British Legation, Naples,
Nov--, 18--.
My dear Harcourt,--Not mine the fault that your letter has lain six
weeks unanswered; but having given up penwork myself for the last
eight months, and Crawley, my private sec., being ill, the delay was
unavoidable. The present communication you owe to the fortunate arrival
here of Captain Mellish, who has kindly volunteered to be my amanuensis.
I am indeed sorely grieved at this delay. I shall be _désolé_ if it
occasion you anything beyond inconvenience. How a private sec. should
permit himself the luxury of an attack of influenza I cannot conceive.
We shall hear of one's hairdresser having the impertinence to catch
cold, to-morrow or next day!
If I don't mistake, it was you yourself recommended Crawley to me, and I
am only half grateful for the service. He is a man of small prejudices;
fancies that he ought to have a regular hour for dinner; thinks that
he should have acquaintances; and will persist in imagining himself an
existent something, appertaining to the Legation,--while, in reality, he
is only a shadowy excrescence of my own indolent habits, the recipient
of the trashy superfluities one commits to paper and calls despatches.
Latterly, in my increasing laziness, I have used him for more intimate
correspondence; and, as Doctor Allitore has now denied me all manual
exertion whatever, I am actually wholly dependent on such aid. I'm
sure I long for the discovery of some other mode of transmitting one's
brain-efforts than by the slow process of manuscript,--some photographic
process that, by a series of bright pictures, might display _en tableau_
what one is now reduced to accomplish by narrative. As it ever did and
ever will happen too, they have deluged me with work when I crave rest.
Every session of Parliament must have its blue-book; and by the devil's
luck they have decided that Italy is to furnish the present one.
You have always been a soldier, and whenever your inspecting general
came his round, your whole care has been to make the troop horses look
as fat, the men's whiskers as trim, their overalls as clean, and their
curb-chains as bright, as possible. You never imagined or dreamed of a
contingency when it would be desirable that the animals should be all
sorebacked, the whole regiment under stoppages, and the trumpeter in a
quinsy. Had you been a diplomatist instead of a dragoon, this view of
things might, perhaps, have presented itself, and the chief object
of your desire have been to show that the system under which you
functionated worked as ill as need be; that the court to which you were
accredited abhorred you; its Ministers snubbed, its small officials
slighted you; that all your communications were ill received, your
counsels ill taken; that what you reprobated was adopted, what you
advised rejected; in fact, that the only result of your presence was the
maintenance of a perpetual ill-will and bad feeling; and that without
the aid of a line-of-battle ship, or at least a frigate, your position
was no longer tenable. From the moment, my dear H----, that you can
establish this fact, you start into life as an able and active Minister,
imbued with thoroughly British principles--an active asserter of what is
due to his country's rights and dignity, not truckling to court favor,
or tamely submitting to royal impertinences; not like the noble lord
at this place, or the more subservient viscount at that, but, in plain
words, an admirable public servant, whose reward, whatever courts and
cabinets may do, will always be willingly accorded by a grateful nation.
I am afraid this sketch of a special envoy's career will scarcely tempt
you to exchange for a mission abroad! And you are quite right, my dear
friend. It is a very unrewarding profession. I often wish myself that
I had taken something in the colonies, or gone into the Church, or some
other career which had given me time and opportunity to look after my
health,--of which, by the way, I have but an indifferent account to
render you. These people here can't hit it off at all, Harcourt; they
keep muddling away about indigestion, deranged functions, and the rest
of it. The mischief is in the blood,--I mean, in the undue distribution
of the blood. So Treysenac, the man of Bagnères, proved to me. There
is a flux and reflux in us, as in the tides, and when, from deficient
energy or lax muscular power, that ceases, we are all driven by
artificial means to remedy the defect. Treysenac's theory is position.
By a number of ingeniously contrived positions he accomplishes an
artificial congestion of any part he pleases; and in his establishment
at Bagnères you may see some fifty people strung up by the arms and
legs, by the waists or the ankles, in the most marvellous manner, and
with truly fabulous success. I myself passed three mornings suspended by
the middle, like the sheep in the decoration of the Golden Fleece, and
was amazed at the strange sensations I experienced before I was cut
down.
You know the obstinacy with which the medical people reject every
discovery in the art, and only sanction its employment when the world
has decreed in its favor. You will, therefore, not be surprised to hear
that Larrey and Cooper, to whom I wrote about Treysenac's theory, sent
me very unsatisfactory, indeed very unseemly, replies. I have resolved,
however, not to let the thing drop, and am determined to originate a
Suspensorium in England, when I can chance upon a man of intelligence
and scientific knowledge to conduct it. Like mesmerism, the system has
its antipathies; and thus yesterday Crawley fainted twice after a few
minutes' suspension by the arms. But he is a bigot about anything he
hears for the first time, and I was not sorry at his punishment.
I wish you would talk over this matter with any clever medical man in
your neighborhood, and let me hear the result.
And so you are surprised, you say, how little influence English
representations exercise over the determinations of foreign cabinets. I
go farther, and confess no astonishment at all at the no-influence! My
dear dragoon, have you not, some hundred and fifty times in this life,
endured a small martyrdom in seeing a very indifferent rider torment
almost to madness the animal he bestrode, just by sheer ignorance
and awkwardness,--now worrying the flank with incautious heel, now
irritating the soft side of the mouth with incessant jerkings; always
counteracting the good impulses, ever prompting the bad ones of his
beast? And have you not, while heartily wishing yourself in the saddle,
felt the utter inutility of administering any counsels to the rider?
You saw, and rightly saw, that even if he attempted to follow your
suggestions, he would do so awkwardly and inaptly, acting at wrong
moments and without that continuity of purpose which must ever accompany
an act of address; and that for his safety, and even for the welfare
of the animal, it were as well they should jog on together as they
had done, trusting that after a time they might establish a sort of
compromise, endurable, if not beneficial, to both.
Such, my dear friend, in brief, is the state of many of those foreign
governments to whom we are so profuse of our wise counsels. It were
doubtless much better if they ruled well; but let us see if the road to
this knotty consummation be by the adoption of methods totally new to
them, estranged from all their instincts and habits, and full of perils
which their very fears will exaggerate. Constitutional governments, like
underdone roast beef, suit our natures and our latitude; but they would
seem lamentable experiments when tried south of the Alps. Liberty with
us means the right to break heads at a county election, and to print
impertinences in newspapers. With the Spaniard or the Italian it would
be to carry a poniard more openly, and use it more frequently than at
present.
At all events, if it be any satisfaction to you, you may be assured that
the rulers in all these cases are not much better off than those they
rule over. They lead lives of incessant terror, distrust, and anxiety.
Their existence is poisoned by ceaseless fears of treachery,--they know
not where. They change ministers as travellers change the direction of
their journey, to disconcert the supposed plans of their enemies; and
they vacillate between cruelty and mercy, really not knowing in which
lies their safety. Don't fancy that they have any innate pleasure in
harsh measures. The likelihood is, they hate them as much as you do
yourself; but they know no other system; and, to come back to my cavalry
illustration, the only time they tried a snaffle, they were run away
with.
I trust these prosings will be a warning to you how you touch upon
politics again in a letter to me; but I really did not wish to-be a
bore, and now here I am, ready to answer, as far as in me lies, all your
interrogatories; first premising that I am not at liberty to enter upon
the question of Glencore himself, and for the simple reason that he has
made me his confidant. And now, as to the boy, I could make nothing
of him, Harcourt; and for this reason,--he had not what sailors call
“steerage way” on him. He went wherever you bade, but without an
impulse. I tried to make him care for his career; for the gay
world; for the butterfly life of young diplomacy; for certain
dissipations,--excellent things occasionally to develop nascent
faculties. I endeavored to interest him by literary society and savans,
but unsuccessfully. For art indeed he showed some disposition,
and modelled prettily; but it never rose above “amateurship.” Now,
enthusiasm, although a very excellent ingredient, will no more make an
artist than a brisk kitchen fire will provide a dinner where all the
materials are wanting.
I began to despair of him, Harcourt, when I saw that there were no
features about him. He could do everything reasonably well, because
there was no hope of his doing anything with real excellence. He
wandered away from me to Carrara, with his quaint companion the Doctor;
and after some months wrote me rather a sturdy letter, rejecting all
moneyed advances, past and future, and saying something very haughty,
and of course very stupid, about the “glorious sense of independence.”
I replied, but he never answered me; and here might have ended all
my knowledge of his history, had not a letter, of which I send you an
extract, resumed the narrative. The writer is the Princess Sabloukoff,
a lady of whose attractions and fascinations you have often heard me
speak. When you have read, and thought over the enclosed, let me have
your opinion. I do not, I cannot, believe in the rumor you allude
to. Glencore is not the man to marry at his time of life, and in
his circumstances. Send me, however, all the particulars you are in
possession of. I hope they don't mean to send you to India, because
you seem to dislike it. For my own part, I suspect I should enjoy that
country immensely. Heat is the first element of daily comfort, and all
the appliances to moderate it are _ex-officio_ luxuries; besides that in
India there is a splendid and enlarged selfishness in the mode of life
very different from the petty egotisms of our rude Northland.
If you do go, pray take Naples in the way. The route by Alexandria and
Suez, they all tell me, is the best and most expeditious.
Mellish desires me to add his remembrances, hoping you have not
forgotten him. He served in the “Fifth” with you in Canada,--that is, if
you be the same George Harcourt who played Tony Lumpkin so execrably at
Montreal. I have told him it is probable, and am yours ever,
H. U.