sorts of gamblers, and I assuredly have no pity to spare for the
gentry who lose their money. A great deal of good useful compassion is
wasted on the victims who are fleeced in the gambling places. Victims!
What do they go to the rooms for? Is it not to amuse themselves and to
pass away time amid false exhilaration? Is it not to gain money
without working for it? The dupe has in him all the raw material of a
scoundrel; and even when he blows his stupid brains out I cannot pity
him so much as I pity the dogged labourer who toils on and starves
until his time comes for going to the workhouse. I am rather more
inclined to study the general manifestations of the gambling spirit. I
have in my mind's eye vivid images of the faces, the figures, the
gestures of hundreds of gamblers, and I might make an appalling
picture-gallery if I chose; but such a nightmare in prose would not do
much good to any one, and I prefer to proceed in a less exciting but
more profitable manner. We please ourselves by calling to mind the
days when "society" gambled openly and constantly; and we like to
fancy that we are all very good and spotless now-a-days and free from
the desire for unnatural excitement. Well, I grant that most European
societies in the last century were sufficiently hideous in many
respects. The English aristocrat, male or female, cared only for
cards, and no noble lady dreamed of remaining long in an assembly
where _piquet_ and _écarté_ were not going on. The French seigneur
gambled away an estate in an evening; the Russian landowner staked a
hundred serfs and their lives and fortunes on the turn of a card;
little German princelings would play quite cheerfully for regiments of
soldiers. The pictures which we are gradually getting from memoirs and
letters are almost too grotesque for belief, and there is some little
excuse for the hearty optimists who look back with complacency on the
past, and thank their stars that they have escaped from the domain of
evil. For my own part, when I see the mode of life now generally
followed by most of our European aristocracies, I am quite ready to be
grateful for a beneficent change, and I have again and again made
light of the wailings of persons who persist in chattering about the
good old times. But I am talking now about the spirit of the gambler;
and I cannot say that the human propensity to gamble has in any way
died out. Its manifestations may in some respects be more decorous
than they used to be; but the deep, masterful, subtle tendency is
there, and its force is by no means diminished by the advance of a
complicated civilisation. Often and often I have mused quietly amid
scenes where gamblers of various sorts were disporting themselves--in
village inns where solemn yokels played shove-halfpenny with
statesmanlike gravity; in sunny Italian streets where lazy loungers
played their queer guessing game with beans; in noisy racing-clubs
where the tape clicks all day long; on crowded steamboats when
Tynesiders and Cockneys yelled and cursed and shouted their offers as
the slim skiffs stole over the water and the straining athletes bent
to their work; on Atlantic liners when hundreds of pounds depended on
the result of the day's run; on the breezy heath where half a million
gazers watched as the sleek Derby horses thundered round. As I have
gazed on these spectacles, I have been forced to let the mind wander
into regions far away from the chatter of the gamesters. Again and
again I have been compelled to think with a kind of melancholy over
the fact that man is not content until he is taken out of himself. Our
wondrous bodies, our miraculous power of looking before and after, our
infinite capacities for enjoyment, are not enough for us, and the poor
feeble human creature spends a great part of his life in trying to
forget that he is himself. At the best, our days pass as in the dim
swiftness of a dream. The young man suddenly thinks, "It is but
yesterday that I was a child;" the middle-aged man finds the gray
hairs streaking his head before he has realised that his youth is
gone; the old man lives so completely in the past that he is taken
only by a gentle shock of surprise when he finds that the end is upon
him. Swiftly, like some wild hunt of shadows, the generations fleet
away--nothing stays their frantic speed; and to the true observer no
fictitious flight of spirits on the Brocken could be half so weird as
the passage of one generation of the children of men. As we grow old,
the appalling brevity of time impresses itself more and more on the
consciousness of calm and thoughtful men; yet nine-tenths of our race
spend the best part of their days in trying to make their ghostly
sweeping flight from eternity to eternity seem more rapid than it
really is. That hot and fevered youth who stands in the betting-ring
and nervously pencils his race-card never thinks that the time of
weakness and sadness and weariness is coming on; that gray and
tremulous old man who bends over the roulette-table never thinks that
he will speedily drop into a profundity deeper than ever plummet
sounded. The gliding ball does not swing round in its groove faster
than the old man's soul fares towards the darkness; and yet he
clenches his jaw and engages in the most trivial of pursuits as if he
had an eternity before him. The youth and the dotard have alike
succeeded in passing out of themselves, and their very souls will not
return to the body until the delirious spell has ceased to act. All
men alike seem to have, more or less, this craving for oblivion. Long
ago I remember seeing a company of farmers who had come to market in
the prosperous times; they were among the wildest of their set, and
they settled down to cards when business was done. Day after day those
bucolic gentlemen sat on; when one of them lay down on a settle to
snatch a nap, his place was taken by another, and at the end of the
week some of the original company were still in the parlour, having
gambled furiously all the while without ever washing or undressing.
Time was non-existent for them, and their consciousness was exercised
only in watching the faces of the cards and counting up points. But
the dull-witted farmers were quite equalled by the polished scholar,
the great orator, the brilliant wit, Charles Fox. It was nothing to
Fox if he sat for three days and three nights at a stretch over the
board of green cloth. His fortune went; he might lose at the rate of
ten thousand pounds in the twenty-four hours; but he had succeeded in
forgetting himself, and his loss of time and fortune counted as
nothing. The light, careless gipsy shares the disposition of the
matchless orator and the dull farmer. You may see a gipsy enter the
tossing-ring at a fair; he loses all his money, but he goes on staking
everything he possesses, and, if the luck remains adverse, he will
continue tossing until his pony, his cart, his lurcher-dog, his very
clothes are all gone. The Chinaman will play for his life; the Red
Indian recklessly piles all he owns in the world upon the rough heap
of goods which his tribe wager on the result of a pony race. Look
high, look low, and we see that the gamblers actually form the
majority of the world's inhabitants; and we must go among the men of
abstractions--the men who can achieve oblivion by dint of their own
thinking power--before we find any class untouched by the strange
taint. Observe that venerable looking man who slowly paces about in
one of the luxurious dwelling-places which are sacred to leisure; you
may see his type at Bath, Buxton, Leamington, Scarborough, Brighton,
Torquay, all places, indeed, whither flock the men whose life-work is
done. That venerable gentleman has fulfilled his task in the world,
his desires have been gratified so far as fortune would allow, and one
would think that most pursuits of the competitive sort must have lost
interest for him. Yet he--even he--cannot get rid of the tendency to
gamble; and he studies the financial news with the eagerness of a boy
who follows the fortunes of Quentin Durward or D'Artagnan or Rebecca.
If English railway shares fall, he is exultant or depressed, according
to the operations of his broker; he may be roused into almost
hysterical delight by a rise in "Nitrates" or "Chilians," or any of
the thousands of securities in which stockbrokers deal. What is it to
the old man if Death smiles gently on him, and will soon touch his
heart with ice? There is no past for him; he has forgotten the
raptures of youth, the strength of manhood, the depression of failure,
the gladness of success, and he drugs his soul into forgetfulness by
dwelling on a gambler's chances. So long as the one doubtful boon of
forgetfulness is secured, it seems to matter very little what may be
the stake at disposal. The English racing-man picks out a promising
colt or filly; he finds that he has a swift and good animal, and he
resolves to bring off some vast gambling _coup_. Patiently, cunningly,
month after month, the steps in the plan are matured; the horse runs
badly until the official handicappers think it is worthless, and the
gambler at last finds that he has some great prize almost at his
mercy. Then with slow dexterity the horse is backed to win. If the
owner shows any eagerness, his purpose is balked once and for all; he
may have to employ half-a-dozen agents to bet for him, until at last
he succeeds in wagering so much money that he will gain, say, one
hundred thousand pounds by winning his race. The fluttering jackets
come nearer and nearer to the judge's box; some of the jockeys are
using their whips and riding desperately; the horse on which so much
depends draws to the front; but the owner never moves a muscle. Of
course we have seen men shrieking themselves almost into apoplexy at
the close of a race; but the hardened gambler is deadly cool. In the
last stride the animal so carefully--and fraudulently--prepared is
beaten by a matter of a few inches, and the chance of picking up a
hundred thousand pounds is gone; but the owner remains impassive, and
as soon as settling-day is over, he endeavours to forget the matter. I
have seen an old man watching a race on which he had planned to win
sixty thousand pounds; his horse was beaten in the last two strides,
and the old gentleman never so much as stirred or spoke. No doubt he
was really transported out of himself; but nothing in the world seemed
capable of altering the composure of his wizened features. On the
other hand, there is one man who is known to possess some four
millions in cash, besides an immense property; this man never bets
more than two pounds at a time, yet from his wild fits of excitement
it might be supposed that his colossal wealth was at stake.
So the whole army of the gamblers pass in their mad whirlwind march
toward the region of night; they are delirious, they are creatures of
contradictions--they are fiercely greedy, lavishly generous, wary in
many things, reckless of life, ready to take any advantage, yet
possessed by a diseased sense of honour. Some of them think that a man
is better and happier when he feels all his faculties working rather
than when he goes off into blind transports of excitement or fear or
doubt. I think that the man who is conscious to his very finger-tips
is better than the wild creature whose senses are all blurred. I hold
that the student or thinker who faces life with a calm and calculated
desire for true knowledge is better off than the insensate being whose
hours are passed in a sordid nightmare. But I see little chance of
ever making men care little for the gambler's pleasure, and I humbly
own to the existence of an ugly mystery which only adds yet another to
the number of dark puzzles whereby we are surrounded. I observe that
desperate efforts are made to put down gambling by law rather than by
culture, religion, true and gentle morality. As well try to put down
the passions of love and fear--as well try to interdict the beat of
the pulses! We may deplore the gambler's existence as much as we like;
but it is a fact, and we must accept it.
XX.
SCOUNDRELS.
Byron very often flung out profound truths in his easy, careless way,
but the theatrical vein in his composition sometimes prompted him to
say dashing things, not because he regarded them as true, but because
he wanted to make people stare. Speaking of one interesting and
homicidal gentleman, the poet observes--
"He knew himself a villain, and he deemed
The rest no better than the thing he seemed."
Now I take leave to say that the rawest of fifth-form lads never
uttered a more school-boyish sentiment than that; and I wonder how a
man of the world came to make such a blunder. Byron had lived in the
degraded London of the Regency, when Europe's rascality flocked
towards St. James's as belated birds flock towards a light; and he
should have known some villains if any one did. Ephraim Bond, the
abominable moneylender and sportsman, was swaggering round town in
Byron's later days; Crockford, that incarnate fiend, had his nets
open; and ruined men--men ruined body and soul--left the gambling
palace where the satanic spider sat spinning his webs. Byron must have
known Crockford, and he had there a chance of studying a being who was
indeed a villain, but who fancied himself to be a highly respectable
person. From the time when "Crocky" started money-lending in the back
parlour of his little fish-shop up to his last ghastly appearance on
earth, he was a cheat and a consummate rascal; and even after death
his hideous corpse was made to serve a deception. He was engaged in a
Turf swindle, and it was necessary that he should be regarded as alive
on the evening of the Derby day; but he died in the morning, and, to
deceive the betting-men, the lifeless carcass of the old robber was
put upright in a club window, and a daring sharper caused the dead
hand to wave as if in greeting to the shouting crowd--a fit end to a
bad life. Crockford's delusion was that his character was marked by
honesty and general benevolence; and those who wished to please him
pretended to accept his own comfortable theory. He regarded himself as
a really good fellow, and in his own person he was a living
confutation of Byron's dashing paradox. Then there was Renton
Nicholson, a specimen of social vermin if ever there was one. This
fellow earned a sordid livelihood by presiding over a club where men
met nightly in orgies that stagger the power of belief. His huge
figure and his raffish face were seen wherever rogues most did
congregate; he showed young men "life"--and sometimes his work as
cicerone led them to death; his style of conversation would nowadays
lead to a speedy prosecution; he was always seen by the ringside when
unhappy brutes met to pound each other, and his stock of evil stories
entertained the interesting noblemen and gentlemen who patronised the
manly British sport. I could not describe this man's baseness in
adequate terms, nor could I so much as give an idea of his ordinary
round of roguery without arousing some incredulity. This unspeakable
creature was fond of describing himself as "Jolly old Renton," or
"Good old John Bull Nicholson"; he really fancied himself to be a
good, genial fellow, and he appeared to fancy that the crowds who
usually collected to hear his abominations were attracted by his
_bonhomie_ and his estimable intellectual qualities. Byron must have
known this striking example of the scoundrel species, but he appears
to have forgotten him when he propounded his theory of villainy. Then
there was Pea-green Haynes, who was also a fine sample of folly and
rascality mingled. Haynes regarded himself as the most injured man on
earth; he never performed an unselfish action, it is true, and he
flung away a fine patrimony on his own pleasures, yet he whined and
held himself up as an example of suffering virtue. Then there was the
precious Regent. What a creature! Good men and bad men unite in saying
that he was absolutely without a virtue; the shrewd, calculating
Greville described him in words that burn; the great Duke, his chief
subject, uses language of dry scorn--"The king could only act the part
of a gentleman for ten minutes at a time"; and we find that the
commonest satellites of the Court despised the wicked fribble who wore
the crown of England. Faithless to women, faithless to men, a coward,
a liar, a mean and grovelling cheat, George IV. nevertheless clung to
a belief in his own virtues; and, if we study the account of his
farcical progress through Scotland, we find that he imagined himself
to be a useful and genuinely kingly personage. No man, except,
perhaps, Philippe Egalité, was ever so contemned and hated; and until
his death he imagined himself to be a good man. In all that wild set
who disgraced England and disgraced human nature in those gay days of
Byron's youth, I can discover only one thoroughly manly and estimable
individual, and that was Gentleman Jackson, the boxer; yet, with such
a marvellously wide range of villainy to study, Byron never seems to
have observed one ethical fact of the deepest importance--a villain
never knows that he is villainous; if he did, he would cease to be a
villain.
Perhaps Byron's own peculiar disposition--his constitution--prevented
him from understanding the undoubted truth which I have stated. Like
all other men, he possessed a dual nature; there was bad in him and
good, and his force was such that the bad was very bad indeed, and the
good was as powerful in its way as the evil. During the brief time
that Byron employed in behaving as a bad man, his conduct reached
almost epic heights--or depths--of misdoing; but he never in his heart
seemed to recognise the fact that he had been a bad man. At any rate,
he was wrong; and the commonest knowledge of our wild world suffices
to show any reasoning man the gravity of the error propounded in my
quotation. As we study the history of the frivolous race of men, it
sometimes seems hard to disbelieve the theory of Descartes. The great
Frenchman held that man and other animals are automata; and, were it
not that such a theory strikes at the root of morals, we might almost
be tempted to accept it in moments of weakness, when the riddle of the
unintelligible earth weighs heavily on the tired spirit. I find that
every prominent scoundrel known to us pursued his work of sin with an
absolute unconsciousness of all moral law until pain or death drew
near; then the scoundrel cringed like a cur under the scourges of
remorse. Thackeray, in a fit of spasmodic courage, painted the
archetypal scoundrel once and for all in "Barry Lyndon," and he
practically said the last word on the subject; for no grave analysis,
no reasoning, can ever improve on that immortal and most moving
picture of a wicked man. Observe the masterpiece. Lyndon goes on with
his narrative from one horror to another; he exposes his inmost soul
with cool deliberation; and the author's art is so consummate that we
never for a moment sympathise with the fiend who talks so
mellifluously--the narrative of ill-doing unfolds itself with all the
inevitable precision of an operation of nature, and we see the human
soul at its worst. But Thackeray did not make Byron's mistake; and
throughout the book the Chevalier harps with deadly persistence on his
own virtues. He does not exactly whine, but he lets you know that he
regards himself as being very much wronged by the envious caprices of
his fellow-men. His tongue is the tongue of a saint, and, even when he
owns to any doubtful transaction, he takes care to let you know that
he was actuated by the sweetest and purest motives. Many people cannot
read "Barry Lyndon" a second time; but those who are nervous should
screw their courage to the sticking-place, and give grave attention to
that awful moral lesson, for all of us have a little of Barry in our
composition. Thackeray's sudden inspiration enabled him to plumb the
deeps of the scoundrel nature, and he saw with the eye of genius that
the very quality which makes a bad man dangerous is his belief in his
own goodness. If you look at the appalling narrative of Lyndon's life
in this country, you see, with a shudder, that the man regards his
cruelty to his wife, his villainy towards his step-son, as the
inevitable outcome of stern virtue; he tells you things that make you
long to stamp on the inanimate pages; for he rouses such a passion of
wild scorn and wrath as we feel against no other artistic creation.
Yet all the while, like a low under-song, goes on his monotonous
assertion of his own goodness and his own injuries. No sermon could
teach more than that hateful book; if it is read aright, it will
supply men or women with an armoury of warnings, and enable them to
start away from the semblance of self-deception as they would from a
rearing cobra when the hood is up, and the murderous head flattened
ready to strike. Thackeray worked on the same theme in his story of
little Stubbs. Lyndon is the Lucifer of rascals; Stubbs--well, Stubbs
beggars the English vocabulary; he is too low, too mean for adjectives
to describe him, and I could almost find it in my heart to wish that
his portraiture had never been placed before the horrified eyes of
men. Yet this Stubbs--a being who was drawn from life--has a profound
belief in the rectitude of everything that he does. Even when he tells
us how he invited his gang of unspeakables home, to drink away his
mother's substance, he takes credit to himself for his fine display of
British hospitality. How Thackeray contrived to live through the
ordeal of composing those two books I cannot tell; he must have had a
nerve of steel, with all his softness of heart and benevolence. At all
events, he did live to complete his gruesome feat; and he has given
us, in a vivid pictorial way, such a picture of scoundreldom as should
serve as a beacon to all men. It may seem like a paradox; but I am
inclined to think that our non-success in putting down actual crime
and wickedness which do not come within range of the law arises from
the fact that our jurists have not made a proper study of the criminal
nature. Grod made the cobra, the cruel wolverine, and the
thrice-cruel tiger; we study the animals and deal with them
adequately; but some of us do not study our human cobras and
wolverines and tigers. I scarcely ever knew of a case of a convict who
would not moan about his own injuries and his own innocence. Even when
these men, whose criminality is ingrained, are willing to own their
guilt, they will always contrive to blame the world in general and
society in particular. It is almost amusing to hear a desperate thief,
who seems no more able to prevent himself from rushing on plunder than
a greyhound can prevent itself from rushing on a hare, complaining
that employers will not trust him. It is useless to say, "What can you
expect?" The scoundrel persists in crying out against a hard world
which drove him to be what he is.
Some ten years ago the arch-rascal among English thieves was living
quietly in a London suburb; he used to solace himself with high-class
music, and he was very fond of poetry. This dreadful creature was a
curious compound of wild beast and artist. During the day he went
about with an innocent air; and the very police who were destined to
take him and hang him learned to greet him cordially as he passed them
in his walks. They thought he was "a sort of high-class tradesman."
Now, when this cheery little man with the decent frock-coat and the
clean respectable air was sauntering on the margin of the breezy heath
or walking up by-streets with measured sobriety, he was really marking
down the places which he intended to plunder. Here his trained pony
should stand; here he would make his entrance; that bedroom door
should be fastened inside; this lock should be picked. The wild
predatory beast drove the police to despair, for it seemed as if no
human being could have performed the feats which came easy to the
robber. The hard earning of good men went to the rascal's store; the
cherished household gods, the valued keepsakes of innocent women were
transferred callously to the melting-pot. He went coolly into bedrooms
where the inmates were asleep; had any one awaked, there would have
been murder, and the murderer would have decamped long before the door
could be broken open. Now my point is this--the wretch whom I have
described never ceased to inveigh against the wrongs of society. Two
unhappy women served him faithfully and followed him like dogs; but he
did not apply his theories in his treatment of them, for they were
never without the marks of his brutality. In the very presence of his
bruised and beaten slaves he talked of his own virtues, of social
inequality, of the tyranny of the rich, and he held to his belief in
his own innate goodness after he had committed depredations to the
extent of thousands of pounds, and even after he was answerable for
two murders. That man never knew himself a villain, and it was only
when the rope was gradually closing round his neck that the keen
sleuth-hound remorse found him out, and he had the grace to save an
innocent man from a living death. This monstrous hypocrite was another
typical scoundrel, and his like people every prison in the country.