‘Summa diligentia,’ as we used to translate it at school, ‘on the top of
the diligence,’ I wagged along towards the Rhine. A weary and a lonely
way it is; indeed, I half believe a frontier is ever thus--a kind of
natural barrier to ambition on either side, where both parties stop
short and say, ‘Well, there’s no temptation there, anyhow!’
Reader, hast ever travelled in the _banquette_ of a diligence? I will
not ask you, fair lady; for how could you ever mount to that Olympus of
trunks, carpet-bags, and hat-boxes; but my whiskered friend with the
cheroot yonder, what says he? Never look angry, man--there was no
offence in my question; better men than either of us have done it.
First, if the weather be fine, the view is a glorious thing; you are not
limited, like your friends in the _coupé_, to the sight of the
conductor’s gaiters, or the leather disc of the postillion’s
‘continuations.’ No; your eye ranges away at either side over those
undulating plains which the Continent presents, unbroken by fence or
hedgerow--one stretch of vast cornfields, great waving woods,
interminable tracts of yellowish pasture-land, with here and there a
village spire, or the pointed roof of some château rising above the
trees. A yellow-earthy byroad traverses the plain, on which a heavy
waggon plods along, the eight huge horses, stepping as free as though no
weight restrained them; their bells are tinkling in the clear air, and
the merry chant of the waggoner chimes in pleasantly with them. It is
somewhat hard to fancy how the land is ever tilled; you meet few
villages; scarcely a house is in sight--yet there are the fragrant
fields; the yellow gold of harvest tints the earth, and the industry of
man is seen on every side. It is peaceful, it is grand, too, from its
very extent; but it is not homelike. No; our own happy land alone
possesses that attribute. _It_ is the country of the hearth and home.
The traveller in France or Germany catches no glances as he goes of the
rural life of the proprietors of the soil. A pale white château,
seemingly uninhabited, stands in some formal lawn, where the hot sun
darts down his rays unbroken, and the very fountain seems to hiss with
heat. No signs of life are seen about; all is still and calm, as though
the moon were shedding her yellow lustre over the scene. Oh how I long
for the merry schoolboy’s laugh, the clatter of the pony’s canter, the
watch-dog’s bark, the squire breathing the morning air amid his woods,
that tell of England! How I fancy a peep into that large drawing-room,
whose windows open to the greensward, letting in a view of distant
mountains and far-receding foreground, through an atmosphere heavy with
the rose and the honeysuckle! Lovely as is the scene, with foliage
tinted in every hue, from the light sprayey hazel to the dull pine or
the dark copper beech--how I prefer to look within where _they_ are met
who call this ‘home!’ And what a paradise is such a home!----
But I must think no more of these things. I am a lone and solitary man;
my happiness is cast in a different mould, nor shall I mar it by
longings which never can be realised.
While I sat thus musing, my companion of the _banquette_, of whom I had
hitherto seen nothing but a blue-cloth cloak and a travelling-cap, came
‘slap down’ on me with a snort that choked him, and aroused me.
‘I ask your pardon, sir,’ said he in a voice that betrayed Middlesex
most culpably. ‘Je suis--that is, j’ai----’
‘Never mind, sir; English will answer every purpose,’ cried I. ‘You have
had a sound sleep of it.’
‘Yes, Heaven be praised! I get over a journey as well as most men. Where
are we now--do you happen to know?’
‘That old castle yonder, I suspect, is the Alten Burg,’ said I, taking
out my guidebook and directory. ‘The Alten Burg was built in the year
1384, by Carl Ludwig Graf von Löwenstein, and is not without its
historic associations-----’
‘Damn its historic associations!’ said my companion, with an energy that
made me start. ‘I wish the devil and his imps had carried away all such
trumpery, or kept them to torture people in their own hot climate, and
left us free here. I ask pardon, sir! I beseech you to forgive my
warmth; you would if you knew the cause, I’m certain.’
I began to suspect as much myself, and that my neighbour being insane,
was in no wise responsible for his opinions; when he resumed--
‘Most men are made miserable by present calamities; some feel
apprehensions for the future; but no one ever suffered so much from
either as I do from the past. No, sir,’ continued he, raising his voice,
‘I have been made unhappy from those sweet souvenirs of departed
greatness which guidebook people and tourists gloat over. The very
thought of antiquity makes me shudder; the name of Charlemagne gives me
the lumbago; and I’d run a mile from a conversation about Charles the
Bold or Philip van Artevelde. I see what’s passing in your mind; but you
‘re all wrong. I’m not deranged, not a bit of it; though, faith, I might
be, without any shame or disgrace.’
The caprices of men, of Englishmen in particular, had long ceased to
surprise me; each day disclosed some new eccentricity or other. In the
very last hotel I had left there was a Member of Parliament planning a
new route to the Rhine, avoiding Cologne, because in the coffee-room of
the ‘Grossen Rheinberg’ there was a double door that everybody banged
when he went in or out, and so discomposed the honourable and learned
gentleman that he was laid up for three weeks with a fit of gout,
brought on by pure passion at the inconvenience.
I had not long to wait for the explanation in this case. My companion
appeared to think he owed it to himself to ‘show cause’ why he was not
to be accounted a lunatic; and after giving me briefly to understand
that his means enabled him to retire from active pursuits and enjoy his
ease, he went on to recount that he had come abroad to pass the
remainder of his days in peace and tranquillity. But I shall let him
tell his own story in his own words.
‘On the eighth day after my arrival at Brussels, I told my wife to pack
up; for as Mr. Thysens the lawyer, who promised to write before that
time, had not done so, we had nothing to wait for. We had seen Waterloo,
visited the Musée, skated about in listed slippers through the Palais
d’Orange, dined at Dubos’s, ate ice at Velloni’s, bought half the old
lace in the Rue de la Madelaine, and almost caught an ague in the Allée
Verte. This was certainly pleasure enough for one week; so I ordered my
bill, and prepared “to evacuate Flanders.” Lord help us, what beings we
are! Had I gone down to the railroad by the Boulevards and not by the
Montagne de la Cour, what miseries might I not have been spared! Mr.
Thysens’s clerk met me, just as I emerged from the Place Royale, with a
letter in his hand. I took it, opened, and read:--
‘“Sir,--I have just completed the purchase of the beautiful Château of
Vanderstradentendonk, with all its gardens, orchards, pheasantries,
piscinae, prairies, and forest rights, which are now your property.
Accept my most respectful congratulations upon your acquisition of this
magnificent seat of ancient grandeur, rendered doubly precious by its
having been once the favourite residence and château of the great Van
Dyck.”
‘Here followed a long encomium upon Rubens and his school, which I did
not half relish, knowing it was charged to me in my account; the whole
winding up with a pressing recommendation to hasten down at once to take
possession, and enjoy the partridge shooting, then in great abundance.
‘My wife was in ecstasy to be the Frow Vanderstradentendonk, with a
fish-pond before the door, and twelve gods and goddesses in lead around
it. To have a brace of asthmatic peacocks on a terrace, and a dropsical
swan on an island, were strong fascinations--not to speak of the
straight avenues leading nowhere, and the winds of heaven blowing
everywhere; a house with a hundred and thirty windows and half as many
doors, none of which would shut close; a garden, with no fruit but crab-
apples; and a nursery, so called, because the playground of all the
brats for a league round us. No matter, I had resolved to live abroad
for a year or two, and one place would do just as well as another; at
least, I should have quietness--that was something; there was no
neighbourhood, no town, no highroad, no excuse for travelling
acquaintances to drop in, or rambling tourists to bore one with letters
of introduction. Thank God! there was neither a battlefield, a
cathedral, a picture, nor a great living poet for ten miles on any side.
‘Here, thought I, I shall have that peace Piccadilly cannot give.
Cincinnatus-like, I’ll plant my cabbages, feed my turkeys, let my beard
grow, and nurse my rental. Solitude never bored me; I could bear
anything but intrusive impertinence. So far did I carry this feeling,
that on reading Robinson Crusoe I laid down the volume in disgust on the
introduction of his man Friday!
‘It mattered little, therefore, that the _couleur de rose_ picture the
lawyer had drawn of the château had little existence out of his own
florid imagination; the quaint old building, with its worn tapestries
and faded furniture, suited the habit of my soul, and I hugged myself
often in the pleasant reflection that my London acquaintances would be
puzzling their brains for my whereabouts, without the slightest clue to
my detection. Now, had I settled in Florence, Frankfort, or Geneva, what
a life I must have led! There is always some dear Mrs. Somebody going to
live in your neighbourhood, who begs you ‘ll look out for a house for
her--something very eligible; eighteen rooms well furnished; a southern
aspect; in the best quarter; a garden indispensable; and all for some
forty pounds a year--or some other dear friend who desires you ‘ll find
a governess, with more accomplishments than Malibran and more learning
than Porson, with the temper of five angels, and a “vow in heaven” to
have no higher salary than a college bed-maker. Then there are the
Thompsons passing through, whom you have taken care never to know
before; but who fall upon you now as strangers in a foreign land, and
take the “benefit” of the “Alien Act” in dinners at your house during
their stay. I stop not to enumerate the crying wants of the more lately
arrived resident, all of which are refreshed for your benefit; the
recommendations to butlers who don’t cheat, to moral music-masters,
grave dancing-masters, and doctors who never take fees--every infraction
by each of these individuals in his peculiar calling being set down as a
just cause of complaint against yourself, requiring an animated
correspondence in writing, and concluding with an abject apology and a
promise to cut the delinquent that day, though you owe him a half-year’s
bill. These are all pleasant; not to speak of the curse of disjointed
society, ill-assorted, ill-conceived, unreasonable pretension, vulgar
impertinence, and fawning toadyism on every side, and not one man to be
found to join you in laughing at the whole thing, which would amply
repay one for any endurance. No, thought I, I ‘ve had enough of this! I
‘ll try my barque in quieter waters, and though it’s only a punt, yet
I’ll hold the sculls myself, and that’s something.
‘So much for the self-gratulation I indulged in, as the old _chaise de
poste_ rattled over the heavy pavement, and drew up short at the portico
of my future dwelling. My wife was charmed with the procession of
villagers who awaited us on the steps, and (although an uglier
population never trod their mother earth in wooden slippers) fancied she
could detect several faces of great beauty and much interest in the
crowd. For my part, I saw nothing but an indiscriminate haze of cotton
nightcaps, striped jackets, blouses, black petticoats and sabots; so,
pushing my way through them, I left the bassoon and the burgomaster to
the united delights of their music and eloquence, and shutting the hall
door threw myself on a seat, and thanked Heaven that my period of peace
and tranquillity was at length to begin.
‘Peace and tranquillity! What airy visions! Had I selected the post of
cad to an omnibus, a steward to a Greenwich steamer, were I a guide to
the Monument or a waiter at Long’s my life had been one of dignified
repose in comparison with my present existence.
‘I had not been a week in the château when a travelling Englishman
sprained his ankle within a short distance of the house. As a matter of
course he was brought there, and taken every care of for the few days of
his stay. He was fed, housed, leeched, and stuped, and when at length he
proceeded upon his journey was profuse in his acknowledgments for the
services rendered him; and yet what was the base return of the
ungrateful man? I have scarcely temper to record it. During the very
moment when we were most lavish in our attention to him, he was sapping
the very peace of his benefactors. He learned from the Flemish servants
of the house that it had formerly been the favourite residence of Van
Dyck; that the very furniture was unchanged since his time; the bed, the
table, the chair he had sat on were all preserved. The wretch--am I not
warranted in calling him so?--made notes of all this; before I had been
three weeks in my abode, out came a _Walk in Flanders_, in two volumes,
with a whole chapter about me, headed “Château de Van Dyck.” There we
were, myself and my wife, in every window of the Row: Longman, Hurst,
Rees, Orme, Brown, Green, and Blue, had bought us at a price, and paid
for us; there we were--we, who courted solitude and retirement--to be
read of by every puppy in the West End, and every apprentice in
Cheapside. Our hospitality was lauded, as if I kept open house for all
comers, with “hot chops and brown gravy” at a moment’s notice. The
antiquary was bribed to visit me by the fascinations of a spot “sacred
to the reveries of genius”; the sportsman, by the account of my
“preserves”; the idler, to say he had been there; and the guide-
bookmaker and historical biographer, to vamp up details for a new
edition of _Belgium as it was_, or _Van Dyck and his Contemporaries_.
‘From the hour of the publication of that horrid book I never enjoyed a
moment’s peace or ease. The whole tide of my travelling countrymen--and
what a flood it is!--came pouring into Ghent. Post-horses could not be
found sufficient for half the demand; the hotels were crowded;
respectable peasants gave up their daily employ to become guides to the
château; and little busts of Van Dyck were hawked about the
neighbourhood by children of four years old. The great cathedral of
Ghent, Van Scamp’s pictures, all the historic remains of that ancient
city were at a discount; and they who formerly exhibited them as a
livelihood were now thrown out of bread. Like the dancing-master who has
not gone up to Paris for the last pirouette, or the physician who has
not taken up the stethoscope, they were reputed old-fashioned and
_passé_; and if they could not describe the Château de Van Dyck, were
voted among the bygones.
‘The impulse once given, there was no stopping; the current was
irresistible. The double lock on the gate of the avenue, the bulldog at
the hall door, the closed shutters, the cut-away bell-rope, announced a
firm resolution in the fortress not to surrender; but we were taken by
assault, escaladed, and starved out in turns.
‘Scarcely was the tea-urn on the breakfast-table when they began to pour
in--old and young, the halt, the one-eyed, the fat, the thin, the
melancholy, the merry, the dissipated, the dyspeptic, the sentimental,
the jocose, the blunt, the ceremonious, the courtly, the rude, the
critical, and the free and easy. One came forty miles out of his way,
and pronounced the whole thing an imposition, and myself a humbug;
another insisted upon my getting up at dinner, that he might sit down in
my chair, characterised by the confounded guides as “le fauteuil de Van
Dyck”; a third went so far as to propose lying down in our great four-
post bed, just to say he had been there, though my wife was then in it.
I speak not of the miserable practice of cutting slices off all the
furniture as relics. John Murray took an inventory of the whole contents
of the house for a new edition of his guidebook; and Holman, the blind
traveller, _felt_ me all over with his hand as I sat at tea with my
wife; and last of all, a respectable cheesemonger from the Strand, after
inspecting the entire building from the attics to the cellar, pressed
sixpence into my hand at parting, and said, “Happy to see you, Mr. Van
Dyck, if you come into the city!”
‘Then the advice and counsel I met with, oral and written, would fill a
volume, and did; for I was compelled to keep an album in the hall for
the visitors’ names. One suggested that my desecration of the temple of
genius would be less disgusting if I dined in my kitchen, and left the
ancient dining-room as the great artist had left it. Another hinted that
my presence in my own house destroyed all the illusion of its historic
associations. A third, a young lady--to judge by the writing--proposed
my wearing a point-beard and lace ruffles, with trunk hose and a feather
in my hat, probably to favour the “illusion” so urgently mentioned by
the other writer, and, perhaps, to indulge visitors like my friend the
cheesemonger. Many pitied me--well might they!--as one insensible to the
associations of the spot; while my very servants, regarding me only as a
show part of the establishment, neglected their duties on every side,
and betook themselves to ciceroneship, each allocating his peculiar
territory to himself, like the people who show the lions and the armour
in the Tower.
‘No weather was either too hot or too cold, too sultry or too
boisterous; no hour too late or too early; no day was sacred. If the
family were at prayers or at dinner or at breakfast or in bed, it
mattered not; they had come many miles to see the chateau, and see it
they would. “Alas!” thought I, “if, as some learned persons suppose,
individuals be recognisable in the next world, what a melancholy time of
it will be yours, poor Van Dyck! If they make all this hubbub about the
house you lived in, what will they do about your fleshy tabernacle?”
‘As the season advanced, the crowds increased; and as autumn began, the
conflicting currents to and from the Rhine all met in my bedroom. There
took place all the rendezvous of Europe. Runaway daughters there first
repented in papa’s arms, and profligate sons promised amendment for the
future. Myself and my wife were passed by unnoticed and disregarded amid
this tumult of recognition and salutation. We were emaciated like
skeletons; our meals we ate when we could, like soldiers on a retreat;
and we slept in our clothes, not knowing at what moment the enemy might
be upon us. Locks, bolts, and bars were ineffectual; our resistance only
increased curiosity, and our garrison was ever open to bribery.
‘It was to no purpose that I broke the windows to let in the north wind
and acute rheumatism; to little good did I try an alarm of fire every
day about two, when the house was fullest; and I failed signally in
terrifying my torturers when I painted the gardener’s wife sky-blue, and
had her placed in the hall, with a large label over the bed, “collapsed
cholera.” Bless your heart! the tourist cares for none of these; and I
often think it would have saved English powder and shot to have exported
half a dozen of them to the East for the siege of Seringapatam. Had they
been only told of an old picture, a teapot, a hearth-brush, or a
candlestick that once belonged to Godfrey de Bouillon or Peter the
Hermit, they would have stormed it under all the fire of Egypt! Well,
it’s all over at last; human patience could endure no longer. We escaped
by night, got away by stealth to Ghent, took post-horses in a feigned
name, and fled from the Château de Van Dyck as from the plague.
Determined no longer to trust to chances, I have built a cottage myself,
which has no historic associations further back than six weeks ago; and
fearful even of being known as the _ci-devant_ possessor of the château,
I never confess to have been in Ghent in my life; and if Van Dyck be
mentioned, I ask if he is not the postmaster at Tervueren.
‘Here, then, I conclude my miseries. I cannot tell what may be the
pleasure that awaits the _live_ “lion,” but I envy no man the delights
that fall to his lot who inhabits the den of the _dead_ one.’