when I like the person I am writing to, because that makes me think
about them, and I like you, and so I tell you. Besides, it is just eight
o'clock at night, and I always go to bed at eight o'clock, except when
it is my birthday, and then I sit up to supper. So I will not say
anything more besides this--and that is my love to you and Neptune; and
if you will drink my health every Christmas Day I will drink
yours--come.
I am,
Respected Sir,
Your affectionate Friend.
P.S. I don't write my name very plain,[128] but you know what it is you
know, so never mind.
50. TO MR. W. C. MACREADY
Saturday, May 24th, 1851.
My dear Macready,
We are getting in a good heap of money for the Guild. The comedy has
been very much improved, in many respects, since you read it. The scene
to which you refer is certainly one of the most telling in the play. And
there _is_ a farce to be produced on Tuesday next, wherein a
distinguished amateur will sustain a variety of assumption-parts, and in
particular, Samuel Weller and Mrs. Gamp, of which I say no more. I am
pining for Broadstairs, where the children are at present. I lurk from
the sun, during the best part of the day, in a villainous compound of
darkness, canvas, sawdust, general dust, stale gas (involving a vague
smell of pepper), and disenchanted properties. But I hope to get down on
Wednesday or Thursday.
Ah! you country gentlemen, who live at home at ease, how little do you
think of us among the London fleas! But they tell me you are coming in
for Dorsetshire. You must be very careful, when you come to town to
attend to your parliamentary duties, never to ask your way of people in
the streets. They will misdirect you for what the vulgar call "a lark,"
meaning, in this connection, a jest at your expense. Always go into some
respectable shop or apply to a policeman. You will know him by his being
dressed in blue, with very dull silver buttons, and by the top of his
hat being made of sticking-plaster. You may perhaps see in some odd
place an intelligent-looking man, with a curious little wooden table
before him and three thimbles on it. He will want you to bet, but don't
do it. He really desires to cheat you. And don't buy at auctions where
the best plated goods are being knocked down for next to nothing. These,
too, are delusions. If you wish to go to the play to see real good
acting (though a little more subdued than perfect tragedy should be), I
would recommend you to see ---- at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane.
Anybody will show it to you. It is near the Strand, and you may know it
by seeing no company whatever at any of the doors. Cab fares are
eightpence a mile. A mile London measure is half a Dorsetshire mile,
recollect. Porter is twopence per pint; what is called stout is
fourpence. The Zoological Gardens are in the Regent's Park, and the
price of admission is one shilling. Of the streets, I would recommend
you to see Regent Street and the Quadrant, Bond Street, Piccadilly,
Oxford Street, and Cheapside. I think these will please you after a
time, though the tumult and bustle will at first bewilder you. If I can
serve you in any way, pray command me. And with my best regards to your
happy family, so remote from this Babel.
Believe me, my dear Friend,
Ever affectionately yours.
[CHARLES DICKENS]
P.S. I forgot to mention just now that the black equestrian figure you
will see at Charing Cross, as you go down to the House, is a statue of
_King Charles the First_.[129]
51. TO MR. EDMUND YATES
TAVISTOCK HOUSE,
Tuesday, Feb. 2nd. 1858.
My dear Yates,
Your quotation is, as I supposed, all wrong. The text _is not_ "Which
his 'owls was organs." When Mr. Harris went into an empty dog-kennel, to
spare his sensitive nature the anguish of overhearing Mrs. Harris's
exclamations on the occasion of the birth of her first child (the
Princess Royal of the Harris family), "he never took his hands away from
his ears, or came out once, till he was showed the baby." On
encountering that spectacle, he was (being of a weakly constitution)
"took with fits." For this distressing complaint he was medically
treated; the doctor "collared him, and laid him on his back upon the
airy stones"--please to observe what follows--"and she was told, to ease
her mind, his 'owls was organs."
That is to say, Mrs. Harris, lying exhausted on her bed, in the first
sweet relief of freedom from pain, merely covered with the counterpane,
and not yet "put comfortable," hears a noise apparently proceeding from
the backyard, and says, in a flushed and hysterical manner: "What 'owls
are those? Who is a-'owling? Not my ugebond?" Upon which the doctor,
looking round one of the bottom posts of the bed, and taking Mrs.
Harris's pulse in a reassuring manner, says, with much admirable
presence of mind: "Howls, my dear madam?--no, no, no! What are we
thinking of? Howls, my dear Mrs. Harris? Ha, ha, ha! Organs, ma'am,
organs. Organs in the streets, Mrs. Harris; no howls."
Yours faithfully, [C. D.]
FOOTNOTES:
[127] One of the pleasantest, _to me_, of Dickens's letters is that in
which, extravagant anti-Tory as he was, he refuses to let a contributor
echo the too common grudges at Lockhart (see _inf._ under Stevenson).
But it is very short, and perhaps of no general interest.
[128] Referring, I suppose, to the well-known and "inimitable" (but by
no means indispensable) flourish of his signature.
[129] "The comedy" is Bulwer-Lytton's _Not so Bad as we Seem_, acted by
Dickens and other amateurs for charity at Devonshire House seventy years
ago, and about to be reproduced _in loco_ as these proofs are being
revised.
CHARLES KINGSLEY (1819-1875)
There are some people who, while thinking that the author of
_Westward Ho!_ has not, at least recently, been given his
due rank in critical estimation, admit certain explanations
of this. As a historian and in almost all his writings
Kingsley was inaccurate,--almost (as his friend and
brother-in-law Froude was once said to be) "congenitally
inaccurate"; in his novels and elsewhere he went out of his
way to tread on the corns of all sorts of people; he
constantly ventured out of his depth in such subjects as
philosophy and theology; and he suffered a terrible defeat
by rashly engaging, and by tactical ineptitude, in his
contest with Newman. His politics, in which matter at one
time he engaged hotly, were those of a busier and more
educated Colonel Newcome. His poems, which were his least
unequal work, seem never to have attracted due notice.
But none of his foibles--not even corn-treading--is a fatal
defect in familiar letter-writing: consequently he has good
chance here, and his _Letters and Memoirs_ have been
deservedly often reprinted. It is true that letters cannot
show in full the really exceptional versatility which
enabled the same man to write _Yeast_ and _Westward Ho!_,
_Andromeda_ and _The Water Babies_, the best of the Essays
and the best of the Sermons, _Alton Locke_ and _At Last_.
But they can and they do show it in part: and it gives them
the interest which has been noticed in other cases. Indeed
in one respect--as a writer--Kingsley is perhaps better in
his letters than in his _Essays_, where he too often affects
a Macaulayesque positiveness on rather inadequate grounds.
The following specimen should show him in pleasantly varied
character--as a thoroughly human person, a good sportsman,
and what Matthew Arnold (by no means himself very liberal of
praise to his literary contemporaries) thought him--"the
most generous man [he had] ever known; the most forward to
praise, the most willing to admire, the most free from all
thought of himself in praising and admiring and the most
incapable of being made ill-natured by having to support
ill-natured attacks upon himself." It is to be feared that
Mr. Arnold did not go far wrong when he declared, "Among men
of letters I know nothing so rare as this."
It is true that the author of _Tom Brown's Schooldays_ was
an intimate personal friend, and in politics and other
things a close comrade of Kingsley's; but he was as generous
to others, and while the scars of the battle with Newman
were almost fresh, he writes that he has read _The Dream of
Gerontius_ "with admiration and awe." [Greek: thymos], in
this sense = "spirit." "Jaques" = "Jack" = "Pike," while on
the other side we get, through him of _As You Like It_, an
explanation of "melancholies." And in fact the pike is not a
cheerful-looking fish. Even two whom the present writer once
saw tugging at the two ends of one dead trout in a shallow,
did it sulkily.
52. TO TOM HUGHES, ESQ.
Jan. 12. 1857.
I have often been minded to write to you about 'Tom Brown.' I have
puffed it everywhere I went, but I soon found how true the adage is that
good wine needs no bush, for every one had read it already, and from
every one, from the fine lady on her throne to the red-coat on his
cock-horse and the school-boy on his forrum (as our Irish brethren call
it), I have heard but one word, and that is, that it is the jolliest
book they ever read. Among a knot of red-coats at the cover-side, some
very fast fellow said, 'If I had had such a book in my boyhood, I should
have been a better man now!' and more than one capped his sentiment
frankly. Now isn't it a comfort to your old bones to have written such a
book, and a comfort to see that fellows are in a humour to take it in?
So far from finding men of our rank in a bad vein, or sighing over the
times and prospects of the rising generation, I can't help thinking they
are very teachable, humble, honest fellows, who want to know what's
right, and if they don't go and do it, still think the worst of
themselves therefor. I remark now, that with hounds and in fast company,
I never hear an oath, and that, too, is a sign of self-restraint.
Moreover, drinking is gone out, and, good God, what a blessing! I have
good hopes, of our class, and better than of the class below. They are
effeminate, and that makes them sensual. Pietists of all ages (George
Fox, my dear friend, among the worst) never made a greater mistake than
in fancying that by keeping down manly [Greek: thymos], which Plato
saith is the root of all virtue, they could keep down sensuality. They
were dear good old fools. However, the day of 'Pietism' is gone, and
'Tom Brown' is a heavy stone on its grave. 'Him no get up again after
that,' as the niggers say of a buried obi-man. I am trying to polish the
poems: but Maurice's holidays make me idle; he has come home healthier
and jollier than ever he was in all his life, and is truly a noble boy.
Sell your last coat and buy a spoon. I have a spoon of huge size (Farlow
his make). I killed forty pounds weight of pike, &c., on it the other
day, at Strathfieldsaye, to the astonishment and delight of ----, who
cut small jokes on 'a spoon at each end,' &c., but altered his tone when
he saw the melancholies coming ashore, one every ten minutes, and would
try his own hand. I have killed heaps of big pike round with it. I tried
it in Lord Eversley's lakes on Monday, when the fish wouldn't have even
his fly. Capricious party is Jaques. Next day killed a seven pounder at
Hurst.... We had a pretty thing on Friday with Garth's, the first run
I've seen this year. Out of the Clay Vale below Tilney Hall, pace as
good as could be, fields three acres each, fences awful, then over
Hazeley Heath to Bramshill, shoved him through a false cast, and a
streamer over Hartford Bridge flat, into an unlucky earth. Time
fifty-five minutes, falls plentiful, started thirty, and came in eight,
and didn't the old mare go? Oh, Tom, she is a comfort; even when a bank
broke into a lane, and we tumbled down, she hops up again before I'd
time to fall off, and away like a four-year old. And if you can get a
horse through that clay vale, why then you can get him 'mostwards';
leastwise so I find, for a black region it is, and if you ain't in the
same field with the hounds, you don't know whether you are in the same
parish, what with hedges, and trees, and woods, and all supernumerary
vegetations. Actually I was pounded in a 'taty-garden,' so awful is the
amount of green stuff in these parts. Come and see me, and take the old
mare out, and if you don't break her neck, she won't break yours.
JOHN RUSKIN (1819-1900)
The peculiar wilfulness--the unkind called it
wrong-headedness--which flecked and veined Mr. Ruskin's
genius, had, owing to his wealth and to his entire
indifference to any but his own opinion, opportunities of
displaying itself in all his work, public as well as
private, which are not common. Naturally, it showed itself
nowhere more than in letters, and perhaps not unnaturally he
often adopted the epistolary form in books which, had he
chosen, might as well have taken another--while he might
have chosen this in some which do not actually _call_
themselves "letters." There is, however, little difference,
except "fuller dress" of expression, between any of the
classes of his work, whether it range from the first volume
of _Modern Painters_ to _Verona_ in time, or from _The Seven
Lamps of Architecture_ to _Unto This Last_ in subject. If
anybody ever could "write beautifully about a broomstick" he
could: though perhaps it is a pity that he so often did. But
this faculty, and the entire absence of bashfulness which
accompanied it, are no doubt grand accommodations for
letter-writing; and the reader of Mr. Ruskin's letters gets
the benefit of both very often--of a curious study of high
character and great powers uncontrolled by logical
self-criticism almost always. The following--part of a still
longer letter which he addressed to the _Daily Telegraph_,
Sep. 11, 1865, on the eternal Servant Question--was of
course written for publication, but so, practically, was
everything that ever came from its author. It so happens too
that, putting aside his usual King Charles's Head of Demand
and Supply, there is little in it of his more mischievous
crotchets, nothing of the petulance (amounting occasionally
to rudeness) of language in which he sometimes indulged, but
much of his nobler idealism, while it is a capital example
of his less florid style. "Launce," "Grumio" and "Old Adam"
are of course Shakespeare's: "Fairservice" (of whom,
tormenting and selfish as he was, Mr. Ruskin perhaps thought
a little too harshly) and "Mattie," Scott's. "Latinity
enough"--the unfortunate man had written, and the newspaper
had printed, _hoc_ instead of _hac_. "A book of Scripture,"
Colenso's work had just been finished. "Charlotte Winsor" a
baby-farmer of the day.
53. From "THE DAILY TELEGRAPH"
September 18, 1865.
DOMESTIC SERVANTS: SONSHIP AND SLAVERY.
To the Editor of "The Daily Telegraph."
Sir,
I have been watching the domestic correspondence in your columns with
much interest, and thought of offering you a short analysis of it when
you saw good to bring it to a close, and perhaps a note or two of my own
experience, being somewhat conceited on the subject just now, because I
have a gardener who lets me keep old-fashioned plants in the greenhouse,
understands that my cherries are grown for the blackbirds, and sees me
gather a bunch of my own grapes without making a wry face. But your
admirable article of yesterday causes me to abandon my purpose; the more
willingly, because among all the letters you have hitherto published
there is not one from any head of a household which contains a complaint
worth notice. All the masters or mistresses whose letters are thoughtful
or well written say they get on well enough with their servants; no
part has yet been taken in the discussion by the heads of old families.
The servants' letters, hitherto, furnish the best data; but the better
class of servants are also silent, and must remain so. Launce, Grumio,
or Fairservice may have something to say for themselves; but you will
hear nothing from Old Adam nor from Carefu' Mattie. One proverb from
Sancho, if we could get it, would settle the whole business for us; but
his master and he are indeed "no more." I would have walked down to
Dulwich to hear what Sam Weller had to say; but the high-level railway
went through Mr. Pickwick's parlour two months ago, and it is of no use
writing to Sam, for, as you are well aware, he is no penman. And,
indeed, Sir, little good will come of any writing on the matter. "The
cat will mew, the dog will have its day." You yourself, excellent as is
the greater part of what you have said, and to the point, speak but
vainly when you talk of "probing the evil to the bottom." This is no
sore that can be probed, no sword nor bullet wound. This is a plague
spot. Small or great, it is in the significance of it, not in the depth,
that you have to measure it. It is essentially bottomless, cancerous; a
putrescence through the constitution of the people is indicated by this
galled place. Because I know this thoroughly, I say so little, and that
little, as your correspondents think, who know nothing of me, and as you
say, who might have known more of me, unpractically. Pardon me, I am no
seller of plasters, nor of ounces of civet. The patient's sickness is
his own fault, and only years of discipline will work it out of him.
That is the only really "practical" saying that can be uttered to him.
The relation of master and servant involves every other--touches every
condition of moral health through the State. Put that right, and you
put all right; but you will find that it can only come ultimately, not
primarily, right; you cannot begin with it. Some of the evidence you
have got together is valuable, many pieces of partial advice very good.
You need hardly, I think, unless you wanted a type of British logic,
have printed a letter in which the writer accused (or would have
accused, if he had possessed Latinity enough) all London servants of
being thieves because he had known one robbery to have been committed by
a nice-looking girl. But on the whole there is much common sense in the
letters; the singular point in them all, to my mind, being the
inapprehension of the breadth and connection of the question, and the
general resistance to, and stubborn rejection of, the abstract ideas of
sonship and slavery, which include whatever is possible in wise
treatment of servants. It is very strange to see that, while everybody
shrinks at abstract suggestions of there being possible error in a book
of Scripture, your sensible English housewife fearlessly rejects
Solomon's opinion when it runs slightly counter to her own, and that not
one of your many correspondents seems ever to have read the Epistle to
Philemon. It is no less strange that while most English boys of ordinary
position hammer through their Horace at one time or other time of their
school life, no word of his wit or his teaching seems to remain by them:
for all the good they get out of them, the Satires need never have been
written. The Roman gentleman's account of his childhood and of his
domestic life possesses no charm for them; and even men of education
would sometimes start to be reminded that his "_noctes coenaeque Deum!_"
meant supping with his merry slaves on beans and bacon. Will you allow
me, on this general question of liberty and slavery, to refer your
correspondents to a paper of mine touching closely upon it, the leader
in the _Art-Journal_ for July last? and to ask them also to meditate a
little over the two beautiful epitaphs on Epictetus and Zosima, quoted
in the last paper of the _Idler_?
"I, Epictetus, was a slave; and sick in body, and wretched
in poverty; and beloved by the gods."
"Zosima, who while she lived was a slave only in her body,
has now found deliverance for that also."
How might we, over many an "independent" Englishman, reverse this last
legend, and write--
"This man, who while he lived was free only in his body, has
now found captivity for that also."
I will not pass without notice--for it bears also on wide
interests--your correspondent's question, how my principles differ from
the ordinary economist's view of supply and demand. Simply in that the
economy I have taught, in opposition to the popular view, is the science
which not merely ascertains the relations of existing demand and supply,
but determines what _ought_ to be demanded and what _can_ be supplied. A
child demands the moon, and, the supply not being in this case equal to
the demand, is wisely accommodated with a rattle; a footpad demands your
purse, and is supplied according to the less or more rational economy of
the State, with that or a halter; a foolish nation, not able to get into
its head that free trade does indeed mean the removal of taxation from
its imports, but not of supervision from them, demands unlimited foreign
beef, and is supplied with the cattle murrain and the like. There may be
all manner of demands, all manner of supplies. The true political
economist regulates these; the false political economist leaves them to
be regulated by (not Divine) Providence. For, indeed, the largest final
demand anywhere reported of, is that of hell; and the supply of it (by
the broad gauge line) would be very nearly equal to the demand at this
day, unless there were here and there a swineherd or two who could keep
his pigs out of sight of the lake.
Thus in this business of servants everything depends on what sort of
servant you at heart wish for or "demand." If for nurses you want
Charlotte Winsors, they are to be had for money; but by no means for
money, such as that German girl who, the other day, on her own
scarce-floating fragment of wreck, saved the abandoned child of another
woman, keeping it alive by the moisture from her lips. What kind of
servant do you want? It is a momentous question for you yourself--for
the nation itself. Are we to be a nation of shopkeepers, wanting only
shop-boys: or of manufacturers, wanting only hands: or are there to be
knights among us, who will need squires--captains among us, needing
crews? Will you have clansmen for your candlesticks, or silver plate?
Myrmidons at your tents, ant-born, or only a mob on the Gillies' Hill?
Are you resolved that you will never have any but your inferiors to
serve you, or shall Enid ever lay your trencher with tender little
thumb, and Cinderella sweep your hearth, and be cherished there? It
_might_ come to that in time, and plate and hearth be the brighter; but
if your servants are to be held your inferiors, at least be sure they
_are_ so, and that you are indeed wiser, and better-tempered, and more
useful than they. Determine what their education ought to be, and
organize proper servants' schools, and there give it them. So they will
be fit for their position, and will do honour to it, and stay in it: let
the masters be as sure they do honour to theirs, and are as willing to
stay in that. Remember that every people which gives itself to the
pursuit of riches, invariably, and of necessity, gets the scum uppermost
in time, and is set by the genii, like the ugly bridegroom in the
Arabian Nights, at its own door with its heels in the air, showing its
shoe-soles instead of a Face. And the reversal is a serious matter, if
reversal be even possible, and it comes right end uppermost again,
instead of to conclusive Wrong-end.
ROBERT LOUIS BALFOUR STEVENSON
(1850-1894)
The author of _Treasure Island_ (invariably known to his
friends simply as "Louis," the "Robert" being reserved in
the form of "Bob" for his less famous but very admirable
cousin the art-critic) will perhaps offer to some Matthew
Arnold of posterity the opportunity of a paradox like that
of our Matthew on Shelley. For a short time some of these
friends--not perhaps the wisest of them--were inclined to
regard him as, and to urge him to continue to be, a writer
of criticisms and miscellaneous articles--a sort of new
Hazlitt. Others no sooner saw the _New Arabian Nights_ than
they recognised a tale-teller such as had not been seen for
a long time--such as, in respect of anything imitable, had
never been seen before. And he fortunately fell in with
these views and hopes. But all his tales are pure Romance,
and Romance has her eclipses with the vulgar. On the other
hand his letters are almost as good as his fiction, and not
in the least open to the charges of a certain
non-naturalness of style--even of thought--which could,
justly or not, be brought against his other writings. And it
is perhaps worth noting here that letters have held their
popularity with all fit judges almost better than any other
division of literature. Whether this is the effect of their
"touches of nature" (using the famous phrase without the
blunder so common in regard to it but not without reference
to its context) need not be discussed.