Transcriber's Note:
Inconsistent hyphenation and spelling in the original document have
been preserved. Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
Italic text is denoted by _underscores_.
MY MISCELLANIES.
BY WILKIE COLLINS,
AUTHOR OF 'THE WOMAN IN WHITE,' 'NO NAME,' 'THE DEAD SECRET,'
&c. &c. &c.
IN TWO VOLUMES.--VOL. I.
LONDON:
SAMPSON LOW, SON, & CO., LUDGATE HILL.
1863.
The Author reserves the right of Translation.
LONDON: PRINTED BY W. CLOWES AND SONS, STAMFORD STREET,
AND CHARING CROSS.
Affectionately Inscribed
TO
HENRY BULLAR
(OF THE WESTERN CIRCUIT).
PREFACE.
The various papers of which the following collection is composed, were
most of them written some years since, and were all originally
published--with many more, which I have not thought it desirable to
reprint--in 'Household Words,' and in the earlier volumes of 'All the
Year Round.' They were fortunate enough to be received with favour by
the reader, at the period of their first appearance, and were thought
worthy in many instances of being largely quoted from in other
journals. After careful selection and revision, they are now collected
in book-form; having been so arranged, in contrast with each other, as
to present specimens of all the shorter compositions which I have
contributed in past years to periodical literature.
My object in writing most of these papers--especially those collected
under the general heads of 'Sketches of Character' and 'Social
Grievances'--was to present what I had observed and what I had
thought, in the lightest and the least pretentious form; to address
the public (if I could) with something of the ease of letter writing,
and something of the familiarity of friendly talk. The literary Pulpit
appeared to me at that time--as it appears to me still--to be rather
overcrowded with the Preachers of Lay Sermons. Views of life and
society to set us thinking penitently in some cases, or doubting
contemptuously in others, were, I thought, quite plentiful enough
already. More freshness and novelty of appeal to the much-lectured and
much-enduring reader, seemed to lie in views which might put us on
easier terms with ourselves and with others; and which might encourage
us to laugh good-humouredly over some of the lighter eccentricities of
character, and some of the more palpable absurdities of
custom--without any unfair perversion of truth, or any needless
descent to the lower regions of vulgarity and caricature. With that
idea, all the lighter contributions to these Miscellanies were
originally written; and with that idea they are now again dismissed
from my desk, to win what approval they may from new readers.
HARLEY STREET, LONDON.
September, 1863.
CONTENTS OF VOL. I.
PAGE
Sketches of Character: I.
Talk-Stoppers 1
Social Grievances: I.
A Journey in Search of Nothing 22
Nooks and Corners of History: I.
A Queen's Revenge 48
Social Grievances: II.
A Petition to the Novel-Writers 72
Fragments of Personal Experience: I.
Laid Up in Lodgings 90
Sketches of Character: II.
A Shockingly Rude Article 135
Nooks and Corners of History: II.
The Great (Forgotten) Invasion 152
Curiosities of Literature: I.
The Unknown Public 169
Social Grievances: III.
Give us Room! 192
Curiosities of Literature: II.
Portrait of an Author, Painted by his Publisher 205
Fragments of Personal Experience: II.
My Black Mirror 250
Sketches of Character: III.
Mrs. Badgery 274
MY MISCELLANIES.
SKETCHES OF CHARACTER.--I.
TALK-STOPPERS.
We hear a great deal of lamentation now-a-days, proceeding mostly from
elderly people, on the decline of the Art of Conversation among us.
Old ladies and gentlemen with vivid recollections of the charms of
society fifty years ago, are constantly asking each other why the
great talkers of their youthful days have found no successors in this
inferior present time. Where--they inquire mournfully--where are the
illustrious men and women gifted with a capacity for perpetual
outpouring from the tongue, who used to keep enraptured audiences
deluged in a flow of eloquent monologue for hours together? Where are
the solo talkers, in this degenerate age of nothing but choral
conversation?
The solo talkers have vanished. Nothing but the tradition of them
remains, imperfectly preserved in books for the benefit of an
ungrateful posterity, which reviles their surviving contemporaries,
and would perhaps even have reviled the illustrious creatures
themselves as Bores. If they could rise from the dead, and wag their
unresting tongues among us now, would they win their reputations anew,
just as easily as ever? Would they even get listeners? Would they be
actually allowed to talk? I venture to say, decidedly not. They would
surely be interrupted and contradicted; they would have their nearest
neighbours at the dinner-table talking across them; they would find
impatient people opposite, dropping things noisily, and ostentatiously
picking them up; they would hear confidential whispering, and
perpetual fidgeting in distant corners, before they had got through
their first half-dozen of eloquent opening sentences. Nothing appears
to me so wonderful as that none of these interruptions (if we are to
believe report) should ever have occurred in the good old times of the
great talkers. I read long biographies of that large class of
illustrious individuals whose fame is confined to the select circle of
their own acquaintance, and I find that they were to a man, whatever
other differences may have existed between them, all delightful
talkers. I am informed that they held forth entrancingly for hours
together, at all times and seasons, and that I, the gentle, constant,
and patient reader, am one of the most unfortunate and pitiable of
human beings in never having enjoyed the luxury of hearing them: but,
strangely enough, I am never told whether they were occasionally
interrupted or not in the course of their outpourings. I am left to
infer that their friends sat under them just as a congregation sits
under a pulpit; and I ask myself amazedly (remembering what society is
at the present day), whether human nature can have changed altogether
since that time. Either the reports in the biographies are one-sided
and imperfect, or the race of people whom I frequently meet with
now--and whom I venture to call Talk-stoppers, because their business
in life seems to be the obstructing, confusing, and interrupting of
all conversation--must be the peculiar and portentous growth of our
own degenerate era.
Perplexed by this dilemma, when I am reading in long biographies about
great talkers, I do not find myself lamenting, like my seniors, that
they have left no successors in our day, or doubting irreverently,
like my juniors, whether the famous performers of conversational solos
were really as well worth hearing as eulogistic report would fain have
us believe. The one invariable question that I put to myself under
these circumstances runs thus:--Could the great talkers, if they had
lived in my time, have talked at all? And the answer I receive is:--In
the vast majority of cases, certainly not.
Let me not unnecessarily mention names, but let me ask, for example,
if some such famous talker as, say--the Great Glib--could have
discoursed uninterruptedly for five minutes together in the presence
of my friend Colonel Hopkirk?
The colonel goes a great deal into society; he is the kindest and
gentlest of men; but he unconsciously stops, or confuses conversation
everywhere, solely in consequence of his own sociable horror of ever
differing in opinion with anybody. If A. should begin by declaring
black to be black, Colonel Hopkirk would be sure to agree with him,
before he had half done. If B. followed, and declared black to be
white, the colonel would be on his side of the question, before he had
argued it out; and, if C. peaceably endeavoured to calm the dispute
with a truism, and trusted that every one would at least admit that
black and white in combination made grey, my ever-compliant friend
would pat him on the shoulder approvingly, all the while he was
talking; would declare that C.'s conclusion was, after all, the common
sense of the question; and would set A. and B. furiously disputing
which of them he agreed or disagreed with now, and whether on the
great Black, White, and Grey question, Colonel Hopkirk could really be
said to have any opinion at all.
How could the Great Glib hold forth in the company of such a man as
this? Let us suppose that delightful talker, with a few of his
admirers (including, of course, the writer of his biography), and
Colonel Hopkirk, to be all seated at the same table; and let us say
that one of the admirers is anxious to get the mellifluous Glib to
discourse on capital punishment for the benefit of the company. The
admirer begins, of course, on the approved method of stating the
objections to capital punishment, and starts the subject in this
manner.
"I was dining out, the other day, Mr. Glib, where capital punishment
turned up as a topic of conversation----"
"Ah!" says Colonel Hopkirk, "a dreadful necessity--yes, yes, yes, I
see--a dreadful necessity--Eh?"
"And the arguments for its abolition," continues the admirer, without
noticing the interruption, "were really handled with great dexterity
by one of the gentlemen present, who started, of course, with the
assertion that it is unlawful, under any circumstances, to take away
life----"
"Unlawful, of course!" cries the colonel. "Very well put. Yes,
yes--unlawful--to be sure--so it is--unlawful, as you say."
"Unlawful, sir?" begins the Great Glib, severely. "Have I lived to
this time of day, to hear that it is unlawful to protect the lives of
the community, by the only certain means----?"
"No, no--O dear me, no!" says the compliant Hopkirk, with the most
unblushing readiness. "Protect their lives, of course--as you say,
protect their lives by the only certain means--yes, yes, I quite agree
with you."
"Allow me, colonel," says another admirer, anxious to assist in
starting the great talker, "allow me to remind our friend, before he
takes this question in hand, that it is an argument of the
abolitionists that perpetual imprisonment would answer the purpose of
protecting society----"
The colonel is so delighted with this last argument that he bounds on
his chair, and rubs his hands in triumph. "My dear sir!" he cries,
before the last speaker can say another word, "you have hit it--you
have indeed! Perpetual imprisonment--that's the thing--ah, yes, yes,
yes, to be sure--perpetual imprisonment--the very thing, my dear
sir--the very thing!"
"Excuse me," says a third admirer, "but I think Mr. Glib was about to
speak. You were saying, sir----?"
"The whole question of capital punishment," begins the delightful
talker, leaning back luxuriously in his chair, "lies in a nutshell."
("Very true," from the colonel.) "I murder one of you--say Hopkirk
here." ("Ha! ha! ha!" loudly from the colonel, who thinks himself
bound to laugh at a joke when he is only wanted to listen to an
illustration.) "I murder Hopkirk. What is the first object of all the
rest of you, who represent the community at large?" ("To have you
hanged," from the colonel. "Ah, yes, to be sure! to have you hanged.
Quite right! quite right!") "Is it to make me a reformed character, to
teach me a trade, to wash my blood-stains off me delicately, and set
me up again in society, looking as clean as the best of you? No!"
("No!" from the compliant colonel.) "Your object is clearly to prevent
me from murdering any more of you. And how are you to do that most
completely and certainly? Can you accomplish your object by perpetual
imprisonment?" ("Ah! I thought we should all agree about it at last,"
cries the colonel cheerfully. "Yes, yes--nothing else for it but
perpetual imprisonment, as you say.") "By perpetual imprisonment? But
men have broken out of prison." ("So they have," from the colonel.)
"Men have killed their gaolers; and there you have the commission of
that very second murder that you wanted to prevent." ("Quite right,"
from the compliant Talk-Stopper. "A second murder--dreadful!
dreadful!") "Imprisonment is not your certain protective remedy, then,
evidently. What is?"
"Hanging!!!" cries the colonel, with another bound in his chair, and a
voice that can no longer be talked down. "Hanging, to be sure! I quite
agree with you. Just what I said from the first. You have hit it, my
dear sir. Hanging, as you say--hanging, by all manner of means!"
Has anybody ever met Colonel Hopkirk in society? And does anybody
think that the Great Glib could possibly have held forth in the
company of that persistently-compliant gentleman, as he is alleged, by
his admiring biographer, to have held forth in the peculiar society of
his own time? The thing is clearly impossible. Let us leave Glib,
congratulating him on having died when the Hopkirks of these latter
days were as yet hardly weaned; let us leave him, and ascertain how
some other great talker might have got on in the society of some other
modern obstructor of the flow of eloquent conversation.
I have just been reading the Life, Letters, Labours, Opinions, and
Table-Talk of the matchless Mr. Oily; edited--as to the Life, by his
mother-in-law; as to the Letters, by his grand-daughter's husband; and
as to the Labours, Opinions, and Table-Talk, by three of his intimate
friends, who dined with him every other Sunday throughout the whole of
his long and distinguished life. It is a very pretty book in a great
many volumes, with pleasing anecdotes--not only of the eminent man
himself, but of all his family connections as well. His shortest notes
are preserved, and the shortest notes of others to him. "My dear O.,
how is your poor head? Yours, P." "My dear P., hotter than ever.
Yours, O." And so on. Portraits of Oily, in infancy, childhood,
youth, manhood, old age active, and old age infirm, concluding with a
post-mortem mask, abound in the book--so do fac-similes of his
handwriting, showing the curious modifications which it underwent when
he occasionally exchanged a quill for a steel-pen. But it will be more
to my present purpose to announce for the benefit of unfortunate
people who have not yet read the Memoirs, that Oily was, as a matter
of course, a delightful and incessant talker. He poured out words, and
his audience imbibed the same perpetually three times a week from
tea-time to past midnight. Women especially revelled in his
conversation. They hung, so to speak, palpitating on his lips. All
this is told me in the Memoirs at great length, and in several places;
but not a word occurs anywhere tending to show that Oily ever met with
the slightest interruption on any one of the thousand occasions when
he held forth. In relation to him, as in relation to the Great Glib, I
seem bound to infer that he was never staggered by an unexpected
question, never affronted by a black sheep among the flock, in the
shape of an inattentive listener, never silenced by some careless man
capable of unconsciously cutting him short and starting another topic
before he had half done with his own particular subject. I am bound to
believe all this--and yet, when I look about me at society as it is
constituted now, I could fill a room, at a day's notice, with people
who would shut up the mouth of Oily before it had been open five
minutes, quite as a matter of course, and without the remotest
suspicion that they were misbehaving themselves in the slightest
degree. What (I ask myself), to take only one example, and that from
the fair sex--what would have become of Oily's delightful and
incessant talk, if he had known my friend Mrs. Marblemug, and had
taken her down to dinner in his enviable capacity of distinguished
man?
Mrs. Marblemug has one subject of conversation--her own vices. On all
other topics she is sarcastically indifferent and scornfully mute.
General conversation she consequently never indulges in; but the
person who sits next to her is sure to be interrupted as soon as he
attracts her attention by talking to her, by receiving a confession of
her vices--not made repentantly, or confusedly, or jocularly--but
slowly declaimed with an ostentatious cynicism, with a hard eye, a
hard voice, a hard--no, an adamantine--manner. In early youth, Mrs.
Marblemug discovered that her business in life was to be eccentric and
disagreeable, and she is one of the women of England who fulfils her
mission.
I fancy I see the ever-flowing Oily sitting next to this lady at
dinner, and innocently trying to make her hang on his lips like the
rest of his tea-table harem. His conversation is reported by his
affectionate biographers, as having been for the most part of the
sweetly pastoral sort. I find that he drove that much-enduring
subject, Nature, in his conversational car of triumph, longer and
harder than most men. I see him, in my mind's eye, starting in his
insinuating way from some parsley garnish round a dish of
lobsters--confessing, in his rich, full, and yet low voice (vide
Memoirs) that garnish delights him, because his favourite colour is
green--and so getting easily on to the fields, the great subject from
which he always got his largest conversational crop. I imagine his
tongue to be, as it were, cutting its first preliminary capers on the
grass for the benefit of Mrs. Marblemug; and I hear that calmly-brazen
lady throw him flat on his back by the utterance of some such words as
these:
"Mr. Oily, I ought to have told you, perhaps, that I hate the fields:
I think Nature in general something eminently disagreeable--the
country, in short, quite odious. If you ask me why, I can't tell you.
I know I'm wrong; but hating Nature is one of my vices."
Mr. Oily eloquently remonstrates. Mrs. Marblemug only says, "Yes, very
likely--but, you see, it's one of my vices." Mr. Oily tries a
dexterous compliment. Mrs. Marblemug only answers, "Don't!--I see
through that. It's wrong in me to see through compliments, being a
woman, I know. But I can't help seeing through them, and saying I do.
That's another of my vices." Mr. Oily shifts the subject to
Literature, and thence, gently but surely, to his own books--his
second great topic after the fields. Mrs. Marblemug lets him go on,
because she has something to finish on her plate--then lays down her
knife and fork--looks at him with a kind of wondering indifference,
and breaks into his next sentence thus:--
"I'm afraid I don't seem quite so much interested as I know I ought to
be," she says; "but I should have told you, perhaps, when we first sat
down, that I have given up reading."
"Given up reading!" exclaims Mr. Oily, thunderstruck by the monstrous
confession. "You mean only the trash that has come into vogue lately;
the morbid, unhealthy----"
"No, not at all," rejoins Mrs. Marblemug. "If I read anything, it
would be morbid literature. My taste is unhealthy. That's another of
my vices."
"My dear madam, you amaze--you alarm me,--you do indeed!" cries Mr.
Oily, waving his hand in graceful deprecation and polite horror.
"Don't," says Mrs. Marblemug; "you'll knock down some of the
wine-glasses, and hurt yourself. You had better keep your hand
quiet,--you had, indeed. No; I have given up reading, because all
books do me harm--the best--the healthiest. Your books even, I
suppose, I ought to say; but I can't, because I see through
compliments, and despise my own, of course, as much as other people's!
Suppose, we say, I don't read, because books do me harm--and leave it
there. The thing is not worth pursuing. You think it is? Well, then,
books do me harm, because they increase my tendency to be envious (one
of my worst vices). The better the book is, the more I hate the man
for being clever enough to write it--so much cleverer than me, you
know, who couldn't write it at all. I believe you call that Envy.
Whatever it is, it has been one of my vices from a child. No, no
wine--a little water. I think wine nasty, that's another of my
vices--or, no, perhaps, that is only one of my misfortunes. Thank you.
I wish I could talk to you about books; but I really can't read
them--they make me so envious."
Perhaps Oily (who, as I infer from certain passages in his Memoirs,
could be a sufficiently dogged and resolute man on occasions when his
dignity was in danger) still valiantly declines to submit and be
silent, and, shifting his ground, endeavours to draw Mrs. Marblemug
out by asking her questions. The new effort, however, avails him
nothing. Do what he will, he is always met and worsted by the lady in
the same, quiet, easy, indifferent way; and, sooner or later, even his
distinguished mouth is muzzled by Mrs. Marblemug, like the mouths of
all the degenerate talkers of my own time whom I have ever seen in
contact with her. Are Mr. Oily's biographers not to be depended on, or
can it really be the fact that, in the course of all his long
conversational career, that illustrious man never once met with a
check in the shape of a Mrs. Marblemug? I have no tender prepossession
in favour of the lady; but when I reflect on the character of Mr.
Oily, as exhibited in his Memoirs, I am almost inclined to regret that
he and Mrs. Marblemug never met. In relation to some people, I
involuntarily regard her as a dose of strong moral physic; and I
really think she might have done my distinguished countryman some
permanent good.
To take another instance, there is the case of the once-brilliant
social luminary, Mr. Endless--extinguished, unfortunately for the new
generation, about the time when we were most of us only little boys
and girls.
What a talker this sparkling creature must have been, if one may judge
by that racy anonymous publication (racy was, I think, the word
chiefly used in reviewing the book by the critics of the period),
Evenings with Endless, by A Constant Listener! "I could hardly
believe," I remember the Listener writes, "that the world was the same
after Endless had flashed out of this mortal scene. It was morning
while he lived--it was twilight, or worse, when he died. I was very
intimate with him. Often has the hand that writes these trembling
lines smacked that familiar back--often have those thrilling and
matchless accents syllabled the fond diminutive of my Christian name.
It was not so much that his talk was ceaseless (though that is
something), as that it moved incessantly over all topics from heaven
to earth. His variety of subject was the most amazing part of this
amazing man. His fertility of allusion to topics of the past and
present alike, was truly inexhaustible. He hopped, he skipped, he
fluttered, he swooped from theme to theme. The butterfly in the
garden, the bee in the flower-bed, the changes of the kaleidoscope,
the sun and shower of an April morning, are but faint emblems of him."
With much more to the same eloquent purpose; but not a word from the
first page to the last to hint even that Endless was ever brought to a
full stop, on any single occasion, by any one of the hundreds of
enchanted listeners before whom he figured in his wonderful
performances with the tongue from morning to night.
And yet, there must surely have been Talk-Stoppers in the world, in
the time of the brilliant Endless--talk-stoppers, in all probability,
possessing characteristics similar to those now displayed in society
by my exasperating connection by marriage, Mr. Spoke Wheeler.
It is impossible to say what the consequences might have been if my
relative and Mr. Endless had ever come together. Mr. Spoke Wheeler is
one of those men--a large class, as it appears to me--who _will_ talk,
and who have nothing whatever in the way of a subject of their own to
talk about. His constant practice is to lie silently in ambush for
subjects started by other people; to take them forthwith from their
rightful owners; turn them coolly to his own uses; and then cunningly
wait again for the next topic, belonging to somebody else, that passes
within his reach. It is useless to give up, and leave him to take the
lead--he invariably gives up, too, and declines the honour. It is
useless to start once more, seeing him apparently silenced--he becomes
talkative again the moment you offer him the chance of seizing on your
new subject--disposes of it without the slightest fancy, taste, or
novelty of handling, in a moment--then relapses into utter
speechlessness as soon as he has silenced the rest of the company by
taking their topic away from them. Wherever he goes, he commits this
social atrocity with the most perfect innocence and the most provoking
good humour, for he firmly believes in himself as one of the most
entertaining men who ever crossed a drawing-room or caroused at a
dinner-table.
Imagine Mr. Spoke Wheeler getting an invitation to one of those
brilliant suppers which assisted in making the evenings of the
sparkling Endless so attractive to his friends and admirers. See him
sitting modestly at the table with every appearance in his face and
manner of being the most persistent and reliable of listeners. Endless
takes the measure of his man, as he too confidently believes, in one
bright glance--thinks to himself, Here is a new worshipper to
astonish; here is the conveniently dense and taciturn human pedestal
on which I can stand to let off my fireworks--plunges his knife and
fork, gaily hospitable, into the dish before him (let us say a turkey
and truffles, for Endless is a gastronome as well as a wit), and
starts off with one of those "fertile allusions," for which he was so
famous.
"I never carve turkey without thinking of what Madame de Pompadour
said to Louis the Fifteenth," Endless begins in his most off-hand
manner. "I refer to the time when the superb Frenchwoman first came to
court, and the star of the fair Chateauroux waned before her. Who
remembers what the Pompadour said when the king insisted on carving
the turkey?"
Before the company can beg Endless, as usual, to remember for them,
Mr. Spoke Wheeler starts into life and seizes the subject.
"What a vicious state of society it was in the time of Madame de
Pompadour!" he says, with moral severity. "Who can wonder that it led
to the French Revolution?"
Endless feels that his first effort for the evening is nipped in the
bud, and that the new guest is not to be depended on as a listener.
He, however, waits politely, and every one else waits politely to hear
something more about the French Revolution. Mr. Spoke Wheeler has not
another word to say. He has snatched his subject--has exhausted
it--and is now waiting, with an expectant smile on his face, to lay
hands on another. Disastrous silence reigns, until Mr. Endless, as
host and wit, launches a new topic in despair.
"Don't forget the salad, gentlemen," he exclaims. "The emblem, as I
always fancy, of human life. The sharp vinegar corrected by the soft
oil, just as the misfortune of one day is compensated by the luck of
another. Heigho! let moralists lecture as they will, what a true
gambler's existence ours is, by the very nature of it! Love, fame,
wealth, are the stakes we all play for; the world is the table; Death
keeps the house, and Destiny shuffles the cards. According to my
definition, gentlemen, man is a gambling animal, and woman----"
Endless pauses for a moment, and lifts the glass to his lips to give
himself a bacchanalian air before he amazes the company with a torrent
of eloquence on the subject of woman. Unhappy man! in that one moment
Mr. Spoke Wheeler seizes on his host's brilliant gambling metaphor,
and runs away with it as his own property immediately.
"The worst of gambling," he says, with a look of ominous wisdom, "is,
that when once a man takes to it, he can never be got to give it up
again. It always ends in ruin. I know a man whose son is in the Fleet,
and whose daughter is a maid-of-all-work at a lodging-house. The poor
devil himself once had twenty thousand pounds, and he now picks up a
living by writing begging-letters. All through gambling. Degrading
vice, certainly; ruins a man's temper and health, too, as well as his
property. Ah! a very degrading vice--very much so indeed!"
"I am afraid, my dear sir, you have no vices," says Endless, getting
angry and sarcastic as a fresh pause follows this undeniable
commonplace. "The bottle stands with you. Do you abjure even that most
amiable of human failings--the cheerful glass? Ha!" exclaims Endless,
seeing that his guest is going to speak again, and vainly imagining
that he can cut him short this time. "Ha! what a debt we owe to the
first man who discovered the true use of the grape! How drunk he must
have got in making his immortal preliminary experiments! How often his
wife must have begged him to consider his health and his
respectability, and give up all further investigations! How he must
have shocked his family with perpetual hiccups, and puzzled the
medical men of the period with incurable morning headaches! To the
health of that marvellous, that magnificent, that inestimable human
being, the first Toper in the world! The patriarchal Bacchus quaffing
in his antediluvian vineyard! What a picture, gentlemen; what a
subject for our artists! Scumble, my dear friend," continues Endless,
breathlessly, feeling that Mr. Spoke Wheeler has got his topic again,
and anxious to secure assistance in preventing that persistent
gentleman from making any use of the stolen property--"Scumble, your
pencil alone is worthy of the subject. Tell us, my prince of painters,
how would you treat it?"
The prince of painters has his mouth full of turkey, and looks more
puzzled than flattered by this complimentary appeal. He hesitates, and
Mr. Spoke Wheeler darts into the conversation on the subject of
drunkenness, forthwith.
"I'll tell you what," says the Talk-Stopper, "we may all joke about
drunkenness as much as we please--I'm no saint, and I like a joke as
well as anybody--but it's a deuced serious thing for all that.
Seven-tenths of the crime in this country is owing to drunkenness; and
of all the incurable diseases that baffle the doctors, delirium
tremens is (next to hydrophobia) one of the worst. I like a cheerful
glass myself--and this is uncommonly good wine we are drinking
now--but there's more than you think for to be said on the temperance
side of the question; there is, indeed!"
Will even the most indiscriminate of the surviving admirers of
Endless, and of the great talkers generally, venture to assert that
he, or they, could have shown off with the slightest approach to
success in the company of Mr. Spoke Wheeler, or of Mrs. Marblemug, or
of Colonel Hopkirk, or of any of the other dozens on dozens of
notorious talk-stoppers whose characters I refrain from troubling the
reader with? Surely not! Surely I have quoted examples enough to prove
the correctness of my theory, that the days when the eminent professors
of the Art of Conversation could be sure of perpetually-attentive
audiences, have gone by. Instead of mourning over the loss of the
great talkers, we ought to feel relieved (if we have any real regard
for them, which I sometimes doubt) by their timely departure from the
scene. Between the members of the modern generation who would not have
listened to them, the members who could not have listened to them, and
the members who would have confused, interrupted, and cut them short,
what extremities of compulsory silence they must have undergone if
they had lasted until our time! Our case may be lamentable enough in
not having heard them; but how much worse would theirs be if they came
back to the world now, and tried to show us how they won their
reputations!
SOCIAL GRIEVANCES.--I.
A JOURNEY IN SEARCH OF NOTHING.
[Communicated by An Anonymous Traveller.]
NOTE THE FIRST. TRYING FOR QUIET.
"Yes," said the doctor, pressing the tips of his fingers with a
tremulous firmness on my pulse, and looking straight forward into the
pupils of my eyes, "yes, I see: the symptoms all point unmistakably
towards one conclusion--Brain. My dear sir, you have been working too
hard; you have been following the dangerous example of the rest of the
world in this age of business and bustle. Your brain is
over-taxed--that is your complaint. You must let it rest--there is
your remedy."
"You mean," I said, "that I must keep quiet, and do Nothing?"
"Precisely so," replied the doctor. "You must not read or write; you
must abstain from allowing yourself to be excited by society; you must
have no annoyances; you must feel no anxieties; you must not think;
you must be neither elated nor depressed; you must keep early hours
and take an occasional tonic, with moderate exercise, and a nourishing
but not too full a diet--above all, as perfect repose is essential to
your restoration, you must go away into the country, taking any
direction you please, and living just as you like, so long as you are
quiet and so long as you do Nothing."
"I presume he is not to go away into the country without ME?" said my
wife, who was present at the interview.
"Certainly not," rejoined the doctor with an acquiescent bow. "I look
to your influence, my dear madam, to encourage our patient to follow
my directions. It is unnecessary to repeat them, they are so extremely
simple and easy to carry out. I will answer for your husband's
recovery if he will but remember that he has now only two objects in
life--to keep quiet, and to do Nothing."
My wife is a woman of business habits. As soon as the doctor had taken
his leave, she produced her pocket-book, and made a brief abstract of
his directions, for our future guidance. I looked over her shoulder
and observed that the entry ran thus:--
"Rules for dear William's restoration to health. No reading; no
writing; no excitement; no annoyance; no anxiety; no thinking. Tonic.
No elation of spirits. Nice dinners. No depression of spirits. Dear
William to take little walks (with me). To go to bed early. To get up
early. N.B.--Keep him quiet. Mem.: Mind he does Nothing."
Mind I do Nothing? No need to mind about that. I have not had a
holiday since I was a boy. Oh, blessed Idleness, after the years of
merciless industry that have separated us, are you and I to be brought
together again at last? Oh, my weary right hand, are you really to
ache no longer with driving the ceaseless pen? May I, indeed, put you
in my pocket, and let you rest there, indolently, for hours together?
Yes! for I am now at last to begin--doing Nothing. Delightful task
that performs itself! Welcome responsibility that carries its weight
away smoothly on its own shoulders!
These thoughts shine in pleasantly on my mind after the doctor has
taken his departure, and diffuse an easy gaiety over my spirits when
my wife and I set forth, the next day, for the country. We are not
going the round of the noisy watering-places, nor is it our intention
to accept any invitations to join the circles assembled by festive
country friends. My wife, guided solely by the abstract of the
doctor's directions in her pocket-book, has decided that the only way
to keep me absolutely quiet, and to make sure of my doing Nothing, is
to take me to some pretty retired village and to put me up at a
little primitive, unsophisticated country-inn. I offer no objection
to this project--not because I have no will of my own and am not
master of all my movements--but only because I happen to agree with my
wife. Considering what a very independent man I am naturally, it has
sometimes struck me, as a rather remarkable circumstance, that I
always do agree with her.
We find the pretty, retired village. A charming place, full of
thatched cottages with creepers at the doors, like the first easy
lessons in drawing-masters' copy-books. We find the unsophisticated
inn--just the sort of house that the novelists are so fond of writing
about, with the snowy curtains and the sheets perfumed by lavender,
and the matronly landlady and the amusing signpost. This Elysium is
called the Nag's Head. Can the Nag's Head accommodate us? Yes, with a
delightful bedroom and a sweet parlour. My wife takes off her bonnet
and makes herself at home, directly. She nods her head at me with a
look of triumph. Yes, dear, on this occasion also I quite agree with
you. Here we have found perfect quiet; here we may make sure of obeying
the doctor's orders; here we have, at last, discovered--Nothing.
Nothing! Did I say Nothing? We arrive at the Nag's Head late in the
evening, have our tea, go to bed tired with our journey, sleep
delightfully till about three o'clock in the morning, and, at that
hour, begin to discover that there are actually noises even in this
remote country seclusion. They keep fowls at the Nag's Head; and, at
three o'clock, the cock begins to crow and the hens to cluck under our
window. Pastoral, my dear, and suggestive of eggs for breakfast whose
reputation is above suspicion; but I wish these cheerful fowls did not
wake quite so early. Are there, likewise, dogs, love, at the Nag's
Head, and are they trying to bark down the crowing and clucking of the
cheerful fowls? I should wish to guard myself against the possibility
of making a mistake, but I think I hear three dogs. A shrill dog who
barks rapidly; a melancholy dog who howls monotonously; and a hoarse
dog who emits barks at intervals like minute guns. Is this going on
long? Apparently it is. My dear, if you will refer to your
pocket-book, I think you will find that the doctor recommended early
hours. We will not be fretful and complain of having our morning sleep
disturbed; we will be contented, and will only say that it is time to
get up.
Breakfast. Delicious meal, let us linger over it as long as we
can,--let us linger, if possible, till the drowsy midday tranquillity
begins to sink over this secluded village.
Strange! but now I think of it again, do I, or do I not, hear an
incessant hammering over the way? No manufacture is carried on in
this peaceful place, no new houses are being built; and yet there is
such a hammering that, if I shut my eyes, I can almost fancy myself in
the neighbourhood of a dock-yard. Waggons, too. Why does a waggon
which makes so little noise in London, make so much noise here? Is the
dust on the road detonating powder, that goes off with a report at
every turn of the heavy wheels? Does the waggoner crack his whip or
fire a pistol to encourage his horses? Children, next. Only five of
them, and they have not been able to settle for the last half hour
what game they shall play at. On two points alone do they appear to be
unanimous--they are all agreed on making a noise and on stopping to
make it under our window. I think I am in some danger of forgetting
one of the doctor's directions: I rather fancy I am actually allowing
myself to be annoyed.
Let us take a turn in the garden, at the back of the house. Dogs
again. The yard is on one side of the garden. Every time our walk
takes us near it, the shrill dog barks and the hoarse dog growls. The
doctor tells me to have no anxieties. I am suffering devouring
anxieties. These dogs may break loose and fly at us, for anything I
know to the contrary, at a moment's notice. What shall I do? Give
myself a drop of tonic? or escape for a few hours from the perpetual
noises of this retired spot by taking a drive? My wife says, take a
drive. I think I have already mentioned that I invariably agree with
my wife.
The drive is successful in procuring us a little quiet. My directions
to the coachman are to take us where he pleases, so long as he keeps
away from secluded villages. We suffer much jolting in by-lanes, and
encounter a great variety of bad smells. But a bad smell is a
noiseless nuisance, and I am ready to put up with it patiently.
Towards dinner-time we return to our inn. Meat, vegetables, pudding,
all excellent, clean and perfectly cooked. As good a dinner as I wish
ever to eat;--shall I get a little nap after it? The fowls, the dogs,
the hammer, the children, the waggons, are quiet at last. Is there
anything else left to make a noise? Yes: there is the working
population of the place.
It is getting on towards evening, and the sons of labour are
assembling on the benches placed outside the inn to drink. What a
delightful scene they would make of this homely every-day event on the
stage! How the simple creatures would clink their tin mugs, and drink
each other's healths, and laugh joyously in chorus! How the peasant
maidens would come tripping on the scene and lure the men tenderly to
the dance! Where are the pipe and tabour that I have seen in so many
pictures; where the simple songs that I have read about in so many
poems? What do I hear as I listen, prone on the sofa, to the evening
gathering of the rustic throng? Oaths,--nothing, on my word of honour,
but oaths! I look out, and see gangs of cadaverous savages, drinking
gloomily from brown mugs, and swearing at each other every time they
open their lips. Never in any large town, at home or abroad, have I
been exposed to such an incessant fire of unprintable words as now
assail my ears in this primitive village. No man can drink to another
without swearing at him first. No man can ask a question without
adding a mark of interrogation at the end in the shape of an oath.
Whether they quarrel (which they do for the most part), or whether
they agree; whether they talk of their troubles in this place or their
good luck in that; whether they are telling a story, or proposing a
toast, or giving an order, or finding fault with the beer, these men
seem to be positively incapable of speaking without an allowance of at
least five foul words for every one fair word that issues from their
lips. English is reduced in their mouths to a brief vocabulary of all
the vilest expressions in the language. This is an age of
civilization; this is a Christian country; opposite me I see a
building with a spire, which is called, I believe, a church; past my
window, not an hour since, there rattled a neat pony chaise with a
gentleman inside, clad in glossy black broad cloth, and popularly
known by the style and title of clergyman. And yet, under all these
good influences, here sit twenty or thirty men whose ordinary
table-talk is so outrageously beastly and blasphemous, that not one
single sentence of it, though it lasted the whole evening, could be
printed, as a specimen, for public inspection in these pages. When the
intelligent foreigner comes to England, and when I tell him (as I am
sure to do) that we are the most moral people in the universe, I will
take good care that he does not set his foot in a secluded British
village when the rural population is reposing over its mug of
small-beer after the labours of the day.
I am not a squeamish person, neither is my wife, but the social
intercourse of the villagers drives us out of our room, and sends us
to take refuge at the back of the house. Do we gain anything by the
change? Nothing whatever.
The back parlour, to which we have now retreated, looks out on a
bowling-green; and there are more benches, more mugs of beer, more
foul-mouthed villagers on the bowling-green. Immediately under our
window is a bench and table for two, and on it are seated a drunken
old man and a drunken old woman. The aged sot in trousers is offering
marriage to the aged sot in petticoats, with frightful oaths of
endearment. Never before did I imagine that swearing could be twisted
to the purposes of courtship. Never before did I suppose that a man
could make an offer of his hand by bellowing imprecations on his eyes,
or that all the powers of the infernal regions could be appropriately
summoned to bear witness to the beating of a lover's heart under the
influence of the tender passion. I know it now, and I derive so little
satisfaction from gaining the knowledge of it, that I determine on
having the two intolerable old drunkards removed from the window, and
sent to continue their cursing courtship elsewhere. The ostler is
lounging about the bowling-green, scratching his bare brawny arms and
yawning grimly in the mellow evening sunlight. I beckon to him, and
ask him if he does not think those two old people have had beer
enough? Yes, the ostler thinks they have. I inquire next if they can
be removed from the premises, before their language gets worse,
without the risk of making any great disturbance. The ostler says,
Yes, they can, and calls to the potboy. When the potboy comes, he
says, "Now then, Jack!" and snatches the table away from the two
ribald old people without another word. The old man's pipe is on the
table; he rises and staggers forward to possess himself of it; the old
woman rises, too, to hold him by the arm for fear he should fall flat
on his face. The moment they are off the bench, the potboy snatches
their seat away from behind them, and quietly joins the ostler who is
carrying their table into the inn. None of the other drinkers laugh at
this proceeding, or pay any attention to it; and the two intoxicated
old people, left helpless on their legs, stagger away feebly without
attracting the slightest notice. The neat stratagem which the ostler
and the potboy have just performed, is evidently the customary and
only possible mode of letting drinkers know when they have had enough
at the Nag's Head. Where did those savage islanders live whose manners
a certain sea-captain once upon a time described as no manners at all,
and some of whose customs he reprobated as being very nasty? If I did
not know that we are many miles distant from the coast, I should be
almost disposed to suspect that the seafaring traveller whose opinion
I have just quoted had been touching at the Nag's Head.
As it is impossible to snatch away all the tables and all the benches
of all the company drinking and swearing in front of the house and
behind it, I inquire of the ostler, the next time he comes near the
window, at what time the tap closes? He tells me at eleven o'clock. It
is hardly necessary to say that we put off going to bed until that
time, when we retire for the night, drenched from head to foot, if I
may so speak, in floods of bad language.