Fanny Gillytin. Even so! behold Fanny in a black satin dress and a laced
_berthe_, and her yellow wavy hair parted on one side like a man, seated
on an ottoman in deep conversation with Professor Sventurato, that
red-hot republican, formerly one of the tribunes of the Ultramontane
Republic; next, under the name of Kibaub Bey, a colonel in the Turkish
service, warring against the Moscovs in Anatolia; then deputy-assistant
quartermaster-general under the immortal Walker, liberator of Nicaragua;
next, an actor at the Variétés Theatre, New Orleans; next, keeper of an
oyster and lager bier saloon, in One-Hundred-and-Twenty-seventh Street,
Ginslingopolis, in the United States of America; next, of Paris, Milan,
Turin, Vienna, and Pesth, travelling as a broom-girl, an old woman, a
Jesuit priest, a waiter at a _café_, a Franciscan friar, and a clown to
a circus; now of the Whetstone Park College for Ladies (by whom he is
adored), professor of modern languages; during the foregoing time, and
occasionally, a prisoner in divers cells, wards, casemates, underground
dungeons, _oubliettes_, _piombi_, _ergastoli_, and penal colonies, from
all of which he has escaped by means little short of miraculous. Fanny,
they say, is madly in love with Sventurato, and would marry him, were not
the professor already allied to a Moldo-Wallachian lady, the daughter of
a Kaïmakan, whose heroism effected his escape from the citadel of Comorn,
and who afterwards essayed to poison him in his coffee. Fanny is no less
mad after liberty, by which she means universal democracy, universal
spoliation, and universal smash. She has some private fortune, which she
dispenses liberally among necessitous refugees; and in furtherance of the
sacred cause of liberty—as she understands it—she has written piles of
books. She is the authoress of that flaming epic, “The Tyrant’s Entrails,
or a Maiden’s Wish;” “Crowns and Coffins, or Oligarchs and Ogres,” an
historical retrospect; “Mazzini the Shiloh,” and “Victory and Vitriol,”
those soul-stirring pamphlets. She signs revolutionary bank-notes; she
applauds regicide; she is in correspondence (in a complicated cipher
which every police official from Paris to Petersburg understands and
laughs at) with foreign revolutionary committees. She visits the
Continent sometimes to distribute funds and ammunition. She would be
ready to assume man’s clothes for the benefit of her adored liberty—as
she understands it. Ah! Fanny, Fanny, pause; ah! rash and foolish girl,
for whom to be whipped and sent to bed would be the better portion,
forbear to play with these edged tools! No second-sight is necessary
for the result of these miserable machinations to be manifest. I see
the portico of a theatre brilliantly lighted up; for a Tyrant and his
young innocent wife come hither to-night. He is hemmed in by guards and
police-agents; yet, for all his escort, desperate men rush forward and
throw hand-grenades beneath his carriage-wheels. A horrible explosion,
and then scores of peaceful men, women, and children, are borne, dead
or frightfully mutilated, to the hospitals; and the Tyrant, safe and
sound, bows to a cheering audience from his box. I see four downcast
men sitting between gensd’arme on the criminals’ bench of a crowded
court-house, before stern judges who have doomed them to death before
the very reading of the indictment. I see a straight-waistcoated wretch
sitting in his chair in a gloomy cell, his head bent down, the governor
and the priest standing by, while the executioner cuts off his hair and
shaves the back of his neck. I see a grim, gray winter’s morning in the
fatal Place of the Roquette. A space is kept clear by thousands of horse,
foot, artillery, and police; and, thrust to the furthermost limits of the
place, is a pale-faced crowd surging like a sea. Then the drums beat, and
the dismal procession issues from a prison to a scaffold. Then, tottering
between priests and turn-keys, come two bare-footed men, with long white
shirts over their garments, and their faces concealed by hideous black
veils. But the veils are removed when they mount the scaffold, when
one by one a distorted, livid face, with white lips, appears, when the
executioner seizes the pinioned criminal, and flings him—yes, flings him,
is the word—on the plank. Then I see the horrible gash in the face as the
moribund strives to shape his mouth to utter his last words on earth;
the last up-turning of the starting eye-balls; but the plank reverses,
the rollers revolve, the slide closes, the spring is touched, the KNIFE
falls, the blood spouts, and the heads drop into the sawdust of the red
basket. Liberty, equality, and fraternity, flaming epics, soul-stirring
pamphlets, and complicated ciphers, have come to this miserable end. The
Tyrant is borne through the streets, the people shouting, and the maidens
strewing flowers at his feet. The telegram has been despatched from the
revolutionary committee to the Roquette, and the answer is a corpse that
quivers, the parricide’s shroud, and the headsman’s bloody axe.
Of course there are some titled folks at Mrs. Van Umbug’s conversazione:
it would not be complete without a literary lord—a harmless nobleman,
generally, who has translated Horace, invented a new metre, or discovered
a new butterfly; and a literary lady—if separated from her husband all
the better, who paints him in the darkest of colours, as the hero of
every one of her novels. And, equally of course, Ethelred Guffoon is
here. Ethelred Guffoon is everywhere. He is one of Mrs. Van Umbug’s
special favourites. She calls him by his Christian name. He hunts up new
lions for her; occasionally he officiates as peacemaker, and prevents
the lions from growling and fighting among themselves. He rushes from
Mrs. Van Umbug’s conversazione to the Pontoppidan Theatre, to see a new
face, which he must criticise; after that he will sit up half the night
to review Mr. Gladstone’s Homer, for the “Daily Scratcher,” and will be
at Somerset House by punctual office hours the next morning. A man of the
age, Ethelred Guffoon—a man of the time, a good fellow, but frivolous.
I wonder whether the celebrities one sees at this shadowy conversazione
really represent the literary world—the real people who write the books
and think the thoughts. I am afraid they do not. I fear that to find
the princes of the pen, the giants of the land of letters, I must go
further afield. Lo, here is Great Tom of Chelsea, sitting cosily, in
his back parlour, smoking a pipe of bird’s-eye with Eglintoun Beaverup,
and telling him he is about having his ceilings whitewashed. Here is
Lord Livy poring over Restoration and Revolution broadsides by his
reading-lamp in his lonely chambers in the Albany;—no, not lonely, the
spirits of the old historic men come from their dusty shelves and clap
him on the shoulder, and cry, “Go on and prosper, Thomas Babington,
Lord Livy.” The great Mr. Polyphemus, the novelist, is bidden to the
Duke of Sennacherib’s, and as he rolls to Sennacherib House in his
brougham, meditates satiric onslaughts on “Tom Garbage” and “Young
Grubstreet”—those Tom Thumb foes of his[12]—in the next number of the
“Pennsylvanians.” Mr. Goodman Twoshoes is reading one of his own books
to the members of the Chawbacon Athenæum, and making, I am delighted
to hear, a mint of money by the simple process. Goldpen, the poet, has
taken his wife and children to Miss P. Horton’s entertainment; Bays, the
great dramatist, is sitting in the stalls of the Pontoppidan Theatre
listening with rapt ears to the jokes in his own farce; and Selwyn Cope,
the essayist, is snoring snugly between the sheets, having to rise very
early to-morrow morning in order to see a man hanged. And where are the
working-men of literature, the conscripts of the pen, doomed to carry
Brown Bess, for sixpence a day, all their lives? Where are Garbage and
Grubstreet? In the worst inn’s worst room, with racing prints half hung,
the walls of plaster and the floors of sand, at once a deal table but
stained with beer, sits Garbage playing four-handed cribbage with an
impenitent hostler, a sporting man who has sold the fight, and a potboy
who is a returned convict? Sits he there, I ask, or is he peacefully
pursuing his vocation in country lodgings? And Grubstreet, is he in some
murky den, with a vulture’s quill dipped in vitriol inditing libels upon
the great, good, and wise of the day? Wonder upon wonders, Grubstreet
sits in a handsome study—listening to his wife laughing, over her crochet
work, at Mr. Polyphemus’s last attack on him, and dandling a little child
upon his knee! Oh! the strange world in which we live, and the post that
people will knock their heads against!
[Illustration: ELEVEN O’CLOCK P.M.: A SCIENTIFIC CONVERSAZIONE.]
From a literary to a learned or scientific conversazione, at one of which
we are about to take a transient peep, there is but one step; indeed,
literature is always welcome among the good-natured old Dryasdusts, who
are continually raking and rummaging, and rocking the “placers” and
“prospects” of knowledge, and turning up huge masses of quartz, from
which the nimble-fingered chymists of the pen extract flakes of shining
gold. Presto! we leave the Republic of Letters, and are in the handsome
rooms of the Royal Inquiring Society. This meritorious association
(incorporated by Royal charter) is perpetually asking questions, and,
though it often receives insufficient, if not ridiculous responses, yet
manages, at the close of every year, to accumulate a highly-respectable
stock of information on almost every imaginable topic. The members, I
will assume (would that such a society in strict reality existed), are
draughts from all the learned, scientific, philosophical, antiquarian,
and artistic societies in London; and on the first Thursday in every
month during the season, they meet to gloze over curiosities exhibited
for their inspection, to shake hands and crack jokes with one another—I
have even seen the friendly dig in the ribs, accompanied by the sly
chuckle, occasionally administered—and to ask questions and receive
answers. They are “Notes and Queries” (chattiest, most quaintly-erudite
of periodicals) incarnated. But they abjure not the presence of the
gentler, unscientific sex. These rare old boys of learning and science
thread their way through the rooms (sometimes almost inconveniently
crowded, for the Royal Inquiring Society is very popular) with blooming
wives and daughters on their arms. The young ladies delight in these
conversaziones—for a change. They are so strange, so peculiar, they
say. You don’t meet anybody to dance with or to talk about the weather,
or the Crystal Palace, or crinoline, or the Botanical Gardens; but you
see such nice old gentlemen, with dear, shiny, bald heads, and such
wonderful intellectual-looking beings, with long hair, turn-down collars,
and large feet, who smell musty bones with unpronounceable names, and
make extraordinary instruments to whiz round, and point out places upon
maps, and talk _so_ cleverly (but so incomprehensibly to you, my dears)
about rusty coins and the backbones of fishes, and battered saucepans,
which _they_ say are helmets. And then there are the nice stereoscopes
to peep through, and the beautiful water-colour drawings and photographs
to look at, and the old gentlemen are so quiet and so polite, and so
different from the young men one meets in society, who either stammer and
blush or are superciliously rude and put their hands in their trousers’
pockets. Yes, young ladies, the bald-headed old gentlemen, the careworn,
long-haired, slovenly-looking men, are quiet and polite. They were, many
of them, poor and humble once; but they have hewn out steps from the rock
of knowledge, whereby they have mounted to that better fortune—European,
Worldwide fame. That quiet man with gray hair, smiles when ministers
press upon him a knighthood or a baronetcy: “_Cui bono?_” he says; “I
would rather be a corresponding member of the Academy of Honolulu. When
I am old and broke, and past work, you may give me enough for a little
bread in my old days: I take it as a Right, not as a favour,” just as
Turner the painter left in his will the simple direction that he was to
be buried in the Cathedral Church of St. Paul.—“St. Paul’s is for the
painters and the warriors, as Westminster Abbey is for the poets and
statesmen; but I want not your honours and titles. Such as you have, you
bestow on your lawyers and your lacqueys; but your captains are almost
ashamed to take the decorations that are shared by footmen and backstairs
cringers.”
You have readily divined, I hope, why I have instructed the dexterous
limner who illustrates these pages to select for his subject the
scientific, rather than the literary, conversazione. The men of science
do not obtrude their personalities upon the public. Their fame is known,
their influence felt from London to Louisiana, but their portraits seldom
meet the public eye. Those of General Tom Thumb or the Christy Minstrels
would attract more crowds to the print-shop windows, and sell better.
But, good lack! what a commotion there would be if the portraits of a
series of _littérateurs_, in their habits as they live, appeared in
“Twice Round the Clock!” I should be denounced, repudiated, vilified,
abused, for the artist’s misdeeds. The great Mr. Polyphemus would crush
me mercilessly beneath his iron heel; Grubstreet would (threaten to)
kick me; Garbage would have me on the hip; O’Roarer smite me beneath
the fifth rib; Leathers devise devices against me to make my existence
intolerable; and Ethelred Guffoon castigate me terribly in his popular
paper, “The Half-penny Cane.” No; let me deal only with the shadows; and
those that the cobweb cap fits, e’en let them wear it.
* * * * *
At Eleven o’Clock in the evening, the social institutions known as
Evening Parties assume their gayest and most radiant aspect. I think
that I have already hinted in these pages that I am not a very frequent
visitor at these entertainments. The truth must out: the people don’t
like me. At the last _soirée_ I attended, a fashionable physician, coming
in very late, and throwing out for general hearing the fact that he had
been dining with an earl, I meekly suggested that he should allow me to
rub myself up against him, in order to catch some of his aristocracy. All
the women laughed, but the men looked as though they would have very much
liked to throw me out of the window. There was one exception—a gentleman
with one eye, and a face like a glass case full of curiosities, so many
different phases of expression were there in it, who came across to me
and made friends at once. But I shall never be asked to that house again;
and if I am ill, I won’t send for the fashionable physician. _Timeo
Danäos_, and the pills they give you.
Thus circumstanced, I feel it becoming my degree to stay on the outside
of great houses, and, herding among the crowd and the link-men, to
witness the setting down and the taking up of the carriages coming to
or going from evening parties. It has always been my lot so to stand on
the kerb, to be a continual dweller on the threshold. I have stood there
to see people married, to see people buried, and have murmured: “My
turn must come next, surely;” but my time has not come yet. A king has
patted me on the head, and I have sate, as a child, on the knee of the
handsomest woman in Europe. I have been on the brink of many a precipice;
I have attained the edge of many a cloud. But I have stopped there. I
have always been like the recalcitrant costermonger’s donkey, “going for
to go,” but never accomplishing the journey in its entirety.
I spoke of link-men. I might tell you a not uninteresting story regarding
those industrials, in these gas-lit days growing day by day rarer and
rarer. The tarred-rope made links are indeed, save on extraneous foggy
nights, grown quite extinct, and are replaced by neat lanterns; and
the time will come when the old red jackets, famous as a class from
Grosvenor Square to the Horticultural Gardens at Chiswick, from the
club-house fronts, on _levée_ days, to the doorways of evening parties,
shall become quite obsolete. But there is a grand old admiral living
now—titled, high in office, before whom even his equals in rank bow, and
who can make post-captains wait in his ante-chambers—who owes at least
half his advancement and social position to the services of the link-men.
Thirty years ago this officer was a young stripling, cast upon the ocean
of London society. He was of good family, but his acquaintances in the
fashionable world were few and far between, his influence was _nil_, and
his promotion was therefore more than dubious. But at the Opera, then the
King’s Theatre, he happened to form a shilling-giving on the one side,
cap-touching on the other, acquaintance with a link-man—Silver Tom, I
think he was called, from a silver badge he always wore, presented to him
by a noble marquis whom he had saved from being prematurely scrunched on
a certain dark night between his own carriage wheels and those of the
equipage of a duchess, his grandmamma. “Silver Tom,” moved by gratitude,
and experienced by his (outside) knowledge of the fashionable world,
put the then young and poor lieutenant up to what is vernacularly
known as “a thing or two.” Not a grand entertainment could be given in
Fashionabledom, but on the lieutenant’s arrival in full evening costume,
“Silver Tom” bawled up his name to the footman in attendance on the
door-step (the _régime_ of cards was not so strictly attended to as it is
now); he on the door-step halloaed it out to the powdered attendant on
the first landing; he, in his turn, gave it to the black-vestmented groom
of the chambers, who proclaimed it to the world in general in sonorous
tones, and the bold lieutenant was inducted to the saloons of reception.
Who was to know whether he had been invited to the feast or not? Not,
certainly, the hostess, who, perhaps, did not know two hundred and fifty
of her five hundred guests by sight. Some had been asked by her husband,
some by herself. Not certainly the guests, who would not have been
much surprised if they had met the Hottentot Venus or the King of the
Cannibal Islands. The lieutenant made his bow and himself comfortable;
was sure to meet some lady or gentleman in society whom he knew, and
probably departed with a list of half-a-dozen newly-formed and valuable
acquaintances. He went on and prospered. Gradually, from being met and
liked at great houses, he received genuine invitations, and, as I have
premised, he made a good end of it at the Admiralty. I hope he pensioned
“Silver Tom.”
[Illustration: ELEVEN O’CLOCK P.M.: AN EVENING PARTY.]
Who is dead by this time, most probably; but I can still stand by the
side of his successor, at the door of the great house, by the lamp
and lantern’s glare, and see the gay company pass in and out. How the
horses champ! how the dresses rustle! how the jewels shine! and what
fair women and brave men are here congregated! Messrs. Weippert’s or
Collinet’s band are upstairs; Messrs. Gunter’s men have brought the
ices; there are flirtations in the conservatories, and squeezings of
hands interchanged on the stairs. Vows of love are spoken, flowers from
bouquets are given; and is it not, after all, the same old, old story,
that boys and girls will love one another, and that the old people will
look on with pretended severity, but with real contentment in their
hearts, and that there will be present a few jealous and cankered ones,
who will look on to envy the others because they are so happy? Drive envy
from your hearts, ye who ride not in gilded chariots, and move not in
the “fashionable circles.” There is as much truth, love, and gaiety at a
“sixpenny hop,” between maid-servants and journeymen bakers, as at the
most refined evening parties.
MIDNIGHT.—THE HAYMARKET, AND THE SUB-EDITOR’S ROOM.
Midnight: an awful sound. Supposing you were to be hanged at three
o’clock in the morning, as I am doomed to be, in a literary sense, how
would you like to hear twelve o’clock sound? But three hours more to
live! In three hours “the sheriff he will come,” and the chaplain, and
the hangman, as they came to Mr. Samuel Hall _en route_ for Tyburn. In
three hours the clock will run down; the pendulum shall oscillate no
more; Time shall rest on his scythe; the last grain of sand shall run
out, and of these ephemeral papers you shall say _fuit_. We have clomb
the hill together, and we will rest together at the foot.
Glancing over my map of London, and retracing the course of our
peregrinations, I find, with some complacency, that we have not, after
all, left many parts of the metropolis unexplored. We have been to
Camberwell and to Hyde Park Corner; to Pentonville and to London Bridge;
to Billingsgate and to Euston Square. It is true, that we have not yet
penetrated to the interior of Buckingham Palace, or the condemned cell at
Newgate, nor do I think that I shall assume the part of the Boy Jones or
a visiting magistrate for your amusement; but we have been “behind the
scenes” of more places than theatres since this clock was first wound up.
It is not without regret now, that I linger over and dally with my few
remaining hours. They have been very pleasant ones for me. I shall miss
the printer’s boy (for, be it known, I am about to abandon literature and
go into trade, though I have not yet settled the precise business—corn,
or coals, or commission agency). I shall miss, beyond aught else, the
daily deluge of letters from anonymous correspondents—praising, blaming,
complaining, or inquiring, but all, I am glad to say, very appreciative
readers of my shiftless writings.
But we have come to the complexion of midnight, and the hour must be
described. It is fraught with meaning for London. You know that in
poetical parlance midnight is the time when church-yards yawn (they
had need to be weary now, for the Board of Health won’t allow them to
receive any occupants _intra muros_), and graves give up their dead. And
there be other grave-yards in London town—yards where no tombstones or
brick vaults are—that at midnight yawn and send forth ghosts to haunt
the city. A new life begins for London at midnight. Strange shapes
appear of men and women who have lain a-bed all the day and evening,
or have remained torpid in holes and corners. They come out arrayed in
strange and fantastic garments, and in glaringly gaslit rooms screech and
gabble in wild revelry. The street corners are beset by night prowlers.
Phantoms arrayed in satin and lace flit upon the sight. The devil puts a
diamond ring on his taloned finger, sticks a pin in his shirt, and takes
his walks abroad. It is a stranger sight than even the painter Raffet
imagined in his picture of Napoleon’s midnight review, and it is, I
think, a much better thing to be at home and in bed, than wandering about
and peeping into the mysteries of this unholy London night life.
I know this book (to my sorrow) well; have conned its grim pages, and
studied its unwholesome lore, attentively. But I am not about to make
you a too-recondite participant in my knowledge. Were it not that
the appointed hours were meted out to me, and that from one of the
hours—midnight—the Haymarket is inseparable, the wicked street should
find no place here; but I must be faithful to my trust, and the bad
thoroughfare must be in part described.