[5] _George Selwyn and his Contemporaries, with Memoirs and Notes_.
By T.H. Jesse. 4 vols.
The volumes of which we are about to give fragments and anecdotes, contain
a portion of the letters addressed to a man of witty memory, whose
existence was passed almost exclusively among men and women of rank; his
life, in the most expressive sense of the word, West End; and even in that
West End, his chief haunt St James's Street. Parliament and the Clubs
divided his day, and often his night. The brilliant roués, the steady
gamesters, the borough venders, and the lordly ex-members of ex-cabinets,
were the only population of whose living and breathing he suffered himself
to have any cognizance. In reverse of Gray's learned mouse, eating its way
through the folios of an ancient library--and to whom
"A river or a sea was but a dish of tea,
And a kingdom bread and butter,"
to George Selwyn, the world and all that it inhabits, were concentrated in
Charles Fox, William Pitt, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and the circle of
men of pleasantry, loose lives, and vivacious temperaments, who, with
whatever diminishing lustre, revolved round them.
Of the City of London, Selwyn probably had heard; for though fixed to one
spot, he was a man fond of collecting curious knowledge; but nothing short
of proof positive can ever convince us that he had passed Temple Bar. He,
of course, knew that there were such things on the globe as merchants and
traders, because their concerns were occasionally talked of in "the House,"
where, however, he heard as little as possible about them; for in the
debates of the time he took no part but that of a listener, and even then
he abridged the difficulty, by generally sleeping through the sitting. He
was supposed to be the only rival of Lord North in the happy faculty of
falling into a sound slumber at the moment when any of those dreary
persons, who chiefly speak on such subjects, was on his legs. St James's,
and the talk of St James's, were his business, his pleasures, the exciters
of his wit, and the rewarders of his toil. He had applied the art of
French cookery to the rude material of the world, and refined and reduced
all things into a _sauce piquante_--all its realities were concentrated in
essences; and, disdaining the grosser tastes of mankind, he lived upon the
_aroma_ of high life--an epicure even among epicures; yet not an indolent
enjoyer of the luxuries of his condition, but a keen, restless, and eager
_student_ of pleasurable sensations--an Apicius, polished by the manners,
and furnished with the arts of the most self-enjoying condition of mankind,
that of an English gentleman of fortune in the 18th century.
We certainly are not the champions of this style of life. We think that
man has other matters to consider than _pâtés_ and _consommés_, the
flavour of his Burgundy and pines, or even the _bons-mots_ of his friends.
We are afraid that we must, after all, regard the whole Selwyn class as
little better than the brutes in their stables, or on their hearth-rugs;
with the advantage to the brutes of following their natural appetites,
having no twinges of either conscience or the gout, and not being from
time to time stripped by their friends, or plundered by the Jews. The
closing hours of the horse or the dog are also, perhaps, more complacent
in general, and their deaths are less a matter of rejoicing to those who
are to succeed to their mangers and cushions. Of higher and more startling
contemplations, this is not the place to speak. If such men shall yet have
the power of looking down from some remoter planet on their idle, empty,
and self-indulgent course in our own, perhaps they would rejoice to have
exchanged with the lot of him whose bread was earned by the sweat of his
brow, yet who had fulfilled the duties of his station; and whose hand had
been withheld by necessity from that banquet, where all the nobler purposes
of life were forgotten, and where the senses absorbed the higher nature.
Still, we admit that these are topics on which no man ought to judge the
individual with severity. We have spoken only of the class. The individual
may have had virtues of which the world can know nothing; he may have been
liberal, affectionate, and zealous, when his feelings were once awakened;
his purse may have dried many a tear, and soothed many a pulse of secret
suffering. It is, at all events, more kindly to speak of poor human nature
with fellow feeling for those exposed to the strong temptations of fortune,
than to establish an arrogant comparison between the notorious errors of
others, and the secret failures of our own.
But we have something to settle with Mr Jesse. He is alive, and therefore
may be instructed; he is making books with great rapidity, and therefore
may be advantageously warned of the perils of book-making. The _title_ of
his volumes has altogether deceived us. We shall not charge him with
intending this; but it has unquestionably had the effect. "_George Selwyn_
and his contemporaries." We opened the volumes, expecting to find our
witty clubbist in every page; George in his full expansion, "in his armour
as he lived;" George, every inch a wit, glittering before us in his full
court suit, in his letters, his anecdotes, his whims, his odd views of
mankind, his caustic sneerings at the glittering world round him; an
epistolary HB., turning every thing into the pleasant food of his pen and
pungency. But we cannot discover any letters from him, excepting a few
very trifling ones of his youth. We have letters from all sorts of persons,
great lords and little, statesmen and travellers, placemen and
place-hunters; and amusing enough many of them are. Walpole furnishes some
sketches, and nothing can be better. In fact the volumes exhibit, not
George Selwyn, the only one whose letters we should have cared to see, but
those who wrote to him. And the disappointment is not the less, that in
those letters constant allusions are made to his "sparkling, delightful,
sportive, characteristic, &c. &c., epistles." Great ladies constantly urge
him to write to _them_. Maids, wives, and widows, pour out a stream of
perpetual laudation. Men of rank, men of letters, men at home, and men
abroad, unite in one common supplication for "London news" _réchaufféed_,
spiced, and served up, by the perfect _cuisinerie_ of George's art of
story-telling; like the horse-leech's two daughters, the cry is, "Give,
give." And this is what we wanted to see. Selwyn, the whole Selwyn, and
nothing but Selwyn.