should recommend you to avoid beefsteaks and boiled mutton. A little
turtle soup, some devilled whitebait, and a slice of a turkey _truffe_
would be the sort of dinner to suit you. If the insomnia is at all
urgent, I have found a light supper of pâté de foie gras work wonders."
Sir E. F. operated on a theological system. His discourse on the
Relations between Natural and Revealed Religion profoundly impressed
those who heard it for the first time, and his tractate on Medical
Missions in India ran into a third edition. In his waiting-room one
found, instead of last month's _Punch_ or the Christmas number of
_Madame_, devotional works inscribed "From his grateful patient,
the author." In his consulting-room a sacred picture of large
dimensions crowned the mantelpiece, and signed portraits of bishops
whom he had delivered from dyspepsia adorned the walls. Ritualistic
clergy frequented him in great numbers, and--what was better
still--recommended their congregations to the "beloved physician."
Ecclesiastically-minded laymen delighted in him, and came away with a
comfortable conviction, syllogistically arranged, that (1) one's first
duty is to maintain one's health; (2) whatever one likes is healthy;
therefore (3) one's first duty is to like exactly as one likes.
A water-drinking adherent of Mr. Gladstone once saw that eminent man
crowning a banquet of champagne with a glass of undeniable port. "Oh!
Mr. Gladstone," he exclaimed in the bitterness of his soul, "what would
Sir E. F. say if he could see you mixing your liquors?" The great
man's defence was ready to his hand: "Sir E. F. assures me that, if
I let fifteen minutes elapse between two kinds of wine, there is no
mixture."
Somehow these lively oracles of Sir E. F.'s, with which I was always
coming in contact, left on my mind a dim impression that he must have
been related to the doctor who attended Little Nell and prescribed the
remedies which the landlady had already applied: "Everybody said he
was a very shrewd doctor indeed, and knew perfectly well what people's
constitutions were, which there appears some reason to suppose he did."
VI
MOURNING
My infant mind was "suckled in a creed outworn," in the form of a
book called, by a strange misnomer, a "Book of Useful Knowledge." It
was there stated, if my memory serves me, that "the Chinese mourn in
yellow, but Kings and Cardinals mourn in purple." In what do modern
English people mourn? That is the subject of to-day's enquiry.
Lord Acton, in one of his most impressive passages, speaks of England
as living under "institutions which incorporate tradition and prolong
the reign of the dead." But the very notion of "prolonging the reign
of the dead" is an anachronism in an age which forgets its friends the
moment it has buried them. "Out of sight, out of mind" is an adage
which nowadays verifies itself with startling rapidity. Mourning is as
much out of date as Suttee; and, as to the Widow's Cap, the admirable
Signora Vesey Neroni in "Barchester Towers" was only a little in
advance of her age when she exclaimed, "The death of twenty husbands
should not make me undergo such a penance. It is as much a relic of
paganism as the sacrifice of a Hindoo woman at the burning of her
husband's body. If not so bloody, it is quite as barbarous and quite as
useless."
In days gone by, a death in a family extinguished all festivity.
Engagements were cancelled, social plans were laid aside, and the
mourners went into retreat for a twelvemonth. Men wore black trousers;
women swathed themselves in black crape. "Mourning Jewellery"--hideous
combinations of jet and bogwood--twinkled and jingled round the necks
of the bereaved, and widows wrote on letter-paper which was virtually
black, with a small white space in the middle of the sheet. Harry
Foker, we know, honoured his father's memory by having his brougham
painted black; and I have known a lady who, when she lost her husband,
had her boudoir lined with black velvet, after the fashion of Lord
Glenallan in "The Antiquary."
But nowadays people shrink (with amiable considerateness) from thus
inflicting their griefs on their friends; and if (as we must in charity
assume) they feel emotion, they studiously conceal it in their own
bosoms. The ball follows the funeral with a celerity and a frank
joyousness which suggest a Wake; and the keen pursuers of pleasure
protest, with quite a religious air, that for their own part they would
think it absolutely wicked to sorrow as those without hope. Weedless
widows, becomingly "gowned," as Ladies' Papers say, in pale grey or
black and white, sacrifice to propriety by forswearing the Opera or the
Racecourse for twelve months or so, but find a little fresh air on the
River or at Hurlingham absolutely necessary for health; and, if they
dine out quietly or even give a little dance at home, are careful to
protest that they have lost all pleasure in life, but must struggle
to keep up for the sake of the dear children. Surely, as Master
Shallow says, "good phrases are, and ever were, very commendable."
The old-fashioned manifestations of mourning were no doubt overdone,
but the modern disregard of the dead seems to me both heartless and
indecent.
The supreme exemplar of Mourning was, of course, Queen Victoria. During
her reign, and in her personal practice, the custom of Mourning reached
its highest point of persistence and solemnity. In 1844 Lady Lyttelton,
who was governess to the present King and his sister the Princess
Royal, wrote from Court, "We are such a 'boundless contiguity of shade'
just now." The immediate cause of that shade was the death of Prince
Albert's father; and although in Queen Victoria's life there was a fair
allowance of sunshine, still, as Ecclesiastes said, "the clouds return
after the rain"; and, in a family where cousinship is recognized to the
third and fourth generation, the "shade" of mourning must constantly
recur. The late Duke of Beaufort, head of the most numerous family in
the Peerage, always wore a black band round his white hat, because,
as he said, one of his cousins was always dead and he would not be
wanting in respect for the deceased; and, similarly, a Maid of Honour
once said to me, "I never see the Queen's jewels, because she is almost
always in mourning for some German prince or princess, and then she
only wears black ornaments." Of course, in a case where there was this
natural predisposition to mournful observance, the supreme loss of a
husband meant a final renunciation of the world and its gaieties. I
suppose it is no exaggeration to say that from her bereavement in 1861
to her death in 1901 Queen Victoria lived in unbroken communion with
the unseen but unforgotten. The necessary business of the State was
not, even for a week, laid aside; but pomps and ceremonies and public
appearances are profoundly distasteful to shattered nerves and broken
hearts. Yielding to the urgent advice of her Ministers, Queen Victoria
emerged from four years' seclusion to open the new Parliament in 1866;
and her reward was reaped in the following December, when a peculiarly
rancorous politician rebuked her at a great meeting of reformers in St.
James's Hall for a lack of popular sympathies. It was then that, on the
spur of the moment, John Bright, who himself had known so well what
bereavement meant, uttered his chivalrous defence of the absent and
lonely Sovereign:--
"I am not accustomed to stand up in defence of those who are
possessors of crowns. But I could not sit and hear that observation
without a sensation of wonder and of pain. I think there has been,
by many persons, a great injustice done to the Queen in reference to
her desolate and widowed position. And I venture to say this--that a
woman, be she the Queen of a great realm or be she the wife of one of
your labouring men, who can keep alive in her heart a great sorrow for
the lost object of her life and affection, is not at all likely to be
wanting in a great and generous sympathy with you."
Admirable and reverend as was this abiding sorrow, contemporary
observers felt that its outward manifestations were not always
harmonious. The Mausoleum at Frogmore is not a "poem in stone," and the
Monument of Gilt opposite the Albert Hall has supplied the frivolous
with an appropriate pun. Landseer, who, when once he forsook his stags
and deerhounds, was surely the most debased painter of a hideous age,
attained his worst in a picture of the Slopes at Windsor _circa_ 1862.
Under an inky sky, in the forefront of a sunless landscape, stands a
black pony, and on its back is a lady dressed in the deepest weeds,
with a black riding-skirt and a black bonnet. A retainer in subfusc
kilt holds the pony's head, a dingy terrier looks on with melancholy
eyes, and, in the distant background, two darkly-clad princesses shiver
on a garden-seat. The only spot of colour in the scene is a red
despatch-box, and the whole forms the highest tribute of English art to
a national disaster and a Queenly sorrow.
Black, and intensely black, were all the trappings of courtly
woe--black crape, black gloves, black feathers, black jewellery. The
State-robes were worn no longer; the State-coach stood unused in the
coach-house. The footmen wore black bands round their arms. It was
only by slow degrees, and on occasions of high and rare solemnity,
that white lace and modest plumes and diamonds and decorations were
permitted to enliven the firmament of courtly woe. But we of the
twentieth century live in an age of æsthetic revival, and, though
perhaps we do not mourn so heartily, we certainly mourn more prettily.
One lady at least there is who knows how to combine the sincerity of
sorrow with its becoming manifestation; and Queen Alexandra in mourning
garb is as delightful a vision as was Queen Alexandra in her clothing
of wrought gold, when she knelt before the altar of Westminster Abbey
and bowed her head to receive her diamond crown.
Queen Victoria's devotion to the memory of those whom she had lost
had one definite consequence which probably she little contemplated.
The annual service, conducted in the Royal Mausoleum at Frogmore on
the anniversary of the Prince Consort's death, accustomed English
people to the idea, which since the Reformation had become strangely
unfamiliar, of devotional commemoration of the Departed. To the
Queen's religious instincts, deeply tinged as they had been by Prince
Albert's Lutheranism, such commemorations were entirely natural; for
German Protestantism has always cherished a much livelier sense of
the relation between the living and the departed than was realized by
English Puritanism. The example set in high quarters quickly spread.
Memorial Services became an established form of English mourning.
Beginning with simple prayers and hymns, they gradually developed into
Memorial Eucharists. The splendid, wailing music of the _Dies Iræ_
was felt to be the Christian echo of the _Domine, Refugium_; and the
common instinct of mourning humanity found its appropriate expression
when, over the coffin of Prince Henry of Battenberg, the choir of St.
George's Chapel sang the Russian hymn of supplication, "Give rest, O
Christ, to Thy servant with Thy Saints."
VII
WILLS
If there is any one still left who knows his "Christian Year," he
will remember that Keble extolled "a sober standard of feeling" as a
special virtue of the English Prayer-book. I have always thought that
this "sober standard" is peculiarly well exemplified by the rubric
about Will-making in the Order for the Visitation of the Sick: "If the
sick person hath not before disposed of his goods, let him then be
admonished to make his Will and to declare his Debts, what he oweth and
what is owing unto him, for the better discharging of his conscience
and the quietness of his Executors. But men should often be put in
remembrance to take order for the settling of their temporal estates
whilst they are in health." There is something in these directions
which is curiously English and commonplace and unrhapsodical, and
therefore exactly congruous with the temper of a people who have never
set a high value on unpractical religions. To this general duty of
Will-making there may, of course, be exceptions. Thus Dr. Pusey in his
old age, when his family was reduced to one and he had no possessions
left except his books, said: "In a case like mine, the Law is the best
willmaker." A pietistic admirer, who had caught the words imperfectly,
in relating them substituted "Lord" for "Law"; but the substitution
did not really affect the sense. In cases where no great interests are
involved and the requirements of justice are not altogether clear, we
can wisely leave the eventual fate of our possessions to "God's scheme
for governing the Universe, by men miscalled Chance."
There is, I believe, a certain school of economic reformers who would
wholly abolish the prerogative of Will-making, and would decree that
whatever a man leaves behind him should pass automatically to his
children, or, failing them, to the State. On the social and fiscal
results of such a system I forbear to speculate; but, as a sincere
friend to Literature in all its branches, I would ask, if that were
law, what would become of the Novelists and the Playwrights? The law
of Stageland has been codified for us by the laborious care of Mr.
Jerome K. Jerome, and among its best-established principles seem to
be these: If a man dies without leaving a will, then all his property
goes to the nearest villain; but, if a man dies and leaves a will,
then all his property goes to whoever can get possession of that will.
Here are the raw materials of dramatic litigation enough to hold the
Stage for a century; and ill would it fare with the embarrassed
playwright if a mechanical process of law were substituted for the
strange possibilities of Will-making, with its startling caprices,
its incalculable miscarriages, and its eventual triumph of injured
innocence. Then again, as to Fiction. Foul fall the day when our
fiction-writers shall be unable to traffic any longer in testamentary
mystification. How would their predecessors have fared if they had
laboured under such a disability? I am by nature too cautious to
"intromit with" the mysteries of Scotch law, and in the romances of
the beloved Sir Walter the complications of Entail and of Will-making
are curiously intertwined. Certainly it was under the provisions of an
entail that Harry Bertram recovered the estates of Ellangowan, and I am
inclined to think that it was an Entail which prompted the Countess of
Glenallan to her hideous crime; but it was by will that Miss Margaret
Bertram devised the lands of Singleside, and it was under old Sir
Hildebrand's will that Francis Osbaldistone succeeded to Osbaldistone
Hall.
Even greater are the obligations of our English novelists to the
testamentary law. Miss Edgeworth made admirable use of it in "Almeria."
Had Englishmen no power of making wills, the "wicked Lord Hertford"
could not have executed the notorious instrument which gave such
unbounded delight to the scandalmongers of 1842-1843, and then Lord
Beaconsfield could not have drawn his Hogarth-like picture of the
reading of Lord Monmouth's will in "Coningsby." Thackeray did not
traffic very much in wills, though, to be sure, Jos Sedley left £1000
to Becky Sharp, and the opportune discovery of Lord Ringwood's will in
the pocket of his travelling-carriage simplified Philip's career. The
insolvent swindler Dr. Firmin, who had robbed his son and absconded
to America, left his will "in the tortoiseshell secretaire in the
consulting-room, under the picture of Abraham offering up Isaac."
Dickens was a great Will-maker. We know that if Dick Swiveller had
been a steadier youth he would have inherited more than £150 a year
from his aunt Rebecca. That loyal-hearted lover Mr. Barkis, in spite
of all rebuffs, made the obdurate Peggotty his residuary legatee. Mr.
Finching left "a beautiful will," and Madeline Bray was the subject
of a very complicated one. Mr. Dorrit's unexpected fortune accrued
to him, I think, as Heir-at-law; but the litigation in Jarndyce _v._
Jarndyce arose, as all the world knows, out of a disputed will; and the
Thellusson Will Case, on which Dickens relied, in later years supplied
Henry Kingsley with the plot of "Reginald Hetherege." Perhaps Dickens's
best piece of Will-making is given in the case of Mr. Spenlow, who,
being a practitioner in Doctors' Commons, spoke about his own will with
"a serenity, a tranquillity, a calm sunset air" which quite affected
David Copperfield; and then shattered all poor David's hopes by dying
intestate.
Anthony Trollope made good use of a Will and a Codicil in the plot of
"Orley Farm." George Eliot, whose disagreeable characters always seem a
good deal nearer life than her heroes and heroines, made Mr. Casaubon
behave very characteristically in the odious will by which he tried to
prevent Dorothea from marrying Will Ladislaw; and her picture of the
disappointment which fell upon the company when Peter Featherstone's
will was read is perhaps her best achievement in the way of humour.
"Nobody present had a farthing; but Mr. Trumbull had the gold-headed
cane," which, considered as an acknowledgment of his professional
services to the deceased, he was ungrateful enough to call "farcical."
The Law of Settlement and Entail is no part of our present study; but
it may be remarked in passing that the legal Opinion on the Base Fee
by which Harold Transome in "Felix Holt" held the Transome Estates was
written, at George Eliot's request, by a young Chancery Barrister, who
still survives, a brilliant figure in the world of Letters.
This is enough, and perhaps more than enough, about Wills in fiction;
but Wills in real life are fully as interesting. The late Sir Charles
Butt, who presided over the Divorce Court and the Probate Court, once
told me that, though the aspect of human nature which is exhibited in
Divorce is not ideally beautiful, it is far less repulsive than that
which is disclosed by Probate. None of the stories which one has read
about forged wills, forced wills, wills made under pressure, wills made
under misrepresentation, are too strange to be true. A century ago the
daughter of a great landowner in the North of England succeeded to his
wealth under circumstances which, to put it mildly, caused surprise. In
later life she had a public quarrel with a high-born but intemperate
dame, who concluded the colloquy by observing, with mordant emphasis,
"Well, at any rate I didn't hold my dying father's hand to make him
sign a will he never saw, and then murder the Butler to prevent his
telling." "Ouida," or Miss Braddon, or some other novelist of High Life
might, I think, make something of this scene.
Spiteful Wills--wills which, by rehearsing and revoking previous
bequests, mortify the survivors when the testator is no longer in
a position to do so _viva voce_--form a very curious branch of the
subject. Lord Kew was a very wealthy peer of strict principles and
peculiarly acrid temper, and, having no wife or children to annoy, he
"took it out," as the saying is, of his brothers, nephews, and other
expectant kinsfolk. One gem from his collection I recall, in some such
words as these: "By a previous will I had left £50,000 to my brother
John; but, as he has sent his son to Oxford instead of Cambridge,
contrary to my expressed wish, I reduce the legacy to £500." May the
earth lie light on that benevolent old despot! Eccentricities of
bequest, again, might make a pleasant chapter. The present writer,
though not yet in tottering age, can recall an annuitant whose claim to
£20 a year was founded (in part) on the skill with which he had tied
his master's pigtail, and that master died in 1830. The proverbial
longevity of annuitants was illustrated in the case of a grey parrot,
for whose maintenance his departed mistress left £10 a year. The bird
was not very young when the annuity began to accrue; and, as years went
on and friends dropped off, he began to feel the loneliness of his
lot. With a tenderness of heart which did them infinite credit, the
good couple to whose care the bird had been left imported a companion
exactly like himself to cheer his solitude. Before long one of the
parrots died, and the mourners remarked that these younger birds had
not half the constitution of the older generation. So, as long as they
lived, the parrot lived, and the pension lived also.
Let my closing word on Wills bear the authority of a great name. To a
retailer of news who informed him that Lord Omnium, recently deceased,
had left a large sum of money to charities, Mr. Gladstone replied with
characteristic emphasis: "Thank him for nothing! He was obliged to
leave it. He couldn't carry it with him."
VIII
PENSIONS
"There is no living in this country under twenty thousand a year--not
that that suffices, but it entitles one to ask a pension for two or
three lives." This was the verdict of Horace Walpole, who, as Sir
George Trevelyan antithetically says, "lived in the country and on
the country during more than half a century, doing for the country
less than half a day's work in half a year." Talleyrand said that no
one could conceive how enjoyable a thing existence was capable of
being who had not belonged to the _Ancienne Noblesse_ of France before
the Revolution; but really the younger son of an important Minister,
General, Courtier, or Prelate under our English Georges had a good
deal to be thankful for. It is pleasant to note the innocent candour
with which, in Walpole's manly declaration, one enormity is made to
justify another. A father who held great office in Church or State or
Law gave, as a matter of course, all his most desirable preferments to
his sons. These preferments enabled the sons to live in opulence at the
public charge, their duties being performed by deputy. The Clerk of
the Rolls and the Clerk of the Hanaper had no personal contact with the
mysterious articles to which they are attached. The Clerk of the Irons,
the Surveyor of the Meltings, and the Accountant of Slops lived far
remote from such "low-thoughtéd cares." The writer of this book deduces
his insignificant being from a gentleman who divided with a brother
the lucrative sinecure of Scavenger of Dublin, though neither ever
set foot in that fragrant city. A nephew of Lord-Chancellor Thurlow
(who survived till 1874) drew pensions for abolished offices to the
amount of £11,000 a year; and a son of Archbishop Moore was Principal
Registrar of the Prerogative Court of Canterbury from his boyhood till
the abolition of his Court in 1858, when he was pensioned off with
£10,000 a year.