILLIANT. I would go five hundred miles to see her for five minutes.
I am deeply grieved by poor Felton's loss. His letter is manly, and of a
most rare kind in the dignified composure and silence of his sorrow."
(See Vol. I. p. 315).
[103] "It matters little now," says Dickens, after describing this
incident in one of his minor writings, "for coaches of all colours are
alike to poor Kindheart, and he rests far north of the little cemetery
with the cypress trees, by the city walls where the Mediterranean is so
beautiful." What was said on a former page (_ante_, 182) may here be
completed by a couple of stories told to Dickens by Mr. Walton,
suggestive strongly of the comment that it required indeed a kind heart
and many attractive qualities (which undoubtedly Fletcher possessed) to
render tolerable such eccentricities. Dickens made one of these stories
wonderfully amusing. It related the introduction by Fletcher of an
unknown Englishman to the marble-merchant's house; the stay there of the
Englishman, unasked, for ten days; and finally the walking off of the
Englishman in a shirt, pair of stockings, neckcloth, pocket-handkerchief,
and other etceteras belonging to Mr. Walton, which never reappeared
after that hour. On another occasion, Fletcher confessed to Mr. Walton
his having given a bill to a man in Carrara for L30; and the
marble-merchant having asked, "And pray, Fletcher, have you arranged to
meet it when it falls due?" Fletcher at once replied, "Yes," and to the
marble-merchant's farther enquiry "how?" added, in his politest manner,
"I have arranged to blow my brains out the day before!" The poor fellow
did afterwards almost as much self-violence without intending it, dying
of fever caught in night-wanderings through Liverpool half-clothed amid
storms of rain.
[104] Sydney died on the 22nd of February ('45), in his 77th year.
[105] A remark on this, made in my reply, elicited what follows in a
letter during his travel home: "Odd enough that remark of yours. I had
been wondering at Rome that Juvenal (which I have been always lugging
out of a bag, on all occasions) never used the fire-flies for an
illustration. But even now, they are only partially seen; and no where I
believe in such enormous numbers as on the Mediterranean coast-road,
between Genoa and Spezzia. I will ascertain for curiosity's sake,
whether there are any at this time in Rome, or between it and the
country-house of Maecenas--on the ground of Horace's journey. I know
there is a place on the French side of Genoa, where they begin at a
particular boundary-line, and are never seen beyond it. . . . All wild to
see you at Brussels! What a meeting we will have, please God!"
CHAPTER IX.
AGAIN IN ENGLAND. 1845-1846.
Proposed Weekly Paper--Christmas Book of
1845--Stage Studies--Private
Theatricals--Dickens as Performer and as
Manager--Second Raven's Death--Busy with the
_Cricket_--Disturbing Engagements--Prospectus
written by him--New Book to be written in
Switzerland--Leaves England.
HIS first letter after again taking possession of Devonshire-terrace
revived a subject on which opinions had been from time to time
interchanged during his absence, and to which there was allusion in the
agreement executed before his departure. The desire was still as strong
with him as when he started _Master Humphrey's Clock_ to establish a
periodical, that, while relieving his own pen by enabling him to receive
frequent help from other writers, might yet retain always the popularity
of his name. "I really think I have an idea, and not a bad one, for the
periodical. I have turned it over, the last two days, very much in my
mind: and think it positively good. I incline still to weekly; price
three halfpence, if possible; partly original, partly select; notices of
books, notices of theatres, notices of all good things, notices of all
bad ones; _Carol_ philosophy, cheerful views, sharp anatomization of
humbug, jolly good temper; papers always in season, pat to the time of
year; and a vein of glowing, hearty, generous, mirthful, beaming
reference in everything to Home, and Fireside. And I would call it,
sir,--
--------------------------------------------------------
| |
| THE CRICKET. |
| |
| A cheerful creature that chirrups on the Hearth. |
| |
| _Natural History._ |
| |
--------------------------------------------------------
"Now, don't decide hastily till you've heard what I would do. I would
come out, sir, with a prospectus on the subject of the Cricket that
should put everybody in a good temper, and make such a dash at people's
fenders and arm-chairs as hasn't been made for many a long day. I could
approach them in a different mode under this name, and in a more winning
and immediate way, than under any other. I would at once sit down upon
their very hobs; and take a personal and confidential position with them
which should separate me, instantly, from all other periodicals
periodically published, and supply a distinct and sufficient reason for
my coming into existence. And I would chirp, chirp, chirp away in every
number until I chirped it up to----well, you shall say how many hundred
thousand! . . . Seriously, I feel a capacity in this name and notion which
appears to give us a tangible starting-point, and a real, defined,
strong, genial drift and purpose. I seem to feel that it is an aim and
name which people would readily and pleasantly connect with _me_; and
that, for a good course and a clear one, instead of making circles
pigeon-like at starting, here we should be safe. I think the general
recognition would be likely to leap at it; and of the helpful
associations that could be clustered round the idea at starting, and the
pleasant tone of which the working of it is susceptible, I have not the
smallest doubt. . . . But you shall determine. What do you think? And what
do you say? The chances are, that it will either strike you instantly,
or not strike you at all. Which is it, my dear fellow? You know I am not
bigoted to the first suggestions of my own fancy; but you know also
exactly how I should use such a lever, and how much power I should find
in it. Which is it? What do you say?--I have not myself said half
enough. Indeed I have said next to nothing; but like the parrot in the
negro-story, I 'think a dam deal.'"
My objection, incident more or less to every such scheme, was the risk
of losing its general advantage by making it too specially dependent on
individual characteristics; but there was much in favour of the present
notion, and its plan had been modified so far, in the discussions that
followed, as to involve less absolute personal identification with
Dickens,--when discussion, project, everything was swept away by a
larger scheme, in its extent and its danger more suitable to the wild
and hazardous enterprises of that prodigious year (1845) of excitement
and disaster. In this more tremendous adventure, already hinted at on a
previous page, we all became involved; and the chirp of the Cricket,
delayed in consequence until Christmas, was heard then in circumstances
quite other than those that were first intended. The change he thus
announced to me about half way through the summer, in the same letter
which told me the success of d'Orsay's kind exertion to procure a fresh
engagement for his courier Roche.[106] "What do you think of a notion
that has occurred to me in connection with our abandoned little weekly?
It would be a delicate and beautiful fancy for a Christmas book, making
the Cricket a little household god--silent in the wrong and sorrow of
the tale, and loud again when all went well and happy." The reader will
not need to be told that thus originated the story of the _Cricket on
the Hearth_, a Fairy Tale of Home, which had a great popularity in the
Christmas days of 1845. Its sale at the outset doubled that of both its
predecessors.
But as yet the larger adventure has not made itself known, and the
interval was occupied with the private play of which the notion had been
started between us at his visit in December, and which cannot now be
better introduced than by a passage of autobiography. This belongs to
his early life, but I overlooked it when engaged on that portion of the
memoir; and the accident gives it now a more appropriate place. For,
though the facts related belong to the interval described in the chapter
on his school-days and start in life, when he had to pass nearly two
years as a reporter for one of the offices in Doctors' Commons, the
influences and character it illustrates had their strongest expression
at this later time. I had asked him, after his return to Genoa, whether
he continued to think that we should have the play; and this was his
reply. It will startle and interest the reader, and I must confess that
it took myself by surprise; for I did not thus early know the story of
his boyish years, and I thought it strange that he could have concealed
from me so much.
"ARE we to have that play??? Have I spoken of it, ever since I came home
from London, as a settled thing! I do not know if I have ever told you
seriously, but I have often thought, that I should certainly have been
as successful on the boards as I have been between them. I assure you,
when I was on the stage at Montreal (not having played for years) I was
as much astonished at the reality and ease, to myself, of what I did as
if I had been another man. See how oddly things come about! When I was
about twenty, and knew three or four successive years of Mathews's At
Homes from sitting in the pit to hear them, I wrote to Bartley who was
stage manager at Covent-garden, and told him how young I was, and
exactly what I thought I could do; and that I believed I had a strong
perception of character and oddity, and a natural power of reproducing
in my own person what I observed in others. There must have been
something in the letter that struck the authorities, for Bartley wrote
to me, almost immediately, to say that they were busy getting up the
_Hunchback_ (so they were!) but that they would communicate with me
again, in a fortnight. Punctual to the time, another letter came: with
an appointment to do anything of Mathews's I pleased, before him and
Charles Kemble, on a certain day at the theatre. My sister Fanny was in
the secret, and was to go with me to play the songs. I was laid up, when
the day came, with a terrible bad cold and an inflammation of the face;
the beginning, by the bye, of that annoyance in one ear to which I am
subject at this day. I wrote to say so, and added that I would resume my
application next season. I made a great splash in the gallery soon
afterwards; the _Chronicle_ opened to me; I had a distinction in the
little world of the newspaper, which made me like it; began to write;
didn't want money; had never thought of the stage, but as a means of
getting it; gradually left off turning my thoughts that way; and never
resumed the idea. I never told you this, did I? See how near I may have
been, to another sort of life.
"This was at the time when I was at Doctors' Commons as a shorthand
writer for the proctors. And I recollect I wrote the letter from a
little office I had there, where the answer came also. It wasn't a very
good living (though not a _very_ bad one), and was wearily uncertain;
which made me think of the Theatre in quite a business-like way. I went
to some theatre every night, with a very few exceptions, for at least
three years: really studying the bills first, and going to where there
was the best acting: and always to see Mathews whenever he played. I
practised immensely (even such things as walking in and out, and sitting
down in a chair): often four, five, six hours a day: shut up in my own
room, or walking about in the fields. I prescribed to myself, too, a
sort of Hamiltonian system for learning parts; and learnt a great
number. I haven't even lost the habit now, for I knew my Canadian parts
immediately, though they were new to me. I must have done a good deal:
for, just as Macready found me out, they used to challenge me at
Braham's: and Yates, who was knowing enough in those things, wasn't to
be parried at all. It was just the same, that day at Keeley's, when they
were getting up the _Chuzzlewit_ last June.
"If you think Macready would be interested in this Strange news from the
South, tell it him. Fancy Bartley or Charles Kemble _now_! And how
little they suspect me!" In the later letter from Lucerne written as he
was travelling home, he adds: "_Did_ I ever tell you the details of my
theatrical idea, before? Strange, that I should have quite forgotten it.
I had an odd fancy, when I was reading the unfortunate little farce at
Covent-garden, that Bartley looked as if some struggling recollection
and connection were stirring up within him--but it may only have been
his doubts of that humorous composition." The last allusion is to the
farce of the _Lamplighter_ which he read in the Covent-garden
green-room, and to which former allusion was made in speaking of his
wish to give help to Macready's managerial enterprise.
_What Might have Been_ is a history of too little profit to be worth
anybody's writing, and here there is no call even to regret how great
an actor was in Dickens lost. He took to a higher calling, but it
included the lower. There was no character created by him into which
life and reality were not thrown with such vividness, that the thing
written did not seem to his readers the thing actually done, whether the
form of disguise put on by the enchanter was Mrs. Gamp, Tom Pinch, Mr.
Squeers, or Fagin the Jew. He had the power of projecting himself into
shapes and suggestions of his fancy which is one of the marvels of
creative imagination, and what he desired to express he became. The
assumptions of the theatre have the same method at a lower pitch,
depending greatly on personal accident; but the accident as much as the
genius favoured Dickens, and another man's conception underwent in his
acting the process which in writing he applied to his own. Into both he
flung himself with the passionate fullness of his nature; and though the
theatre had limits for him that may be named hereafter, and he was
always greater in quickness of assumption than in steadiness of
delineation, there was no limit to his delight and enjoyment in the
adventures of our theatrical holiday.
In less than three weeks after his return we had selected our play, cast
our parts, and all but engaged our theatre; as I find by a note from my
friend of the 22nd of July, in which the good natured laugh can give now
no offence, since all who might have objected to it have long gone from
us. Fanny Kelly, the friend of Charles Lamb, and a genuine successor to
the old school of actresses in which the Mrs. Orgers and Miss Popes were
bred, was not more delightful on the stage than impracticable when off,
and the little theatre in Dean-street which the Duke of Devonshire's
munificence had enabled her to build, and which with any ordinary good
sense might handsomely have realized both its uses, as a private school
for young actresses and a place of public amusement, was made useless
for both by her mere whims and fancies. "Heavens! Such a scene as I have
had with Miss Kelly here, this morning! She wanted us put off until the
theatre should be cleaned and brushed up a bit, and she would and she
would not, for she is eager to have us and alarmed when she thinks of
us. By the foot of Pharaoh, it was a great scene! Especially when she
choked, and had the glass of water brought. She exaggerates the
importance of our occupation, dreads the least prejudice against the
establishment in the minds of any of our company, says the place already
has quite ruined her, and with tears in her eyes protests that any jokes
at her additional expense in print would drive her mad. By the body of
Caesar, the scene was incredible! It's like a preposterous dream."
Something of our play is disclosed by the oaths a la Bobadil, and of our
actors by "the jokes" poor Miss Kelly was afraid of. We had chosen EVERY
MAN IN HIS HUMOUR, with special regard to the singleness and
individuality of the "humours" portrayed in it; and our company included
the leaders of a journal then in its earliest years, but already not
more renowned as the most successful joker of jokes yet known in
England, than famous for that exclusive use of its laughter and satire
for objects the highest or most harmless which makes it still so
enjoyable a companion to mirth-loving right-minded men. Maclise took
earnest part with us, and was to have acted, but fell away on the eve of
the rehearsals; and Stanfield, who went so far as to rehearse Downright
twice, then took fright and also ran away:[107] but Jerrold, who played
Master Stephen, brought with him Lemon, who took Brainworm; Leech, to
whom Master Matthew was given; A'Beckett, who had condescended to the
small part of William; and Mr. Leigh, who had Oliver Cob. I played
Kitely, and Bobadil fell to Dickens, who took upon him the redoubtable
Captain long before he stood in his dress at the footlights; humouring
the completeness of his assumption by talking and writing Bobadil, till
the dullest of our party were touched and stirred to something of his
own heartiness of enjoyment. One or two hints of these have been given,
and I will only add to them his refusal of my wish that he should go and
see some special performance of the Gamester. "Man of the House.
_Gamester!_ By the foot of Pharaoh, I will _not_ see the _Gamester_. Man
shall not force, nor horses drag, this poor gentleman-like carcass into
the presence of the _Gamester_. I have said it. . . . The player Mac hath
bidden me to eat and likewise drink with him, thyself, and short-necked
Fox to-night--An' I go not, I am a hog, and not a soldier. But an' thou
goest not--Beware citizen! Look to it. . . . Thine as thou meritest.
BOBADIL (Captain). Unto Master Kitely. These."
The play was played on the 21st of September with a success that out-ran
the wildest expectation; and turned our little enterprise into one of
the small sensations of the day. The applause of the theatre found so
loud an echo in the press, that for the time nothing else was talked
about in private circles; and after a week or two we had to yield (we
did not find it difficult) to a pressure of demand for more public
performance in a larger theatre, by which a useful charity received
important help, and its committee showed their gratitude by an
entertainment to us at the Clarendon, a month or two later, when Lord
Lansdowne took the chair. There was also another performance by us at
the same theatre, before the close of the year, of a play by Beaumont
and Fletcher. I may not farther indicate the enjoyments that attended
the success, and gave always to the first of our series of performances
a pre-eminently pleasant place in memory.
Of the thing itself, however, it is necessary to be said that a modicum
of merit goes a long way in all such matters, and it would not be safe
now to assume that ours was much above the average of amateur attempts
in general. Lemon certainly had most of the stuff, conventional as well
as otherwise, of a regular actor in him, but this was not of a high
kind; and though Dickens had the title to be called a born comedian, the
turn for it being in his very nature, his strength was rather in the
vividness and variety of his assumptions, than in the completeness,
finish, or ideality he could give to any part of them. It is expressed
exactly by what he says of his youthful preference for the
representations of the elder Mathews. At the same time this was in
itself so thoroughly genuine and enjoyable, and had in it such quickness
and keenness of insight, that of its kind it was unrivalled; and it
enabled him to present in Bobadil, after a richly coloured picture of
bombastical extravagance and comic exaltation in the earlier scenes, a
contrast in the later of tragical humility and abasement, that had a
wonderful effect. But greatly as his acting contributed to the success
of the night, this was nothing to the service he had rendered as
manager. It would be difficult to describe it. He was the life and soul
of the entire affair. I never seemed till then to have known his
business capabilities. He took everything on himself, and did the whole
of it without an effort. He was stage-director, very often
stage-carpenter, scene-arranger, property-man, prompter, and
band-master. Without offending any one he kept every one in order. For
all he had useful suggestions, and the dullest of clays under his
potter's hand were transformed into little bits of porcelain. He
adjusted scenes, assisted carpenters, invented costumes, devised
playbills, wrote out calls, and enforced as well as exhibited in his
proper person everything of which he urged the necessity on others. Such
a chaos of dirt, confusion, and noise, as the little theatre was the day
we entered it, and such a cosmos as he made it of cleanliness, order,
and silence, before the rehearsals were over! There were only two
things left as we found them, bits of humanity both, understood from
the first as among the fixtures of the place: a Man in a Straw Hat,
tall, and very fitful in his exits and entrances, of whom we never could
pierce the mystery, whether he was on guard or in possession, or what he
was; and a solitary little girl, who flitted about so silently among our
actors and actresses that she might have been deaf and dumb but for
sudden small shrieks and starts elicited by the wonders going on, which
obtained for her the name of Fireworks. There is such humorous allusion
to both in a letter of Dickens's of a year's later date, on the occasion
of the straw-hatted mystery revealing itself as a gentleman in training
for the tragic stage, that it may pleasantly close for the present our
private theatricals.
"OUR STRAW-HATTED FRIEND from Miss Kelly's! Oh my stars! To think of
him, all that time--Macbeth in disguise; Richard the Third grown
straight; Hamlet as he appeared on his seavoyage to England. What an
artful villain he must be, never to have made any sign of the melodrama
that was in him! What a wicked-minded and remorseless Iago to have seen
you doing Kitely night after night! raging to murder you and seize the
part! Oh fancy Miss Kelly 'getting him up' in Macbeth. Good Heaven! what
a mass of absurdity must be shut up sometimes within the walls of that
small theatre in Dean-street! FIREWORKS will come out shortly, depend
upon it, in the dumb line; and will relate her history in profoundly
unintelligible motions that will be translated into long and complicated
descriptions by a grey-headed father, and a red-wigged countryman, his
son. You remember the dumb dodge of relating an escape from captivity?
Clasping the left wrist with the right hand, and the right wrist with
the left hand--alternately (to express chains)--and then going round and
round the stage very fast, and coming hand over hand down an imaginary
cord; at the end of which there is one stroke on the drum, and a
kneeling to the chandelier? If Fireworks can't do that--and won't
somewhere--I'm a Dutchman."
Graver things now claim a notice which need not be proportioned to their
gravity, because, though they had an immediate effect on Dickens's
fortunes, they do not otherwise form part of his story. But first let me
say, he was at Broadstairs for three weeks in the autumn;[108] we had
the private play on his return; and a month later, on the 28th of
October, a sixth child and fourth son, named Alfred Tennyson after his
godfathers d'Orsay and Tennyson, was born in Devonshire-terrace. A death
in the family followed, the older and more gifted of his ravens having
indulged the same illicit taste for putty and paint which had been fatal
to his predecessor. Voracity killed him, as it killed Scott's. He died
unexpectedly before the kitchen-fire. "He kept his eye to the last upon
the meat as it roasted, and suddenly turned over on his back with a
sepulchral cry of _Cuckoo_!" The letter which told me this (31st of
October) announced to me also that he was at a dead lock in his
Christmas story: "Sick, bothered and depressed. Visions of Brighton come
upon me; and I have a great mind to go there to finish my second part,
or to Hampstead. I have a desperate thought of Jack Straw's. I never was
in such bad writing cue as I am this week, in all my life." The reason
was not far to seek. In the preparation for the proposed new Daily Paper
to which reference has been made, he was now actively assisting, and had
all but consented to the publication of his name.
I entertained at this time, for more than one powerful reason, the
greatest misgiving of his intended share in the adventure. It was not
fully revealed until later on what difficult terms, physical as well as
mental, Dickens held the tenure of his imaginative life; but already I
knew enough to doubt the wisdom of what he was at present undertaking.
In all intellectual labour, his will prevailed so strongly when he fixed
it on any object of desire, that what else its attainment might exact
was never duly measured; and this led to frequent strain and unconscious
waste of what no man could less afford to spare. To the world gladdened
by his work, its production might always have seemed quite as easy as
its enjoyment; but it may be doubted if ever any man's mental effort
cost him more. His habits were robust, but not his health; that secret
had been disclosed to me before he went to America; and to the last he
refused steadily to admit the enormous price he had paid for his
triumphs and successes. The morning after his last note I heard again.
"I have been so very unwell this morning, with giddiness, and headache,
and botheration of one sort or other, that I didn't get up till noon:
and, shunning Fleet-street" (the office of the proposed new paper), "am
now going for a country walk, in the course of which you will find me,
if you feel disposed to come away in the carriage that goes to you with
this. It is to call for a pull of the first part of the _Cricket_, and
will bring you, if you like, by way of Hampstead to me, and subsequently
to dinner. There is much I should like to discuss, if you can manage it.
It's the loss of my walks, I suppose; but I am as giddy as if I were
drunk, and can hardly see." I gave far from sufficient importance at the
time to the frequency of complaints of this kind, or to the recurrence,
at almost regular periods after the year following the present, of
those spasms in the side of which he has recorded an instance in the
recollections of his childhood, and of which he had an attack in Genoa;
but though not conscious of it to its full extent, this consideration
was among those that influenced me in a determination to endeavour to
turn him from what could not but be regarded as full of peril. His
health, however, had no real prominence in my letter; and it is strange
now to observe that it appears as an argument in his reply. I had simply
put before him, in the strongest form, all the considerations drawn from
his genius and fame that should deter him from the labour and
responsibility of a daily paper, not less than from the party and
political involvements incident to it; and here was the material part of
the answer made. "Many thanks for your affectionate letter, which is
full of generous truth. These considerations weigh with me, _heavily_:
but I think I descry in these times, greater stimulants to such an
effort; greater chance of some fair recognition of it; greater means of
persevering in it, or retiring from it unscratched by any weapon one
should care for; than at any other period. And most of all I have,
sometimes, that possibility of failing health or fading popularity
before me, which beckons me to such a venture when it comes within my
reach. At the worst, I have written to little purpose, if I cannot
_write myself right_ in people's minds, in such a case as this."
And so it went on: but it does not fall within my plan to describe more
than the issue, which was to be accounted so far at least fortunate that
it established a journal which has advocated steadily improvements in
the condition of all classes, rich as well as poor, and has been able,
during late momentous occurrences, to give wider scope to its influence
by its enterprise and liberality. To that result, the great writer whose
name gave its earliest attraction to the _Daily News_ was not enabled to
contribute much; but from him it certainly received the first impress of
the opinions it has since consistently maintained. Its prospectus is
before me in his handwriting, but it bears upon itself sufficiently the
character of his hand and mind. The paper would be kept free, it said,
from personal influence or party bias; and would be devoted to the
advocacy of all rational and honest means by which wrong might be
redressed, just rights maintained, and the happiness and welfare of
society promoted.
The day for the appearance of its first number was that which was to
follow Peel's speech for the repeal of the corn laws; but, brief as my
allusions to the subject are, the remark should be made that even before
this day came there were interruptions to the work of preparation, at
one time very grave, which threw such "changes of vexation" on Dickens's
personal relations to the venture as went far to destroy both his faith
and his pleasure in it. No opinion need be offered as to where most of
the blame lay, and it would be useless now to apportion the share that
might possibly have belonged to himself; but, owing to this cause, his
editorial work began with such diminished ardour that its brief
continuance could not but be looked for. A little note written "before
going home" at six o'clock in the morning of Wednesday the 21st of
January 1846, to tell me they had "been at press three quarters of an
hour, and were out before the _Times_," marks the beginning; and a note
written in the night of Monday the 9th of February, "tired to death and
quite worn out," to say that he had just resigned his editorial
functions, describes the end. I had not been unprepared. A week before
(Friday 30th of January) he had written: "I want a long talk with you. I
was obliged to come down here in a hurry to give out a travelling letter
I meant to have given out last night, and could not call upon you. Will
you dine with us to-morrow at six sharp? I have been revolving plans in
my mind this morning for quitting the paper and going abroad again to
write a new book in shilling numbers. Shall we go to Rochester to-morrow
week (my birthday) if the weather be, as it surely must be, better?" To
Rochester accordingly we had gone, he and Mrs. Dickens and her sister,
with Maclise and Jerrold and myself; going over the old Castle, Watts's
Charity, and Chatham fortifications on the Saturday, passing Sunday in
Cobham church and Cobham park; having our quarters both days at the Bull
inn made famous in _Pickwick_; and thus, by indulgence of the desire
which was always strangely urgent in him, associating his new resolve in
life with those earliest scenes of his youthful time. On one point our
feeling had been in thorough agreement. If long continuance with the
paper was not likely, the earliest possible departure from it was
desirable. But as the letters descriptive of his Italian travel (turned
afterwards into _Pictures from Italy_) had begun with its first number,
his name could not at once be withdrawn; and for the time during which
they were still to appear, he consented to contribute other occasional
letters on important social questions. Public executions and Ragged
schools were among the subjects chosen by him, and all were handled with
conspicuous ability. But the interval they covered was a short one.
To the supreme control which he had quitted, I succeeded, retaining it
very reluctantly for the greater part of that weary, anxious, laborious
year; but in little more than four months from the day the paper
started, the whole of Dickens's connection with the _Daily News_, even
that of contributing letters with his signature, had ceased. As he said
in the preface to the republished _Pictures_, it was a mistake to have
disturbed the old relations between himself and his readers, in so
departing from his old pursuits. It had however been "a brief mistake;"
the departure had been only "for a moment;" and now those pursuits were
"joyfully" to be resumed in Switzerland. Upon the latter point we had
much discussion; but he was bent on again removing himself from London,
and his glimpse of the Swiss mountains on his coming from Italy had
given him a passion to visit them again. "I don't think," he wrote to
me, "I _could_ shut out the paper sufficiently, here, to write well. No
. . . I will write my book in Lausanne and in Genoa, and forget everything
else if I can; and by living in Switzerland for the summer, and in Italy
or France for the winter, I shall be saving money while I write." So
therefore it was finally determined.
There is not much that calls for mention before he left. The first
conceiving of a new book was always a restless time, and other subjects
beside the characters that were growing in his mind would persistently
intrude themselves into his night-wanderings. With some surprise I heard
from him afterwards, for example, of a communication opened with a
leading member of the Government to ascertain what chances there might
be for his appointment, upon due qualification, to the paid magistracy
of London: the reply not giving him encouragement to entertain the
notion farther. It was of course but an outbreak of momentary
discontent; and if the answer had been as hopeful as for others' sake
rather than his own one could have wished it to be, the result would
have been the same. Just upon the eve of his departure, I may add, he
took much interest in the establishment of the General Theatrical Fund,
of which he remained a trustee until his death. It had originated in the
fact that the Funds of the two large theatres, themselves then disused
for theatrical performances, were no longer available for the ordinary
members of the profession; and on the occasion of his presiding at its
first dinner in April he said, very happily, that now the statue of
Shakespeare outside the door of Drury-lane, as emphatically as his bust
inside the church of Stratford-on-Avon, _pointed out his grave_. I am
tempted also to mention as felicitous a word which I heard fall from him
at one of the many private dinners that were got up in those days of
parting to give him friendliest farewell. "Nothing is ever so good as it
is thought," said Lord Melbourne. "And nothing so bad," interposed
Dickens.
The last incidents were that he again obtained Roche for his travelling
servant, and that he let his Devonshire-terrace house to Sir James Duke
for twelve months, the entire proposed term of his absence. On the 30th
of May they all dined with me, and on the following day left England.
FOOTNOTES:
[106] Count d'Orsay's note about Roche, replying to Dickens's
recommendation of him at his return, has touches of the pleasantry, wit,
and kindliness that gave such a wonderful fascination to its writer.
"Gore House, 6 July, 1845. MON CHER DICKENS, Nous sommes enchantes de
votre retour. Voici, thank God, Devonshire Place ressuscite. Venez
luncheoner demain a 1 heure, et amenez notre brave ami Forster.
J'attends la perle fine des couriers. Vous l'immortalisez par ce
certificat--la difficulte sera de trouver un maitre digne de lui.
J'essayerai de tout mon coeur. La Reine devroit le prendre pour aller
en Saxe Gotha, car je suis convaincu qu'il est assez intelligent pour
pouvoir decouvrir ce Royaume. Gore House vous envoye un cargo d'amities
des plus sinceres. Donnez de ma part 100,000 kind regards a Madame
Dickens. Toujours votre affectionne, Ce D'ORSAY. J'ai vu le courier,
c'est le tableau de l'honnetete, et de la bonne humeur. Don't forget to
be here at one to-morrow, with Forster."
[107] "Look here! Enclosed are two packets--a large one and a small one.
The small one, read first. It contains Stanny's renunciation as an
actor!!! After receiving it, at dinner time to-day" (22nd of August), "I
gave my brains a shake, and thought of George Cruikshank. After much
shaking, I made up the big packet, wherein I have put the case in the
artfullest manner. R-r-r-r-ead it! as a certain Captain whom you know
observes." The great artist was not for that time procurable, having
engagements away from London, and Mr. Dudley Costello was substituted;
Stanfield taking off the edge of his desertion as an actor by doing
valuable work in management and scenery.
[108] Characteristic glimpse of this Broadstairs holiday is afforded by
a letter of the 19th of August 1845. "Perhaps it is a fair specimen of
the odd adventures which befall the inimitable, that the cab in which
the children and the luggage were (I and my womankind being in the
other) got its shafts broken in the city, last Friday morning, through
the horse stumbling on the greasy pavement; _and was drawn to the wharf
(about a mile) by a stout man_, amid such frightful howlings and
derisive yellings on the part of an infuriated populace, as I never
heard before. Conceive the man in the broken shafts with his back
towards the cab; all the children looking out of the windows; and the
muddy portmanteaus and so forth (which were all tumbled down when the
horse fell) tottering and nodding on the box! The best of it was, that
_our_ cabman, being an intimate friend of the damaged cabman, insisted
on keeping him company; and proceeded at a solemn walk, in front of the
procession; thereby securing to me a liberal share of the popular
curiosity and congratulation. . . . Everything here at Broadstairs is the
same as of old. I have walked 20 miles a day since I came down, and I
went to a circus at Ramsgate on Saturday night, where _Mazeppa_ was
played in three long acts without an H in it: as if for a wager. Evven,
and edds, and errors, and ands, were as plentiful as blackberries; but
the letter H was neither whispered in Evven, nor muttered in Ell, nor
permitted to dwell in any form on the confines of the sawdust." With
this I will couple another theatrical experience of this holiday, when
he saw a Giant played by a village comedian with a quite Gargantuesque
felicity, and singled out for my admiration his fine manner of sitting
down to a hot supper (of children), with the self-lauding exalting
remark, by way of grace, "How pleasant is a quiet conscience and an
approving mind!"
CHAPTER X.
A HOME IN SWITZERLAND.
1846.
On the Rhine--Travelling Englishmen--At
Lausanne--House-hunting--A Cottage
chosen--First Impressions of
Switzerland--Lausanne described--His Villa
described--Design as to Work--English
Neighbours--Swiss Prison System--Blind
Institution--Interesting Case--Idiot
Girl--Habits in Idiot Life and Savage--Begins
Dombey--The Christmas Tale.
HALTING only at Ostend, Verviers, Coblentz, and Mannheim, they reached
Strasburg on the seventh of June: the beauty of the weather[109] showing
them the Rhine at its best. At Mayence there had come aboard their boat
a German, who soon after accosted Mrs. Dickens on deck in excellent
English: "Your countryman Mr. Dickens is travelling this way just now,
our papers say. Do you know him, or have you passed him anywhere?"
Explanations ensuing, it turned out, by one of the odd chances my friend
thought himself always singled out for, that he had with him a letter of
introduction to the brother of this gentleman; who then spoke to him of
the popularity of his books in Germany, and of the many persons he had
seen reading them in the steamboats as he came along. Dickens remarking
at this how great his own vexation was not to be able himself to speak a
word of German, "Oh dear! that needn't trouble you," rejoined the other;
"for even in so small a town as ours, where we are mostly primitive
people and have few travellers, I could make a party of at least forty
people who understand and speak English as well as I do, and of at least
as many more who could manage to read you in the original." His town was
Worms, which Dickens afterwards saw, ". . . a fine old place, though
greatly shrunken and decayed in respect of its population; with a
picturesque old cathedral standing on the brink of the Rhine, and some
brave old churches shut up, and so hemmed in and overgrown with
vineyards that they look as if they were turning into leaves and
grapes."
He had no other adventure on the Rhine. But, on the same steamer, a not
unfamiliar bit of character greeted him in the well-known lineaments,
moral and physical, of two travelling Englishmen who had got an immense
barouche on board with them, and had no plan whatever of going anywhere
in it. One of them wanted to have this barouche wheeled ashore at every
little town and village they came to. The other was bent upon "seeing it
out," as he said--meaning, Dickens supposed, the river; though neither
of them seemed to have the slightest interest in it. "The locomotive one
would have gone ashore without the carriage, and would have been
delighted to get rid of it; but they had a joint courier, and neither of
them would part with _him_ for a moment; so they went growling and
grumbling on together, and seemed to have no satisfaction but in asking
for impossible viands on board the boat, and having a grim delight in
the steward's excuses."
From Strasburg they went by rail on the 8th to Bale, from which they
started for Lausanne next day, in three coaches, two horses to each,
taking three days for the journey: its only enlivening incident being an
uproar between the landlord of an inn on the road, and one of the
voituriers who had libelled Boniface's establishment by complaining of
the food. "After various defiances on both sides, the landlord said
'Scelerat! Mecreant! Je vous boaxerai!' to which the voiturier replied,
'Aha! Comment dites-vous? Voulez-vous boaxer? Eh? Voulez-vous? Ah!
Boaxez-moi donc! Boaxez-moi!'--at the same time accompanying these
retorts with gestures of violent significance, which explained that this
new verb-active was founded on the well-known English verb to boax, or
box. If they used it once, they used it at least a hundred times, and
goaded each other to madness with it always." The travellers reached the
hotel Gibbon at Lausanne on the evening of Thursday the 11th of June;
having been tempted as they came along to rest somewhat short of it, by
a delightful glimpse of Neuchatel. "On consideration however I thought
it best to come on here, in case I should find, when I begin to write,
that I want streets sometimes. In which case, Geneva (which I hope would
answer the purpose) is only four and twenty miles away."
He at once began house-hunting, and had two days' hard work of it. He
found the greater part of those let to the English like small villas in
the Regent's-park, with verandahs, glass-doors opening on lawns, and
alcoves overlooking the lake and mountains. One he was tempted by,
higher up the hill, "poised above the town like a ship on a high wave;"
but the possible fury of its winter winds deterred him. Greater still
was the temptation to him of "L'Elysee," more a mansion than a villa;
with splendid grounds overlooking the lake, and in its corridors and
staircases as well as furniture like an old fashioned country house in
England; which he could have got for twelve months for L160. "But when I
came to consider its vastness, I was rather dismayed at the prospect of
windy nights in the autumn, with nobody staying in the house to make it
gay." And so he again fell back upon the very first place he had seen,
Rosemont, quite a doll's house; with two pretty little salons, a
dining-room, hall, and kitchen, on the ground floor; and with just
enough bedrooms upstairs to leave the family one to spare. "It is
beautifully situated on the hill that rises from the lake, within ten
minutes' walk of this hotel, and furnished, though scantily as all here
are, better than others except Elysee, on account of its having being
built and fitted up (the little salons in the Parisian way) by the
landlady and her husband for themselves. They lived now in a smaller
house like a porter's lodge, just within the gate. A portion of the
grounds is farmed by a farmer, and _he_ lives close by; so that, while
it is secluded, it is not at all lonely." The rent was to be ten pounds
a month for half a year, with reduction to eight for the second half, if
he should stay so long; and the rooms and furniture were to be described
to me, so that according to custom I should be quite at home there, as
soon as, also according to a custom well-known, his own ingenious
re-arrangements and improvements in the chairs and tables should be
completed. "I shall merely observe at present therefore, that my little
study is upstairs, and looks out, from two French windows opening into a
balcony, on the lake and mountains; and that there are roses enough to
smother the whole establishment of the _Daily News_ in. Likewise, there
is a pavilion in the garden, which has but two rooms in it; in one of
which, I think you shall do your work when you come. As to bowers for
reading and smoking, there are as many scattered about the grounds, as
there are in Chalk-farm tea-gardens. But the Rosemont bowers are really
beautiful. Will you come to the bowers. . . ?"
Very pleasant were the earliest impressions of Switzerland with which
this first letter closed. "The country is delightful in the extreme--as
leafy, green, and shady, as England; full of deep glens, and branchy
places (rather a Leigh Huntish expression), and bright with all sorts of
flowers in profusion.[110] It abounds in singing birds besides--very
pleasant after Italy; and the moonlight on the lake is noble. Prodigious
mountains rise up from its opposite shore (it is eight or nine miles
across, at this point), and the Simplon, the St. Gothard, Mont Blanc,
and all the Alpine wonders are piled there, in tremendous grandeur. The
cultivation is uncommonly rich and profuse. There are all manner of
walks, vineyards, green lanes, cornfields, and pastures full of hay. The
general neatness is as remarkable as in England. There are no priests or
monks in the streets, and the people appear to be industrious and
thriving. French (and very intelligible and pleasant French) seems to be
the universal language. I never saw so many booksellers' shops crammed
within the same space, as in the steep up-and-down streets of Lausanne."
Of the little town he spoke in his next letter as having its natural
dulness increased by that fact of its streets going up and down hill
abruptly and steeply, like the streets in a dream; and the consequent
difficulty of getting about it. "There are some suppressed churches in
it, now used as packers' warehouses: with cranes and pulleys growing out
of steeple-towers; little doors for lowering goods through, fitted into
blocked-up oriel windows; and cart-horses stabled in crypts. These also
help to give it a deserted and disused appearance. On the other hand, as
it is a perfectly free place subject to no prohibitions or restrictions
of any kind, there are all sorts of new French books and publications in
it, and all sorts of fresh intelligence from the world beyond the Jura
mountains. It contains only one Roman Catholic church, which is mainly
for the use of the Savoyards and Piedmontese who come trading over the
Alps. As for the country, it cannot be praised too highly, or reported
too beautiful. There are no great waterfalls, or walks through
mountain-gorges, _close_ at hand, as in some other parts of Switzerland;
but there is a charming variety of enchanting scenery. There is the
shore of the lake, where you may dip your feet, as you walk, in the
deep blue water, if you choose. There are the hills to climb up, leading
to the great heights above the town; or to stagger down, leading to the
lake. There is every possible variety of deep green lanes, vineyard,
cornfield, pasture-land, and wood. There are excellent country roads
that might be in Kent or Devonshire: and, closing up every view and
vista, is an eternally changing range of prodigious mountains--sometimes
red, sometimes grey, sometimes purple, sometimes black; sometimes white
with snow; sometimes close at hand; and sometimes very ghosts in the
clouds and mist."
In the heart of these things he was now to live and work for at least
six months; and, as the love of nature was as much a passion with him in
his intervals of leisure, as the craving for crowds and streets when he
was busy with the creatures of his fancy, no man was better qualified to
enjoy what was thus open to him from his little farm.
The view from each side of it was different in character, and from one
there was visible the liveliest aspect of Lausanne itself, close at
hand, and seeming, as he said, to be always coming down the hill with
its steeples and towers, not able to stop itself. "From a fine long
broad balcony on which the windows of my little study on the first floor
(where I am now writing) open, the lake is seen to wonderful
advantage,--losing itself by degrees in the solemn gorge of mountains
leading to the Simplon pass. Under the balcony is a stone colonnade, on
which the six French windows of the drawing-room open; and quantities of
plants are clustered about the pillars and seats, very prettily. One of
these drawing-rooms is furnished (like a French hotel) with red velvet,
and the other with green; in both, plenty of mirrors and nice white
muslin curtains; and for the larger one in cold weather there is a
carpet, the floors being bare now, but inlaid in squares with
different-coloured woods." His description did not close until, in every
nook and corner inhabited by the several members of the family, I was
made to feel myself at home; but only the final sentence need be added.
"Walking out into the balcony as I write, I am suddenly reminded, by the
sight of the Castle of Chillon glittering in the sunlight on the lake,
that I omitted to mention that object in my catalogue of the Rosemont
beauties. Please to put it in, like George Robins, in a line by itself."
[Illustration]
Regular evening walks of nine or ten miles were named in the same letter
(22nd of June) as having been begun;[111] and thoughts of his books were
already stirring in him. "An odd shadowy undefined idea is at work
within me, that I could connect a great battle-field somehow with my
little Christmas story. Shapeless visions of the repose and peace
pervading it in after-time; with the corn and grass growing over the
slain, and people singing at the plough; are so perpetually floating
before me, that I cannot but think there may turn out to be something
good in them when I see them more plainly. . . . I want to get Four Numbers
of the monthly book done here, and the Christmas book. If all goes well,
and nothing changes, and I can accomplish this by the end of November, I
shall run over to you in England for a few days with a light heart, and
leave Roche to move the caravan to Paris in the meanwhile. It will be
just the very point in the story when the life and crowd of that
extraordinary place will come vividly to my assistance in writing." Such
was his design; and, though difficulties not now seen started up which
he had a hard fight to get through, he managed to accomplish it. His
letter ended with a promise to tell me, when next he wrote, of the small
colony of English who seemed ready to give him even more than the usual
welcome. Two visits had thus early been paid him by Mr. Haldimand,
formerly a member of the English parliament, an accomplished man, who,
with his sister Mrs. Marcet (the well-known authoress), had long made
Lausanne his home. He had a very fine seat just below Rosemont, and his
character and station had made him quite the little sovereign of the
place. "He has founded and endowed all sorts of hospitals and
institutions here, and he gives a dinner to-morrow to introduce our
neighbours, whoever they are."
He found them to be happily the kind of people who rendered entirely
pleasant those frank and cordial hospitalities which the charm of his
personal intercourse made every one so eager to offer him. The dinner at
Mr. Haldimand's was followed by dinners from the guests he met there;
from an English lady[112] married to a Swiss, Mr. and Mrs. Cerjat,
clever and agreeable both, far beyond the common; from her sister wedded
to an Englishman, Mr. and Mrs. Goff; and from Mr. and Mrs. Watson of
Rockingham-castle in Northamptonshire, who had taken the Elysee on
Dickens giving it up, and with whom, as with Mr. Haldimand, his
relations continued to be very intimate long after he left Lausanne. In
his drive to Mr. Cerjat's dinner a whimsical difficulty presented
itself. He had set up, for use of his wife and children, an odd little
one-horse-carriage; made to hold three persons sideways, so that they
should avoid the wind always blowing up or down the valley; and he found
it attended with one of the drollest consequences conceivable. "It can't
be easily turned; and as you face to the side, all sorts of evolutions
are necessary to bring you 'broad-side to' before the door of the house
where you are going. The country houses here are very like those upon
the Thames between Richmond and Kingston (this, particularly), with
grounds all round. At Mr. Cerjat's we were obliged to be carried, like
the child's riddle, round the house and round the house, without
touching the house; and we were presented in the most alarming manner,
three of a row, first to all the people in the kitchen, then to the
governess who was dressing in her bedroom, then to the drawing-room
where the company were waiting for us, then to the dining-room where
they were spreading the table, and finally to the hall where we were got
out--scraping the windows of each apartment as we glared slowly into
it."
A dinner party of his own followed of course; and a sad occurrence, of
which he and his guests were unconscious, signalised the evening (15th
of July). "While we were sitting at dinner, one of the prettiest girls
in Lausanne was drowned in the lake--in the most peaceful water,
reflecting the steep mountains, and crimson with the setting sun. She
was bathing in one of the nooks set apart for women, and seems somehow
to have entangled her feet in the skirts of her dress. She was an
accomplished swimmer, as many of the girls are here, and drifted,
suddenly, out of only five feet water. Three or four friends who were
with her, _ran away_, screaming. Our children's governess was on the
lake in a boat with M. Verdeil (my prison-doctor) and his family. They
ran inshore immediately; the body was quickly got out; and M. Verdeil,
with three or four other doctors, laboured for some hours to restore
animation; but she only sighed once. After all that time, she was
obliged to be borne, stiff and stark, to her father's house. She was his
only child, and but 17 years old. He has been nearly dead since, and all
Lausanne has been full of the story. I was down by the lake, near the
place, last night; and a boatman _acted_ to me the whole scene:
depositing himself finally on a heap of stones, to represent the body."
With M. Verdeil, physician to the prison and vice-president of the
council of health, introduced by Mr. Haldimand, there had already been
much communication; and I could give nothing more characteristic of
Dickens than his reference to this, and other similar matters in which
his interest was strongly moved during his first weeks at Lausanne.[113]
"Some years ago, when they set about reforming the prison at Lausanne,
they turned their attention, in a correspondence of republican feeling,
to America; and taking the Philadelphian system for granted, adopted it.
Terrible fits, new phases of mental affection, and horrible madness,
among the prisoners, were very soon the result; and attained to such an
alarming height, that M. Verdeil, in his public capacity, began to
report against the system, and went on reporting and working against it
until he formed a party who were determined not to have it, and caused
it to be abolished--except in cases where the imprisonment does not
exceed ten months in the whole. It is remarkable that in his notes of
the different cases, there is _every effect_ I mentioned as having
observed myself at Philadelphia; even down to those contained in the
description of the man who had been there thirteen years, and who
_picked his hands_ so much as he talked. He has only recently, he says,
read the _American Notes_; but he is so much struck by the perfect
coincidence that he intends to republish some extracts from his own
notes, side by side with these passages of mine translated into French.
I went with him over the prison the other day. It is wonderfully well
arranged for a continental jail, and in perfect order. The sentences
however, or some of them, are very terrible. I saw one man sent there
for murder under circumstances of mitigation--for 30 years. Upon the
silent social system all the time! They weave, and plait straw, and make
shoes, small articles of turnery and carpentry, and little common wooden
clocks. But the sentences are too long for that monotonous and hopeless
life; and, though they are well-fed and cared for, they generally break
down utterly after two or three years. One delusion seems to become
common to three-fourths of them after a certain time of imprisonment.
Under the impression that there is something destructive put into their
food 'pour les guerir de crime' (says M. Verdeil), they refuse to eat!"
It was at the Blind Institution, however, of which Mr. Haldimand was the
president and great benefactor, that Dickens's attention was most deeply
arrested; and there were two cases in especial of which the detail may
be read with as much interest now as when my friend's letters were
written, and as to which his own suggestions open up still rather
startling trains of thought. The first, which in its attraction for him
he found equal even to Laura Bridgman's, was that of a young man of 18:
"born deaf and dumb, and stricken blind by an accident when he was about
five years old. The Director of the institution is a young German, of
great ability, and most uncommonly prepossessing appearance. He
propounded to the scientific bodies of Geneva, a year ago (when this
young man was under education in the asylum), the possibility of
teaching him to speak--in other words, to play with his tongue upon his
teeth and palate as if on an instrument, and connect particular
performances with particular words conveyed to him in the
finger-language. They unanimously agreed that it was quite impossible.
The German set to work, and the young man now speaks very plainly and
distinctly: without the least modulation, of course, but with
comparatively little hesitation; expressing the words aloud as they are
struck, so to speak, upon his hands; and showing the most intense and
wonderful delight in doing it. This is commonly acquired, as you know,
by the deaf and dumb who learn by sight; but it has never before been
achieved in the case of a deaf, dumb, and blind subject. He is an
extremely lively, intelligent, good-humoured fellow; an excellent
carpenter; a first-rate turner; and runs about the building with a
certainty and confidence which none of the merely blind pupils acquire.
He has a great many ideas, and an instinctive dread of death. He knows
of God, as of Thought enthroned somewhere; and once told, on nature's
prompting (the devil's of course), a lie. He was sitting at dinner, and
the Director asked him whether he had had anything to drink; to which he
instantly replied 'No,' in order that he might get some more, though he
had been served in his turn. It was explained to him that this was a
wrong thing, and wouldn't do, and that he was to be locked up in a room
for it: which was done. Soon after this, he had a dream of being bitten
in the shoulder by some strange animal. As it left a great impression on
his mind, he told M. the Director that he had told another lie in the
night. In proof of it he related his dream, and added, 'It must be a lie
you know, because there is no strange animal here, and I never was
bitten.' Being informed that this sort of lie was a harmless one, and
was called a dream, he asked whether dead people ever dreamed[114] while
they were lying in the ground. He is one of the most curious and
interesting studies possible."
The second case had come in on the very day that Dickens visited the
place. "When I was there" (8th of July) "there had come in, that
morning, a girl of ten years old, born deaf and dumb and blind, and so
perfectly untaught that she has not learnt to have the least control
even over the performance of the common natural functions. . . . And yet
she _laughs sometimes_ (good God! conceive what at!)--and is dreadfully
sensitive from head to foot, and very much alarmed, for some hours
before the coming on of a thunder storm. Mr. Haldimand has been long
trying to induce her parents to send her to the asylum. At last they
have consented; and when I saw her, some of the little blind girls were
trying to make friends with her, and to lead her gently about. She was
dressed in just a loose robe from the necessity of changing her
frequently, but had been in a bath, and had had her nails cut (which
were previously very long and dirty), and was not at all
ill-looking--quite the reverse; with a remarkably good and pretty little
mouth, but a low and undeveloped head of course. It was pointed out to
me, as very singular, that the moment she is left alone, or freed from
anybody's touch (which is the same thing to her), she instantly
crouches down with her hands up to her ears, in exactly the position of
a child before its birth; and so remains. I thought this such a strange
coincidence with the utter want of advancement in her moral being, that
it made a great impression on me; and conning it over and over, I began
to think that this is surely the invariable action of savages too, and
that I have seen it over and over again described in books of voyages
and travels. Not having any of these with me, I turned to _Robinson
Crusoe_; and I find De Foe says, describing the savages who came on the
island after Will Atkins began to change for the better and commanded
under the grave Spaniard for the common defence, 'their posture was
generally sitting upon the ground, with their knees up towards their
mouth, and the head put between the two hands, leaning down upon the
knees'--exactly the same attitude!" In his next week's letter he
reported further: "I have not been to the Blind asylum again yet, but
they tell me that the deaf and dumb and blind child's _face_ is
improving obviously, and that she takes great delight in the first
effort made by the Director to connect himself with an occupation of her
time. He gives her, every day, two smooth round pebbles to roll over and
over between her two hands. She appears to have an idea that it is to
lead to something; distinctly recognizes the hand that gives them to
her, as a friendly and protecting one; and sits for hours quite busy."
To one part of his very thoughtful suggestion I objected, and would have
attributed to a mere desire for warmth, in her as in the savage, what he
supposed to be part of an undeveloped or embryo state explaining also
the absence of sentient and moral being. To this he replied (25th of
July): "I do not think that there is reason for supposing that the
savage attitude originates in the desire of warmth, because all naked
savages inhabit hot climates; and their instinctive attitude, if it had
reference to heat or cold, would probably be the coolest possible; like
their delight in water, and swimming. I do not think there is any race
of savage men, however low in grade, inhabiting cold climates, who do
not kill beasts and wear their skins. The girl decidedly improves in
face, and, if one can yet use the word as applied to her, in manner too.
No communication by the speech of touch has yet been established with
her, but the time has not been long enough." In a later letter he tells
me (24th of August): "The deaf, dumb, and blind girl is decidedly
improved, and very much improved, in this short time. No communication
is yet established with her, but that is not to be expected. They have
got her out of that strange, crouching position; dressed her neatly; and
accustomed her to have a pleasure in society. She laughs frequently, and
also claps her hands and jumps; having, God knows how, some inward
satisfaction. I never saw a more tremendous thing in its way, in my
life, than when they stood her, t'other day, in the centre of a group of
blind children who sang a chorus to the piano; and brought her hand, and
kept it, in contact with the instrument. A shudder pervaded her whole
being, her breath quickened, her colour deepened,--and I can compare it
to nothing but returning animation in a person nearly dead. It was
really awful to see how the sensation of the music fluttered and stirred
the locked-up soul within her." The same letter spoke again of the
youth: "The male subject is well and jolly as possible. He is very fond
of smoking. I have arranged to supply him with cigars during our stay
here; so he and I are in amazing sympathy. I don't know whether he
thinks I grow them, or make them, or produce them by winking, or what.
But it gives him a notion that the world in general belongs to me.". . .
Before his kind friend left Lausanne the poor fellow had been taught to
say, "Monsieur Dickens m'a donne les cigares," and at their leave-taking
his gratitude was expressed by incessant repetition of these words for a
full half-hour.
Certainly by no man was gratitude more persistently earned, than by
Dickens, from all to whom nature or the world had been churlish or
unfair. Not to those only made desolate by poverty or the temptations
incident to it, but to those whom natural defects or infirmities had
placed at a disadvantage with their kind, he gave his first
consideration; helping them personally where he could, sympathising and
sorrowing with them always, but above all applying himself to the
investigation of such alleviation or cure as philosophy or science might
be able to apply to their condition. This was a desire so eager as
properly to be called one of the passions of his life, visible in him to
the last hour of it.
Only a couple of weeks, themselves not idle ones, had passed over him at
Rosemont when he made a dash at the beginning of his real work; from
which indeed he had only been detained so long by the non-arrival of a
box dispatched from London before his own departure, containing not his
proper writing materials only, but certain quaint little bronze figures
that thus early stood upon his desk, and were as much needed for the
easy flow of his writing as blue ink or quill pens. "I have not been
idle" (28th of June) "since I have been here, though at first I was
'kept out' of the big box as you know. I had a good deal to write for
Lord John about the Ragged schools. I set to work and did that. A good
deal for Miss Coutts, in reference to her charitable projects. I set to
work and did _that_. Half of the children's New Testament[115] to write,
or pretty nearly. I set to work and did _that_. Next I cleared off the
greater part of such correspondence as I had rashly pledged myself to;
and then. . . .
BEGAN DOMBEY!
I performed this feat yesterday--only wrote the first slip--but there it
is, and it is a plunge straight over head and ears into the story. . . .
Besides all this, I have really gone with great vigour at the French,
where I find myself greatly assisted by the Italian; and am subject to
two descriptions of mental fits in reference to the Christmas book: one,
of the suddenest and wildest enthusiasm; one, of solitary and anxious
consideration. . . . By the way, as I was unpacking the big box I took
hold of a book, and said to 'Them,'--'Now, whatever passage my thumb
rests on, I shall take as having reference to my work.' It was TRISTRAM
SHANDY, and opened at these words, 'What a work it is likely to turn
out! Let us begin it!'"
The same letter told me that he still inclined strongly to "the field of
battle notion" for his Christmas volume, but was not as yet advanced in
it; being curious first to see whether its capacity seemed to strike me
at all. My only objection was to his adventure of opening two stories at
once, of which he did not yet see the full danger; but for the moment
the Christmas fancy was laid aside, and not resumed, except in passing
allusions, until after the close of August, when the first two numbers
of _Dombey_ were done. The interval supplied fresh illustration of his
life in his new home, not without much interest; and as I have shown
what a pleasant social circle, "wonderfully friendly and
hospitable"[116] to the last, already had grouped itself round him in
Lausanne, and how full of "matter to be heard and learn'd" he found such
institutions as its prison and blind school, the picture will receive
attractive touches if I borrow from his letters written during this
outset of _Dombey_, some farther notices as well of the general
progress of his work, as of what was specially interesting or amusing to
him at the time, and of how the country and the people impressed him. In
all of these his character will be found strongly marked.
FOOTNOTES:
[109] "We have hardly seen a cloud in the sky since you and I parted at
Ramsgate, and the heat has been extraordinary."
[110] "The green woods and green shades about here," he says in another
letter, "are more like Cobham in Kent, than anything we dream of at the
foot of the Alpine passes."
[111] To these the heat interposed occasional difficulties. "Setting off
last night" (5th of July) "at six o'clock, in accordance with my usual
custom, for a long walk, I was really quite floored when I got to the
top of a long steep hill leading out of the town--the same by which we
entered it. I believe the great heats, however, seldom last more than a
week at a time; there are always very long twilights, and very delicious
evenings; and now that there is moonlight, the nights are wonderful. The
peacefulness and grandeur of the Mountains and the Lake are
indescribable. There comes a rush of sweet smells with the morning air
too, which is quite peculiar to the country."
[112] "One of her brothers by the bye, now dead, had large property in
Ireland--all Nenagh, and the country about; and Cerjat told me, as we
were talking about one thing and another, that when he went over there
for some months to arrange the widow's affairs, he procured a copy of
the curse which had been read at the altar by the parish priest of
Nenagh, against any of the flock who didn't subscribe to the O'Connell
tribute."
[113] In a note may be preserved another passage from the same letter.
"I have been queer and had trembling legs for the last week. But it has
been almost impossible to sleep at night. There is a breeze to-day (25th
of July) and I hope another storm is coming up. . . . There is a theatre
here; and whenever a troop of players pass through the town, they halt
for a night and act. On the day of our tremendous dinner party of eight,
there was an infant phenomenon; whom I should otherwise have seen. Last
night there was a Vaudeville company; and Charley, Roche, and Anne went.
The Brave reports the performances to have resembled Greenwich Fair. . . .
There are some Promenade Concerts in the open air in progress now: but
as they are just above one part of our garden we don't go: merely
sitting outside the door instead, and hearing it all where we are. . . .
Mont Blanc has been very plain lately. One heap of snow. A Frenchman got
to the top, the other day."
[114] ". . . Ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil. . . ."
[115] This was an abstract, in plain language for the use of his
children, of the narrative in the Four Gospels. Allusion was made,
shortly after his death, to the existence of such a manuscript, with
expression of a wish that it might be published; but nothing would have
shocked himself so much as any suggestion of that kind. The little piece
was of a peculiarly private character, written for his children, and
exclusively and strictly for their use only.
[116] So he described it. "I do not think," he adds, "we could have
fallen on better society. It is a small circle certainly, but quite
large enough. The Watsons improve very much on acquaintance. Everybody
is very well informed; and we are all as social and friendly as people
can be, and very merry. We play whist with great dignity and gravity
sometimes, interrupted only by the occasional facetiousness of the
inimitable."
CHAPTER XI.
SWISS PEOPLE AND SCENERY.
1846.
The Mountains and Lake--Manners of the
People--A Country Fete--Rifle-shooting--A
Marriage--Gunpowder Festivities--Progress in
Work--Hints to Artist for Illustrating
Dombey--Henry Hallam--Sight-seers from
England--Trip to Chamounix--Mule
Travelling--Mer de Glace--Tete Noire Pass--An
Accident--Castle of Chillon
described--Political Celebration--Good Conduct
of the People--Protestant and Catholic Cantons.
WHAT at once had struck him as the wonderful feature in the mountain
scenery was its everchanging and yet unchanging aspect. It was never
twice like the same thing to him. Shifting and altering, advancing and
retreating, fifty times a day, it was unalterable only in its grandeur.
The lake itself too had every kind of varying beauty for him. By
moonlight it was indescribably solemn; and before the coming on of a
storm had a strange property in it of being disturbed, while yet the sky
remained clear and the evening bright, which he found to be mysterious
and impressive in an especial degree. Such a storm had come among his
earliest and most grateful experiences; a degree of heat worse even than
in Italy[117] having disabled him at the outset for all exertion until
the lightning, thunder, and rain arrived. The letter telling me this
(5th July) described the fruit as so abundant in the little farm, that
the trees of the orchard in front of his house were bending beneath it;
spoke of a field of wheat sloping down to the side window of his
dining-room as already cut and carried; and said that the roses, which
the hurricane of rain had swept away, were come back lovelier and in
greater numbers than ever.
Of the ordinary Swiss people he formed from the first a high opinion
which everything during his stay among them confirmed. He thought it the
greatest injustice to call them "the Americans of the Continent." In his
first letters he said of the peasantry all about Lausanne that they were
as pleasant a people as need be. He never passed, on any of the roads,
man, woman, or child, without a salutation; and anything churlish or
disagreeable he never noticed in them. "They have not," he continued,
"the sweetness and grace of the Italians, or the agreeable manners of
the better specimens of French peasantry, but they are admirably
educated (the schools of this canton are extraordinarily good, in every
little village), and always prepared to give a civil and pleasant
answer. There is no greater mistake. I was talking to my landlord[118]
about it the other day, and he said he could not conceive how it had
ever arisen, but that when he returned from his eighteen years' service
in the English navy he shunned the people, and had no interest in them
until they gradually forced their real character upon his observation.
We have a cook and a coachman here, taken at hazard from the people of
the town; and I never saw more obliging servants, or people who did
their work so truly _with a will_. And in point of cleanliness, order,
and punctuality to the moment, they are unrivalled. . . ."
The first great gathering of the Swiss peasantry which he saw was in the
third week after his arrival, when a country fete was held at a place
called The Signal; a deep green wood, on the sides and summit of a very
high hill overlooking the town and all the country round; and he gave me
very pleasant account of it. "There were various booths for eating and
drinking, and the selling of trinkets and sweetmeats; and in one place
there was a great circle cleared, in which the common people waltzed and
polka'd, without cessation, to the music of a band. There was a great
roundabout for children (oh my stars what a family were proprietors of
it! A sunburnt father and mother, a humpbacked boy, a great poodle-dog
possessed of all sorts of accomplishments, and a young murderer of
seventeen who turned the machinery); and there were some games of chance
and skill established under trees. It was very pretty. In some of the
drinking booths there were parties of German peasants, twenty together
perhaps, singing national drinking-songs, and making a most exhilarating
and musical chorus by rattling their cups and glasses on the table and
drinking them against each other, to a regular tune. You know it as a
stage dodge, but the real thing is splendid. Farther down the hill,
other peasants were rifle-shooting for prizes, at targets set on the
other side of a deep ravine, from two to three hundred yards off. It was
quite fearful to see the astonishing accuracy of their aim, and how,
every time a rifle awakened the ten thousand echoes of the green glen,
some men crouching behind a little wall immediately in front of the
targets, sprung up with large numbers in their hands denoting where the
ball had struck the bull's eye--and then in a moment disappeared again.
Standing in a ring near these shooters was another party of Germans
singing hunting-songs, in parts, most melodiously. And down in the
distance was Lausanne, with all sorts of haunted-looking old towers
rising up before the smooth water of the lake, and an evening sky all
red, and gold, and bright green. When it closed in quite dark, all the
booths were lighted up; and the twinkling of the lamps among the forest
of trees was beautiful. . . ." To this pretty picture, a letter of a little
later date, describing a marriage on the farm, added farther comical
illustration of the rifle-firing propensities of the Swiss, and had
otherwise also whimsical touches of character. "One of the farmer's
people--a sister, I think--was married from here the other day. It is
wonderful to see how naturally the smallest girls are interested in
marriages. Katey and Mamey were as excited as if they were eighteen. The
fondness of the Swiss for gunpowder on interesting occasions, is one of
the drollest things. For three days before, the farmer himself, in the
midst of his various agricultural duties, plunged out of a little door
near my windows, about once in every hour, and fired off a rifle. I
thought he was shooting rats who were spoiling the vines; but he was
merely relieving his mind, it seemed, on the subject of the approaching
nuptials. All night afterwards, he and a small circle of friends kept
perpetually letting off guns under the casement of the bridal chamber. A
Bride is always drest here, in black silk; but this bride wore merino of
that colour, observing to her mother when she bought it (the old lady is
82, and works on the farm), 'You know, mother, I am sure to want
mourning for you, soon; and the same gown will do.'"[119]
Meanwhile, day by day, he was steadily moving on with his first number;
feeling sometimes the want of streets in an "extraordinary nervousness
it would be hardly possible to describe," that would come upon him after
he had been writing all day; but at all other times finding the repose
of the place very favourable to industry. "I am writing slowly at first,
of course" (5th of July), "but I hope I shall have finished the first
number in the course of a fortnight at farthest. I have done the first
chapter, and begun another. I say nothing of the merits thus far, or of
the idea beyond what is known to you; because I prefer that you should
come as fresh as may be upon them. I shall certainly have a great
surprise for people at the end of the fourth number;[120] and I think
there is a new and peculiar sort of interest, involving the necessity of
a little bit of delicate treatment whereof I will expound my idea to you
by and by. When I have done this number, I may take a run to Chamounix
perhaps. . . . My thoughts have necessarily been called away from the
Christmas book. The first _Dombey_ done, I think I should fly off to
that, whenever the idea presented itself vividly before me. I still
cherish the Battle fancy, though it is nothing but a fancy as yet." A
week later he told me that he hoped to finish the first number by that
day week or thereabouts, when he should then run and look for his
Christmas book in the glaciers at Chamounix. His progress to this point
had been pleasing him. "I think _Dombey_ very strong--with great
capacity in its leading idea; plenty of character that is likely to
tell; and some rollicking facetiousness, to say nothing of pathos. I
hope you will soon judge of it for yourself, however; and I know you
will say what you think. I have been very constantly at work." Six days
later I heard that he had still eight slips to write, and for a week had
put off Chamounix.
But though the fourth chapter yet was incomplete, he could repress no
longer the desire to write to me of what he was doing (18th of July). "I
think the general idea of _Dombey_ is interesting and new, and has great
material in it. But I don't like to discuss it with you till you have
read number one, for fear I should spoil its effect. When done--about
Wednesday or Thursday, please God--I will send it in two days' posts,
seven letters each day. If you have it set at once (I am afraid you
couldn't read it, otherwise than in print) I know you will impress on B.
& E. the necessity of the closest secrecy. The very name getting out,
would be ruinous. The points for illustration, and the enormous care
required, make me excessively anxious. The man for Dombey, if Browne
could see him, the class man to a T, is Sir A---- E----, of D----'s.
Great pains will be necessary with Miss Tox. The Toodle family should
not be too much caricatured, because of Polly. I should like Browne to
think of Susan Nipper, who will not be wanted in the first number. After
the second number, they will all be nine or ten years older, but this
will not involve much change in the characters, except in the children
and Miss Nipper. What a brilliant thing to be telling you all these
names so familiarly, when you know nothing about 'em! I quite enjoy it.
By the bye, I hope you may like the introduction of Solomon Gills.[121]
I think he lives in a good sort of house. . . . One word more. What do you
think, as a name for the Christmas book, of THE BATTLE OF LIFE? It is
not a name I have conned at all, but has just occurred to me in
connection with that foggy idea. If I can see my way, I think I will
take it next, and clear it off. If you knew how it hangs about me, I am
sure you would say so too. It would be an immense relief to have it
done, and nothing standing in the way of _Dombey_."
Within the time left for it the opening number was done, but two little
incidents preceded still the trip to Chamounix. The first was a visit
from Hallam to Mr. Haldimand. "Heavens! how Hallam did talk yesterday! I
don't think I ever saw him so tremendous. Very good-natured and
pleasant, in his way, but Good Heavens! how he did talk. That famous day
you and I remember was nothing to it. His son was with him, and his
daughter (who has an impediment in her speech, as if nature were
determined to balance that faculty in the family), and his niece, a
pretty woman, the wife of a clergyman and a friend of Thackeray's. It
strikes me that she must be 'the little woman' he proposed to take us to
drink tea with, once, in Golden-square. Don't you remember? His great
favourite? She is quite a charming person anyhow." I hope to be pardoned
for preserving an opinion which more familiar later acquaintance
confirmed, and which can hardly now give anything but pleasure to the
lady of whom it is expressed. To the second incident he alludes more
briefly. "As Haldimand and Mrs. Marcet and the Cerjats had devised a
small mountain expedition for us for to-morrow, I didn't like to allow
Chamounix to stand in the way. So we go with them first, and start on
our own account on Tuesday. We are extremely pleasant with these
people." The close of the same letter (25th of July), mentioning two
pieces of local news, gives intimation of the dangers incident to all
Swiss travelling, and of such special precautions as were necessary for
the holiday among the mountains he was now about to take. "My first news
is that a crocodile is said to have escaped from the Zoological gardens
at Geneva, and to be now 'zigzag-zigging' about the lake. But I can't
make out whether this is a great fact, or whether it is a pious fraud to
prevent too much bathing and liability to accidents. The other piece of
news is more serious. An English family whose name I don't know,
consisting of a father, mother, and daughter, arrived at the hotel
Gibbon here last Monday, and started off on some mountain expedition in
one of the carriages of the country. It was a mere track, the road, and
ought to have been travelled only by mules, but the Englishman persisted
(as Englishmen do) in going on in the carriage; and in answer to all the
representations of the driver that no carriage had ever gone up there,
said he needn't be afraid he wasn't going to be paid for it, and so
forth. Accordingly, the coachman got down and walked by the horses'
heads. It was fiery hot; and, after much tugging and rearing, the horses
began to back, and went down bodily, carriage and all, into a deep
ravine. The mother was killed on the spot; and the father and daughter
are lying at some house hard by, not expected to recover."
His next letter (written on the second of August) described his own
first real experience of mountain-travel. "I begin my letter to-night,
but only begin, for we returned from Chamounix in time for dinner just
now, and are pretty considerably done up. We went by a mountain pass not
often crossed by ladies, called the Col de Balme, where your imagination
may picture Kate and Georgy on mules _for ten hours at a stretch_,
riding up and down the most frightful precipices. We returned by the
pass of the Tete Noire, which Talfourd knows, and which is of a
different character, but astonishingly fine too. Mont Blanc, and the
Valley of Chamounix, and the Mer de Glace, and all the wonders of that
most wonderful place, are above and beyond one's wildest expectations. I
cannot imagine anything in nature more stupendous or sublime. If I were
to write about it now, I should quite rave--such prodigious impressions
are rampant within me. . . . You may suppose that the mule-travelling is
pretty primitive. Each person takes a carpet-bag strapped on the mule
behind himself or herself: and that is all the baggage that can be
carried. A guide, a thorough-bred mountaineer, walks all the way,
leading the lady's mule; I say the lady's par excellence, in compliment
to Kate; and all the rest struggle on as they please. The cavalcade
stops at a lone hut for an hour and a half in the middle of the day, and
lunches brilliantly on whatever it can get. Going by that Col de Balme
pass, you climb up and up and up for five hours and more, and
look--from a mere unguarded ledge of path on the side of the
precipice--into such awful valleys, that at last you are firm in the
belief that you have got above everything in the world, and that there
can be nothing earthly overhead. Just as you arrive at this conclusion,
a different (and oh Heaven! what a free and wonderful) air comes blowing
on your face; you cross a ridge of snow; and lying before you (wholly
unseen till then), towering up into the distant sky, is the vast range
of Mont Blanc, with attendant mountains diminished by its majestic side
into mere dwarfs tapering up into innumerable rude Gothic pinnacles;
deserts of ice and snow; forests of firs on mountain sides, of no
account at all in the enormous scene; villages down in the hollow, that
you can shut out with a finger; waterfalls, avalanches, pyramids and
towers of ice, torrents, bridges; mountain upon mountain until the very
sky is blocked away, and you must look up, overhead, to see it. Good
God, what a country Switzerland is, and what a concentration of it is to
be beheld from that one spot! And (think of this in Whitefriars and in
Lincoln's-inn!) at noon on the second day from here, the first day being
but half a one by the bye and full of uncommon beauty, you lie down on
that ridge and see it all! . . . I think I must go back again (whether you
come or not!) and see it again before the bad weather arrives. We have
had sunlight, moonlight, a perfectly transparent atmosphere with not a
cloud, and the grand plateau on the very summit of Mont Blanc so clear
by day and night that it was difficult to believe in intervening chasms
and precipices, and almost impossible to resist the idea that one might
sally forth and climb up easily. I went into all sorts of places; armed
with a great pole with a spike at the end of it, like a leaping-pole,
and with pointed irons buckled on to my shoes; and am all but knocked
up. I was very anxious to make the expedition to what is called 'The
Garden:' a green spot covered with wild flowers, lying across the Mer de
Glace, and among the most awful mountains: but I could find no
Englishman at the hotels who was similarly disposed, and the Brave
_wouldn't go_. No sir! He gave in point blank (having been horribly
blown in a climbing excursion the day before), and couldn't stand it. He
is too heavy for such work, unquestionably.[122] In all other respects,
I think he has exceeded himself on this journey; and if you could have
seen him riding a very small mule, up a road exactly like the broken
stairs of Rochester-castle; with a brandy bottle slung over his
shoulder, a small pie in his hat, a roast fowl looking out of his
pocket, and a mountain staff of six feet long carried cross-wise on the
saddle before him; you'd have said so. He was (next to me) the
admiration of Chamounix, but he utterly quenched me on the road."
On the road as they returned there had been a small adventure, the day
before this letter was written. Dickens was jingling slowly up the Tete
Noire pass (his mule having thirty-seven bells on its head), riding at
the moment quite alone, when--"an Englishman came bolting out of a
little chalet in a most inaccessible and extraordinary place, and said
with great glee 'There has been an accident here sir!' I had been
thinking of anything else you please; and, having no reason to suppose
him an Englishman except his language, which went for nothing in the
confusion, stammered out a reply in French and stared at him, in a very
damp shirt and trowsers, as he stared at me in a similar costume. On his
repeating the announcement, I began to have a glimmering of common
sense; and so arrived at a knowledge of the fact that a German lady had
been thrown from her mule and had broken her leg, at a short distance
off, and had found her way in great pain to that cottage, where the
Englishman, a Prussian, and a Frenchman, had presently come up; and the
Frenchman, by extraordinary good fortune, was a surgeon! They were all
from Chamounix, and the three latter were walking in company. It was
quite charming to see how attentive they were. The lady was from
Lausanne; where she had come from Frankfort to make excursions with her
two boys, who are at the college here, during the vacation. She had no
other attendants, and the boys were crying and very frightened. The
Englishman was in the full glee of having just cut up one white dress,
two chemises, and three pocket handkerchiefs, for bandages; the
Frenchman had set the leg skilfully; the Prussian had scoured a
neighboring wood for some men to carry her forward; and they were all at
it, behind the hut, making a sort of handbarrow on which to bear her.
When it was constructed, she was strapped upon it; had her poor head
covered over with a handkerchief, and was carried away; and we all went
on in company: Kate and Georgy consoling and tending the sufferer, who
was very cheerful, but had lost her husband only a year." With the same
delightful observation, and missing no touch of kindly character that
might give each actor his place in the little scene, the sequel is
described; but it does not need to add more. It was hoped that by means
of relays of men at Martigny the poor lady might have been carried on
some twenty miles, in the cooler evening, to the head of the lake, and
so have been got into the steamer; but she was too exhausted to be borne
beyond the inn, and there she had to remain until joined by relatives
from Frankfort.
A few days' rest after his return were interposed, before he began his
second number; and until the latter has been completed, and the
Christmas story taken in hand, I do not admit the reader to his full
confidences about his writing. But there were other subjects that amused
and engaged him up to that date, as well when he was idle as when again
he was at work, to which expression so full of character is given in his
letters that they properly find mention here.
Between the second and the ninth of August he went down one evening to
the lake, five minutes after sunset, when the sky was covered with
sullen black clouds reflected in the deep water, and saw the Castle of
Chillon. He thought it the best deserving and least exaggerated in
repute, of all the places he had seen. "The insupportable solitude and
dreariness of the white walls and towers, the sluggish moat and
drawbridge, and the lonely ramparts, I never saw the like of. But there
is a court-yard inside; surrounded by prisons, oubliettes, and old
chambers of torture; so terrifically sad, that death itself is not more
sorrowful. And oh! a wicked old Grand Duke's bedchamber upstairs in the
tower, with a secret staircase down into the chapel, where the bats were
wheeling about; and Bonnivard's dungeon; and a horrible trap whence
prisoners were cast out into the lake; and a stake all burnt and
crackled up, that still stands in the torture-ante-chamber to the saloon
of justice (!)--what tremendous places! Good God, the greatest mystery
in all the earth, to me, is how or why the world was tolerated by its
Creator through the good old times, and wasn't dashed to fragments."
On the ninth of August he wrote to me that there was to be a prodigious
fete that day in Lausanne, in honour of the first anniversary of the
proclamation of the New Constitution:[123] "beginning at sunrise with
the firing of great guns, and twice two thousand rounds of rifles by two
thousand men; proceeding at eleven o'clock with a great service, and
some speechifying, in the church; and ending to-night with a great ball
in the public promenade, and a general illumination of the town." The
authorities had invited him to a place of honour in the ceremony; and
though he did not go ("having been up till three o'clock in the morning,
and being fast asleep at the appointed time"), the reply that sent his
thanks expressed also his sympathy. He was the readier with this from
having discovered, in the "old" or "gentlemanly" party of the place
("including of course the sprinkling of English who are always tory,
hang 'em!"), so wonderfully sore a feeling about the revolution thus
celebrated, that to avoid its fete the majority had gone off by steamer
the day before, and those who remained were prophesying assaults on the
unilluminated houses, and other excesses. Dickens had no faith in such
predictions. "The people are as perfectly good tempered and quiet
always, as people can be. I don't know what the last Government may have
been, but they seem to me to do very well with this, and to be
rationally and cheaply provided for. If you believed what the
discontented assert, you wouldn't believe in one solitary man or woman
with a grain of goodness or civility. I find nothing _but_ civility; and
I walk about in all sorts of out-of-the-way places, where they live
rough lives enough, in solitary cottages." The issue was told in two
postscripts to his letter, and showed him to be so far right. "P.S. 6
o'clock afternoon. The fete going on, in great force. Not one of 'the
old party' to be seen. I went down with one to the ground before dinner,
and nothing would induce him to go within the barrier with me. Yet what
they call a revolution was nothing but a change of government.
Thirty-six thousand people, in this small canton, petitioned against the
Jesuits--God knows with good reason. The Government chose to call them
'a mob.' So, to prove that they were not, they turned the Government
out. I honour them for it. They are a genuine people, these Swiss. There
is better metal in them than in all the stars and stripes of all the
fustian banners of the so-called, and falsely called, U-nited States.
They are a thorn in the sides of European despots, and a good wholesome
people to live near Jesuit-ridden Kings on the brighter side of the
mountains." "P.P.S. August 10th. . . . The fete went off as quietly as I
supposed it would; and they danced all night."
These views had forcible illustration in a subsequent letter, where he
describes a similar revolution that occurred at Geneva before he left
the country; and nothing could better show his practical good sense in a
matter of this kind. The description will be given shortly; and
meanwhile I subjoin a comment made by him, not less worthy of attention,
upon my reply to his account of the anti-Jesuit celebration at Lausanne.
"I don't know whether I have mentioned before, that in the valley of the
Simplon hard by here, where (at the bridge of St. Maurice, over the
Rhone) this Protestant canton ends and a Catholic canton begins, you
might separate two perfectly distinct and different conditions of
humanity by drawing a line with your stick in the dust on the ground. On
the Protestant side, neatness; cheerfulness; industry; education;
continual aspiration, at least, after better things. On the Catholic
side, dirt, disease, ignorance, squalor, and misery. I have so
constantly observed the like of this, since I first came abroad, that I
have a sad misgiving that the religion of Ireland lies as deep at the
root of all its sorrows, even as English misgovernment and Tory
villainy." Almost the counterpart of this remark is to be found in one
of the later writings of Macaulay.
FOOTNOTES:
[117] "When it is very hot, it is hotter than in Italy. The over-hanging
roofs of the houses, and the quantity of wood employed in their
construction (where they use tile and brick in Italy), render them
perfect forcing-houses. The walls and floors, hot to the hand all the
night through, interfere with sleep; and thunder is almost always
booming and rumbling among the mountains." Besides this, though there
were no mosquitoes as in Genoa, there was at first a plague of flies,
more distressing even than at Albaro. "They cover everything eatable,
fall into everything drinkable, stagger into the wet ink of
newly-written words and make tracks on the writing paper, clog their
legs in the lather on your chin while you are shaving in the morning,
and drive you frantic at any time when there is daylight if you fall
asleep."
[118] His preceding letter had sketched his landlord for me. . . . "There
was an annual child's fete at the Signal the other night: given by the
town. It was beautiful to see perhaps a hundred couple of children
dancing in an immense ring in a green wood. Our three eldest were among
them, presided over by my landlord, who was 18 years in the English
navy, and is the Sous Prefet of the town--a very good fellow indeed;
quite an Englishman. Our landlady, nearly twice his age, used to keep
the Inn (a famous one) at Zurich: and having made L50,000 bestowed it on
a young husband. She might have done worse."
[119] The close of this letter sent family remembrances in
characteristic form. "Kate, Georgy, Mamey, Katey, Charley, Walley,
Chickenstalker, and Sampson Brass, commend themselves unto your Honour's
loving remembrance." The last but one, who continued long to bear the
name, was Frank; the last, who very soon will be found to have another,
was Alfred.
[120] The life of Paul was nevertheless prolonged to the fifth number.
[121] The mathematical-instrument-maker, who Mr. Taine describes as a
marine store dealer.
[122] Poor fellow! he had latent disease of the heart, which developed
itself rapidly on Dickens's return to England.
[123] Out of the excitements consequent on the public festivities arose
some domestic inconveniences. I will give one of them. "Fanchette the
cook, distracted by the forthcoming fete, madly refused to buy a duck
yesterday as ordered by the Brave, and a battle of life ensued between
those two powers. The Brave is of opinion that 'datter woman have went
mad.' But she seems calm to-day; and I suppose won't poison the
family. . . ."
CHAPTER XII.
SKETCHES CHIEFLY PERSONAL.
1846.
Home Politics--Malthus Philosophy--Mark
Lemon--An Incident of Character--Hood's _Tylney
Hall_--Duke of Wellington--Lord Grey--A
Recollection of his Reporting Days--Returns to
_Dombey_--Two English Travellers--Party among
the Hills--Lord Vernon--A Wonderful
Carriage--Reading of First _Dombey_--A Sketch
from Life--Trip to Great St. Bernard--Ascent of
the Mountain--The Convent--Scene at the
Mountain Top--Bodies found in the Snow--The
Holy Fathers--A Holy Brother and _Pickwick_.
SOME sketches from the life in his pleasantest vein now claim to be
taken from the same series of letters; and I will prefix one or two less
important notices, for the most part personal also, that have
characteristic mention of his opinions in them.
Home-politics he criticized in what he wrote on the 24th of August, much
in the spirit of his last excellent remark on the Protestant and
Catholic cantons; having no sympathy with the course taken by the whigs
in regard to Ireland after they had defeated Peel on his coercion bill,
and resumed the government. "I am perfectly appalled by the hesitation
and cowardice of the whigs. To bring in that arms bill, bear the brunt
of the attack upon it, take out the obnoxious clauses, still retain the
bill, and finally withdraw it, seems to me the meanest and most halting
way of going to work that ever was taken. I cannot believe in them.
Lord John must be helpless among them. They seem somehow or other never
to know what cards they hold in their hands, and to play them out
blindfold. The contrast with Peel (as he was last) is, I agree with you,
certainly not favourable. I don't believe now they ever would have
carried the repeal of the corn law, if they could." Referring in the
same letter[124] to the reluctance of public men of all parties to give
the needful help to schemes of emigration, he ascribed it to a secret
belief "in the gentle politico-economical principle that a surplus
population must and ought to starve;" in which for himself he never
could see anything but disaster for all who trusted to it. "I am
convinced that its philosophers would sink any government, any cause,
any doctrine, even the most righteous. There is a sense and humanity in
the mass, in the long run, that will not bear them; and they will wreck
their friends always, as they wrecked them in the working of the
Poor-law-bill. Not all the figures that Babbage's calculating machine
could turn up in twenty generations, would stand in the long run against
the general heart."
Of other topics in his letters, one or two have the additional
attractiveness derivable from touches of personal interest when these
may with propriety be printed. Hardly within the class might have fallen
a mention of Mark Lemon, of whom our recent play, and his dramatic
adaptation of the _Chimes_, had given him pleasant experiences, if I
felt less strongly not only that its publication would have been gladly
sanctioned by the subject of it, but that it will not now displease
another to whom also it refers, herself the member of a family in
various ways distinguished on the stage, and to whom, since her
husband's death, well-merited sympathy and respect have been paid.
"After turning Mrs. Lemon's portrait over, in my mind, I am convinced
that there is not a grain of bad taste in the matter, and that there is
a manly composure and courage in the proceeding deserving of the utmost
respect. If Lemon were one of your braggart honest men, he would set a
taint of bad taste upon that action as upon everything else he might say
or do; but being what he is, I admire him for it greatly, and hold it to
be a proof of an exalted nature and a true heart. Your idea of him, is
mine. I am sure he is an excellent fellow. We talk about not liking such
and such a man because he doesn't look one in the face,--but how much we
should esteem a man who looks the world in the face, composedly, and
neither shirks it nor bullies it. Between ourselves, I say with shame
and self-reproach that I am quite sure if Kate had been a Columbine her
portrait would not be hanging, 'in character,' in Devonshire-terrace."
He speaks thus of a novel by Hood. "I have been reading poor Hood's
_Tylney Hall_; the most extraordinary jumble of impossible extravagance,
and especial cleverness, I ever saw. The man drawn to the life from the
pirate-bookseller, is wonderfully good; and his recommendation to a
reduced gentleman from the university, to rise from nothing as he, the
pirate, did, and go round to the churches and see whether there's an
opening, and begin by being a beadle, is one of the finest things I ever
read, in its way." The same letter has a gentle little trait of the
great duke, touching in its simplicity, and worth preserving. "I had a
letter from Tagart the day before yesterday, with a curious little
anecdote of the Duke of Wellington in it. They have had a small cottage
at Walmer; and one day--the other day only--the old man met their little
daughter Lucy, a child about Mamey's age, near the garden; and having
kissed her, and asked her what was her name, and who and what her
parents were, tied a small silver medal round her neck with a bit of
pink ribbon, and asked the child to keep it in remembrance of him. There
is something good, and aged, and odd in it. Is there not?"
Another of his personal references was to Lord Grey, to whose style of
speaking and general character of mind he had always a strongly-expressed
dislike, drawn not impartially or quite justly from the days of reaction
that followed the reform debates, when the whig leader's least
attractive traits were presented to the young reporter. "He is a very
intelligent agreeable fellow, the said Watson by the bye" (he is
speaking of the member of the Lausanne circle with whom he established
friendliest after-intercourse); "he sat for Northamptonshire in the
reform bill time, and is high sheriff of his county and all the rest of
it; but has not the least nonsense about him, and is a thorough good
liberal. He has a charming wife, who draws well, and is making a sketch
of Rosemont for us that shall be yours in Paris." (It is already, by
permission of its present possessor, the reader's, and all the world's
who may take interest in the little doll's house of Lausanne which
lodged so illustrious a tenant.) "He was giving me some good
recollections of Lord Grey the other evening when we were playing at
battledore (old Lord Grey I mean), and of the constitutional
impossibility he and Lord Lansdowne and the rest laboured under, of ever
personally attaching a single young man, in all the excitement of that
exciting time, to the leaders of the party. It was quite a delight to
me, as I listened, to recall my own dislike of his style of speaking,
his fishy coldness, his uncongenial and unsympathetic politeness, and
his insufferable though most gentlemanly artificiality. The shape of his
head (I see it now) was misery to me, and weighed down my youth. . . ."
It was now the opening of the second week in August; and before he
finally addressed himself to the second number of _Dombey_, he had again
turned a lingering look in the direction of his Christmas book. "It
would be such a great relief to me to get that small story out of the
way." Wisely, however, again he refrained, and went on with _Dombey_; at
which he had been working for a little time when he described to me
(24th of August) a visit from two English travellers, of one of whom
with the slightest possible touch he gives a speaking likeness.[125]
"Not having your letter as usual, I sat down to write to you on
speculation yesterday, but lapsed in my uncertainty into _Dombey_, and
worked at it all day. It was, as it has been since last Tuesday morning,
incessantly raining regular mountain rain. After dinner, at a little
after seven o'clock, I was walking up and down under the little
colonnade in the garden, racking my brain about _Dombeys_ and _Battles
of Lives_, when two travel-stained-looking men approached, of whom one,
in a very limp and melancholy straw hat, ducked, perpetually to me as he
came up the walk. I couldn't make them out at all; and it wasn't till I
got close up to them that I recognised A. and (in the straw hat) N. They
had come from Geneva by the steamer, and taken a scrambling dinner on
board. I gave them some fine Rhine wine, and cigars innumerable. A.
enjoyed himself and was quite at home. N. (an odd companion for a man of
genius) was snobbish, but pleased and good-natured. A. had a five pound
note in his pocket which he had worn down, by careless carrying about,
to some two-thirds of its original size, and which was so ragged in its
remains that when he took it out bits of it flew about the table. 'Oh
Lor you know--now really--like Goldsmith you know--or any of those great
men!' said N. with the very 'snatches in his voice and burst of
speaking' that reminded Leigh Hunt of Cloten. . . . The clouds were lying,
as they do in such weather here, on the earth, and our friends saw no
more of Lake Leman than of Battersea. Nor had they, it might appear,
seen more of the Mer de Glace, on their way here; their talk about it
bearing much resemblance to that of the man who had been to Niagara and
said it was nothing but water."
His next letter described a day's party of the Cerjats, Watsons, and
Haldimands, among the neighbouring hills, which, contrary to his custom
while at work, he had been unable to resist the temptation of joining.
They went to a mountain-lake twelve miles off, had dinner at the
public-house on the lake, and returned home by Vevay at which they
rested for tea; and where pleasant talk with Mr. Cerjat led to anecdotes
of an excellent friend of ours, formerly resident at Lausanne, with
which the letter closed. Our friend was a distinguished writer, and a
man of many sterling fine qualities, but with a habit of occasional free
indulgence in coarseness of speech, which, though his earlier life had
made it as easy to acquire as difficult to drop, did always less than
justice to a very manly, honest, and really gentle nature. He had as
much genuinely admirable stuff in him as any favourite hero of Smollett
or Fielding, and I never knew anyone who reminded me of those characters
so much. "It would seem, Mr. Cerjat tells me, that he was, when here,
infinitely worse in his general style of conversation, than
now--sermuchser, as Toodles says, that Cerjat describes himself as
having always been in unspeakable agony when he was at his table, lest
he should forget himself (or remember himself, as I suggested) and break
out before the ladies. There happened to be living here at that time a
stately English baronet and his wife, who had two milksop sons,
concerning whom they cherished the idea of accomplishing their education
into manhood coexistently with such perfect purity and innocence, that
they were hardly to know their own sex. Accordingly, they were sent to
no school or college, but had masters of all sorts at home, and thus
reached eighteen years or so, in what Falstaff calls a kind of male
green-sickness. At this crisis of their innocent existence, our ogre
friend encountered these lambs at dinner, with their father, at Cerjat's
house; and, as if possessed by a devil, launched out into such frightful
and appalling impropriety--ranging over every kind of forbidden topic
and every species of forbidden word and every sort of scandalous
anecdote--that years of education in Newgate would have been as nothing
compared with their experience of that one afternoon. After turning
paler and paler, and more and more stoney, the baronet, with a
half-suppressed cry, rose and fled. But the sons--intent on the
ogre--remained behind instead of following him; and are supposed to have
been ruined from that hour. Isn't that a good story? I can SEE our
friend and his pupils now. . . . Poor fellow! He seems to have a hard time
of it with his wife. She had no interest whatever in her children; and
was such a fury, that, being dressed to go out to dinner, she would
sometimes, on no other provocation than a pin out of its place or some
such thing, fall upon a little maid she had, beat her till she couldn't
stand, then tumble into hysterics, and be carried to bed. He suffered
martyrdom with her; and seems to have been himself, in all good-natured
easy-going ways, just what we know him now."
There were at this time some fresh arrivals of travelling English at
Lausanne, outside their own little circle, and among them another
baronet and his family made amusing appearance. "We have another English
family here, one Sir Joseph and his lady, and ten children. Sir Joseph,
a large baronet something in the Graham style, with a little,
loquacious, flat-faced, damaged-featured, _old young_ wife. They are
fond of society, and couldn't well have less. They delight in a view,
and live in a close street at Ouchy, down among the drunken boatmen and
the drays and omnibuses, where nothing whatever is to be seen but the
locked wheels of carts scraping down the uneven, steep, stone pavement.
The baronet plays double-dummy all day long, with an unhappy Swiss whom
he has entrapped for that purpose; the baronet's lady pays visits; and
the baronet's daughters play a Lausanne piano, which must be heard to be
appreciated. . . ."
Another sketch in the same letter touches little more than the
eccentricities (but all in good taste and good humour) of the subject of
it, who is still gratefully remembered by English residents in Italy for
his scholarly munificence, and for very valuable service conferred by it
on Italian literature. "Another curious man is backwards and forwards
here--a Lord Vernon,[126] who is well-informed, a great Italian scholar
deep in Dante, and a very good-humoured gentleman, but who has fallen
into the strange infatuation of attending every rifle-match that takes
place in Switzerland, accompanied by two men who load rifles for him,
one after another, which he has been frequently known to fire off, two a
minute, for fourteen hours at a stretch, without once changing his
position or leaving the ground. He wins all kinds of prizes; gold
watches, flags, teaspoons, tea-boards, and so forth; and is constantly
travelling about with them, from place to place, in an extraordinary
carriage, where you touch a spring and a chair flies out, touch another
spring and a bed appears, touch another spring and a closet of pickles
opens, touch another spring and disclose a pantry. While Lady Vernon
(said to be handsome and accomplished) is continually cutting across
this or that Alpine pass in the night, to meet him on the road, for a
minute or two, on one of his excursions; these being the only times at
which she can catch him. The last time he saw her, was five or six
months ago, when they met and supped together on the St. Gothard! It is
a monomania with him, of course. He is a man of some note; seconded one
of Lord Melbourne's addresses; and had forty thousand a year, now
reduced to ten, but nursing and improving every day. He was with us last
Monday, and comes back from some out-of-the-way place to join another
small picnic next Friday. As I have said, he is the very soul of good
nature and cheerfulness, but one can't help being melancholy to see a
man wasting his life in such a singular delusion. Isn't it odd? He knows
my books very well, and seems interested in everything concerning them;
being indeed accomplished in books generally, and attached to many
elegant tastes."
But the most agreeable addition to their own special circle was referred
to in his first September letter, just when he was coming to the close
of his second number of _Dombey_. "There are two nice girls here, the
Ladies Taylor, daughters of Lord Headfort. Their mother was daughter (I
think) of Sir John Stevenson, and Moore dedicated one part of the Irish
Melodies to her. They inherit the musical taste, and sing very well. A
proposal is on foot for our all bundling off on Tuesday (16 strong) to
the top of the Great St. Bernard. But the weather seems to have broken,
and the autumn rains to have set in; which I devoutly hope will break up
the party. It would be a most serious hindrance to me, just now; but I
have rashly promised. Do you know young Romilly? He is coming over from
Geneva when 'the reading' comes off, and is a fine fellow I am told.
There is not a bad little theatre here; and by way of an artificial
crowd, I should certainly have got it open with an amateur company, if
we were not so few that the only thing we want is the audience.". . . The
"reading" named by him was that of his first number, which was to "come
off" as soon as I could get the proofs out to him; but which the changes
needful to be made, and to be mentioned hereafter, still delayed. The
St. Bernard holiday, which within sight of his Christmas-book labour he
would fain have thrown over, came off as proposed very fortunately for
the reader, who might otherwise have lost one of his pleasantest
descriptions. But before giving it, one more little sketch of character
may be interposed as delicately done as anything in his writings.
Steele's observation is in the outline, and Charles Lamb's humour in its
touch of colouring.
". . . There are two old ladies (English) living here who may serve me for
a few lines of gossip--as I have intended they should, over and over
again, but I have always forgotten it. There were originally four old
ladies, sisters, but two of them have faded away in the course of
eighteen years, and withered by the side of John Kemble in the cemetery.
They are very little, and very skinny; and each of them wears a row of
false curls, like little rolling-pins, so low upon her brow, that there
is no forehead; nothing above the eyebrows but a deep horizontal
wrinkle, and then the curls. They live upon some small annuity. For
thirteen years they have wanted very much to move to Italy, as the
eldest old lady says the climate of this part of Switzerland doesn't
agree with her, and preys upon her spirits; but they have never been
able to go, because of the difficulty of moving 'the books.' This
tremendous library belonged once upon a time to the father of these old
ladies, and comprises about fifty volumes. I have never been able to
see what they are, because one of the old ladies always sits before
them; but they look, outside, like very old backgammon-boards. The two
deceased sisters died in the firm persuasion that this precious property
could never be got over the Simplon without some gigantic effort to
which the united family was unequal. The two remaining sisters live, and
will die also, in the same belief. I met the eldest (evidently drooping)
yesterday, and recommended her to try Genoa. She looked shrewdly at the
snow that closes up the mountain prospect just now, and said that when
the spring was quite set in, and the avalanches were down, and the
passes well open, she would certainly try that place, if they could
devise any plan, in the course of the winter, for moving 'the books.'
The whole library will be sold by auction here, when they are both dead,
for about a napoleon; and some young woman will carry it home in two
journeys with a basket."
The last letter sent me before he fell upon his self-appointed task for
Christmas, contained a delightful account of the trip to the Great St.
Bernard. It was dated on the sixth of September.