Theatre. There I learn that "The Campden Wonder" has run its course. A
"horror" of the highest excellence has been on view for four weeks; and
I, who might have revelled in it, have made, _per viltate_, the Great
Refusal. I leave the italicized quality untranslated, because I am not
quite sure of the English equivalent which would exactly suit my case.
"Vileness" is a little crude. "Cowardice" is ignominious. "Poorness of
Spirit "is an Evangelical virtue. "Deficiency of Enterprise" and "an
impaired nervous system" would, at the best, be paraphrases rather than
translations. On the whole, I think the nearest approximation to the
facts of my case is to say that my refusal to profit by Mr. Masefield's
Horror was due to Decadence. _Fuimus._ There has been a period when
such a tale as the "Campden Wonder" would have attracted me with an
irresistible fascination and gripped me with a grasp of iron. But I am
not the man I was; and I am beginning to share the apprehensions of the
aged lady who told her doctor that she feared she was breaking up, for
she could no longer relish her Murders.
Youth, and early youth, is indeed the Golden Age of Horrors. To a
well-constituted child battle and murder and sudden death appeal far
more powerfully than any smooth tale of love. We snatch a fearful joy
from the lurid conversation of servants and neighbours. We gaze, with
a kind of panic-stricken rapture, at the stain on the floor which
marks the place where old Mr. Yellowboy was murdered for his money;
and run very fast, though with a backward gaze, past the tree on which
young Rantipole hanged himself on being cut off with a shilling by his
uncle Mr. Wormwood Scrubbs. In some privileged families the children
are not left to depend on circumjacent gossip, but are dogmatically
instructed in hereditary horrors. This happy lot was mine. My father's
uncle had been murdered by his valet; and from a very tender age I
could have pointed out the house where the murder took place--it went
cheap for a good many years afterwards,--and could have described the
murderer stripping himself naked before he performed the horrid act,
and the bath of blood in which the victim was found, and the devices
employed to create an impression of suicide instead of murder. I could
have repeated the magnificent peroration in which the murderer's
advocate exhorted the jury to spare his client's life (and which,
forty years later, was boldly plagiarized by Mr. Montagu Williams in
defending Dr. Lamson). The murderer, Benjamin Francis Courvoisier by
name, long occupied a conspicuous place in Madame Tussaud's admirable
collection. I can distinctly recall a kind of social eminence among
my schoolfellows which was conferred by the fact that I had this
relationship with the Chamber of Horrors; and I was conscious of a
painful descent when Courvoisier lapsed out of date and was boiled
down into Mr. Cobden or Cardinal Wiseman or some other more recent
celebrity. Then, again, all literature was full of Horrors; and, though
we should have been deprived of jam at tea if we had been caught
reading a Murder Trial in the _Daily Telegraph_, we were encouraged to
drink our fill of Shakespeare and Scott and Dickens and other great
masters of the Horrible. From De Quincey we learned that Murder may
be regarded as a Fine Art, and from an anonymous poet we acquired the
immortal verse which narrates the latter end of Mr. William Weare.
Shakespeare, as his French critics often remind us, reeks of blood and
slaughter; the word "Murder" and its derivatives occupy two columns of
Mrs. Cowden Clarke's closely-printed pages. Scott's absolute mastery
over his art is nowhere more strikingly exemplified than in his use of
murderous mechanisms. "The Heart of Midlothian" begins, continues, and
ends with murder. "Rob Roy" contains a murder-scene of lurid beauty.
The murderous attack on the bridegroom in "The Bride of Lammermoor"
is a haunting horror. Not all the Dryasdusts in England and Germany
combined will ever displace the tradition of Amy Robsart and the
concealed trap-door. Front-de-Boeuf's dying agony is to this hour
a glimpse of hell. Greatest of the great in humour, Dickens fell not
far behind the greatest when he turned his hand to Horrors. One sheds
few tears for Mr. Tulkinghorn, and we consign Jonas Chuzzlewit to the
gallows without a pang. But is there in fiction a more thrilling scene
than the arrest of the murderer on the moonlit tower-stair in "Barnaby
Rudge," or the grim escape of Sikes from the vengeance of the mob in
"Oliver Twist"? For deliberate, minute, and elaborated horror commend
me to the scene at the limekiln on the marshes where Pip awaits his
horrible fate at the hands of the crazy savage Dolge Orlick.
But it was not only the great masters of fiction who supplied us with
our luxuries of horror. The picture of the young man who had murdered
his brother, hanging on a gibbet in Blackgrove Wood, is painted with
a gruesome fidelity of detail which places Mrs. Sherwood high among
literary artists; and the incidents connected with the death of Old
Prue would entitle Mrs. Beecher Stowe to claim kinship with Zola.
It is curious to reflect that Miss Braddon, the most cheerful and
wholesome-minded of all living novelists, first won her fame by
imagining the murderous possibilities of a well, and established it
by that unrivalled mystification which confounds the murderer and
the murdered in "Henry Dunbar." Nor will the younger generation of
authoresses consent to be left behind in the race of Horrors. In old
days we were well satisfied if we duly worked up to our predestined
murder just before the end of the third volume. To-day Lady Ridley
gives us, in the first chapter of "A Daughter of Jael," one of the most
delicate and suggestive pieces of murder-writing which I, a confirmed
lover of the horrible, can call to mind.
To a soul early saturated with literary horrors the experience of life
is a curious translation of fancy into fact. Incidents which have
hitherto appeared visionary and imaginative now take the character
of substantial reality. We discover that horrors are not confined
to books or to a picturesque past, but are going on all round us;
and the discovery is fraught with an uneasy joy. When I recall the
illusions of my infancy and the facts which displaced them, I feel
that I fall miserably below the ideal of childhood presented in the
famous "Ode on the Intimations of Immortality." My "daily travel
further from the East" is marked by memories of dreadful deeds, and
the "vision splendid" which attends me on my way is a vivid succession
of peculiarly startling murders. In the dawn of consciousness these
visions have "something of celestial light" about them--they are
spiritual, impalpable, ideal. At length the youth perceives them die
away, "and melt into the light of common day"--very common day indeed,
the day of the Old Bailey and the _Police News_. By a curious chain
of coincidences, I was early made acquainted with the history of
that unfriendly Friend John Tawell, who murdered his sweetheart with
prussic acid, and was the first criminal to be arrested by means of
the electric telegraph. Heroic was the defence set up by Sir Fitzroy
Kelly, who tried to prove that an inordinate love of eating apples,
pips and all, accounted for the amount of prussic acid found in the
victim's body. Kelly lived to be Lord Chief Baron of the Exchequer, but
the professional nickname of "Apple-pip Kelly" stuck to him to the end.
I know the house where Tawell lived; I have sat under the apple-tree
of which his victim ate; and I have stood, the centre of a roaring
election crowd, on the exact spot outside the Court-house at Aylesbury
where he expiated his crime.
Tawell belongs, if I may so say, to a pre-natal impression. But,
as the 'sixties of the last century unroll their record, each page
displays its peculiar Horror. In 1860 Constance Kent cut her little
brother's throat, and buried him in the back-yard. Many a night have
I lain quaking in my bed, haunted by visions of sisters armed with
razors, and hurried graves in secret spots. Not much more cheering was
the nocturnal vision of Thomas Hopley, schoolmaster, of Eastbourne,
convicted in 1860 of flogging a half-witted pupil to death with a
skipping-rope, and afterwards covering the lacerated hands with white
kid gloves. I confess to a lasting distaste for private schools,
founded on this reminiscence. "The Flowery Land" is a title so prettily
fanciful, so suffused with the glamour of the East, that one would
scarcely expect to connect it with piracy, murder, and a five-fold
execution. Yet that is what it meant for youthful horror-mongers in
1864. In 1865 the plan which pleased my childish thought was that
pursued by Dr. Pritchard of Glasgow, who, while he was slowly poisoning
his wife and his mother-in-law, kept a diary of their sufferings and
recorded their deliverance from the burden of the flesh with pious
unction. Two years later a young ruffian, whose crime inspired Mr.
James Rhoades to write a passionate poem, cut a child into segments,
and recorded in his journal--"Saturday, August 24, 1867: Killed a young
girl; it was fine and hot."
One might linger long in these paths of dalliance, but space forbids;
and memory clears nine years at a bound. Most vivid, most fascinating,
most human, if such an epithet be permitted in such a context, was the
"Balham Mystery" of 1876. Still I can feel the cob bolting with me
across Tooting Common; still I lave my stiffness in a hot bath, and
tell the butler that it will do for a cold bath to-morrow; still I
plunge my carving-knife into the loin of lamb, and fill up the chinks
with that spinach and those eggs; still I quench my thirst with that
Burgundy, of _which no drop remained in the decanter_; and still I
wake up in the middle of the night to find myself dying in torture by
antimonial poisoning.
But we have supped full on horrors. Good night, and pleasant dreams.
XLII
SOCIAL CHANGES
I have been invited to make some comments on recent changes in society,
and I obey the call, though not without misgiving. "Society" in its
modern extension is so wide a subject that probably no one can survey
more than a limited portion of its area; and, if one generalizes
too freely from one's own experience, one is likely to provoke the
contradictions of critics who, surveying other portions, have been
impressed by different, and perhaps contrary, phenomena. All such
contradictions I discount in advance. After all, one can only describe
what one has seen, and my equipment for the task entrusted to me
consists of nothing more than a habit of observation and a retentive
memory.
I was brought up in that "sacred circle of the Great-Grandmotherhood"
of which Mr. Beresford-Hope made such excellent fun in "Strictly Tied
Up." As Mr. Squeers considered himself the "right shop for morals," so
the Whigs considered themselves the right shop for manners. What they
said and did every one ought to say and do, and from their judgment
there was no appeal. A social education of this kind leaves traces
which time is powerless to efface--"_Vieille école, bonne école,
begad!_" as Major Pendennis said. In twenty-five years' contact with a
more enlarged society, one has found a perpetual interest in watching
the departure, gradual but nearly universal, from the social traditions
of one's youth. The contrast between Now and Then is constantly
reasserting itself; and, if I note some instances of it just as they
occur to my mind, I shall be doing, at any rate in part, what has been
required of me.
I will take the most insignificant instances first--instances of
phrase and diction and pronunciation. I am just old enough to remember
a greatgrandmother who said that she "lay" at a place when she meant
that she had slept there, and spoke of "using the potticary" when we
should speak of sending for the doctor. Some relations of a later
generation said "ooman" for woman, and, when they were much obliged,
said they were much "obleeged." "Brarcelet" for bracelet and "di'monds"
for diamonds were common pronunciations. Tuesday was "Toosday," and
first was "fust." Chariot was "charr'ot," and Harriet "Harr'yet," and
I have even heard "Jeames" for James. "Goold" for gold and "yaller"
for yellow were common enough. Stirrups were always called "sturrups,"
and squirrels "squrrels," and wrapped was pronounced "wropped," and
tassels "tossels," and Gertrude "Jertrude." A lilac was always called
a "laylock," and a cucumber a "cowcumber." The stress was laid on the
second syllable of balcony, even as it is written in the "Diverting
History of John Gilpin":--
"At Edmonton his loving wife
From the balcony spied
Her tender husband, wondering much
To see how he did ride."
_N.B._--Cowper was a Whig.
Of course, these archaisms were already passing away when I began
to notice them, but some of them survive until this hour, and only
last winter, after an evening service in St. Paul's Cathedral, I was
delighted to hear a lady, admiring the illuminated dome, exclaim, "How
well the doom looks!"
Then, again, as regards the names of places. I cannot profess to
have heard "Lunnon," but I have heard the headquarters of my family
called "'Ooburn," and Rome "Roome," and Sèvres "Saver," and Falmouth
"Farmouth," and Penrith "Peerith," and Cirencester "Ciciter."
Nowadays it is as much as one can do to get a cabman to take one to
Berwick Street or Berkeley Square, unless one calls them Berwick or
Burkley. Gower Street and Pall Mall are pronounced as they are spelt;
and, if one wants a ticket for Derby, the booking-clerk obligingly
corrects one's request to "Durby."
And, as with pronunciation, so also with phrase and diction--
"Change and decay in all around I see."
When I was young the word "lunch," whether substantive or verb, was
regarded with a peculiar horror, and ranked with "'bus" in the lowest
depths of vulgarity. To "take" in the sense of eat or drink was another
abomination which lay too deep for words. "You take exercise or take
physic; nothing else," said Brummel to the lady who asked him to
take tea. "I beg your pardon, you also take a liberty," was the just
rejoinder.
I well remember that, when the journals of an Illustrious Person were
published and it appeared that a royal party had "taken luncheon" on a
hill, it was stoutly contended in Whig circles that the servants had
taken the luncheon to the hill where their masters ate it; and, when
a close examination of the text proved this gloss to be impossible,
it was decided that the original must have been written in German,
and that it had been translated by some one who did not know the
English idiom. To "ride," meaning to travel in a carriage, was, and
I hope still is, regarded as the peculiar property of my friend
Pennialinus;[12] and I remember the mild sensation caused in a Whig
house when a neighbour who had driven over to luncheon declined to wash
her hands on the ground that she had "ridden in gloves." The vehicle
which was invented by a Lord Chancellor and called after his name
was scrupulously pronounced so as to rhyme with groom, and any one
indiscreet enough to say that he had ridden in "the Row" would probably
have been asked if he had gone round by "the Zoo."
[12] A character invented by Mr. William Cory.
"Cherry pie and apple pie; all the rest are tarts," was an axiom
carefully instilled into the young gastronomer; while "to pass" the
mustard was bound in the same bundle of abominations as "I'll trouble
you," "May I assist you?" "Not any, thank you," and "A very small
piece."
Then, again, as to what may be called the Manners of Eating. A man
who put his elbows on the table would have been considered a Yahoo,
and he who should eat his asparagus with a knife and fork would have
been classed with the traditional collier who boiled his pineapple.
Fish-knives (like oxidized silver biscuit-boxes) were unknown and
undreamt-of horrors. To eat one's fish with two forks was the _cachet_
of a certain circle, and the manner of manipulating the stones of
a cherry pie was the _articulus stantis vel cadentis_. The little
daughter of a great Whig house, whose eating habits had been contracted
in the nursery, once asked her mother with wistful longing, "Mamma,
when shall I be old enough to eat bread and cheese with a knife, and
put the knife in my mouth?" and she was promptly informed that not
if she lived to attain the age of Methuselah would she be able to
acquire that "unchartered freedom." On the other hand, old gentlemen
of the very highest breeding used after dinner to rinse their mouths
in their finger-glasses, and thereby caused unspeakable qualms in
unaccustomed guests. In that respect at any rate, if in no other, the
most inveterate praiser of times past must admit that alteration has
not been deterioration.
Another marked change in society is the diminution of stateliness.
A really well-turned-out carriage, with a coachman in a wig and two
powdered footmen behind, is as rare an object in the Mall as a hansom
in Bermondsey or a tandem in Bethnal Green. Men go to the levée in
cabs or on motor-cars, and send their wives to the Palace Ball in
the products of the Coupé Company. The Dowager Duchess of Cleveland
(1792-1883) once told me that Lord Salisbury had no carriage. On my
expressing innocent surprise, she said, "I have been told that Lord
Salisbury goes about London in a brougham;" and her tone could not
have expressed a more lively horror if the vehicle had been a coster's
barrow. People of a less remote date than the Duchess's had become
inured to barouches for ladies and broughams for men, but a landau
was contemned under the derogatory nickname of a "demi-fortune," and
the spectacle of a great man scaling the dizzy heights of the 'bus or
plunging into the depths of the Twopenny Tube would have given rise to
lively comment.
A pillar of the Tory party, who died not twenty years ago, finding his
newly-married wife poking the fire, took the poker from her hands and
said with majestic pain, "My dear, will you kindly remember that you
are now a countess?" A Liberal statesman, still living, when he went to
Harrow for the first time, sailed up the Hill in the family coach, and
tradition does not report that his schoolfellows kicked him with any
special virulence.
I have known people who in travelling would take the whole of a
first-class carriage sooner than risk the intrusion of an unknown
fellow-passenger: their descendants would as likely as not reach their
destination on motor-cars, having pulled up at some wayside inn for
mutton chops and whisky-and-soda.
XLIII
SOCIAL GRACES
Though stateliness has palpably diminished, the beauty of life has as
palpably increased. In old days people loved, or professed to love,
fine pictures, and those who had them made much of them. But with
that one exception no one made any attempt to surround himself with
beautiful objects. People who happened to have fine furniture used
it because they had it; unless, indeed, the desire to keep pace with
the fashion induced them to part with Louis Seize or Chippendale and
replace it by the austere productions of Tottenham Court Road. The
idea of buying a chimneypiece or a cabinet or a bureau because it was
beautiful never crossed the ordinary mind. The finest old English china
was habitually used, and not seldom smashed, in the housekeeper's
room. It was the age of horse-hair and mahogany, and crimson flock
papers and green rep curtains. Whatever ornaments the house happened to
possess were clustered together on a round table in the middle of the
drawing-room. The style has been immortalized by the hand of a master:
"There were no skilfully contrasted shades of grey or green, no dado,
no distemper. The woodwork was grained and varnished after the manner
of the Philistines, the walls papered in dark crimson, with heavy
curtains of the same colour, and the sideboard, dinner-waggon, and row
of stiff chairs were all carved in the same massive and expensive style
of ugliness. The pictures were those familiar presentments of dirty
rabbits, fat white horses, bloated goddesses, and misshapen boors by
masters, who if younger than they assumed to be, must have been quite
old enough to know better." A man who hung a blue-and-white plate on a
wall, or put peacocks' feathers in a vase, would have been regarded as
insane; and I well remember the outcry of indignation and scorn when
a well-known collector of bric-a-brac had himself painted with a pet
teapot in his hands.
In this respect the change is complete. The owners of fine
picture-galleries no longer monopolize "art in the home." People who
cannot afford old masters invoke the genius of Mr. Mortimer Menpes.
If they have not inherited French furniture they buy it, or at least
imitations of the real, which are quite as beautiful. A sage-green
wash on the wall, and a white dado to the height of a man's shoulder,
cover a multitude of paper-hanger's sins. The commonest china is
pretty in form and colour. A couple of rugs from Liberty's replace the
hideous and costly carpets which lasted their unfortunate possessors
a lifetime; and, whereas in those distant days one never saw a
flower on a dinner-table, now "it is roses, roses all the way," or,
when it cannot be roses, it is daffodils and tulips and poppies and
chrysanthemums.
All this is the work of the despised æsthetes; but this generation
will probably see no meaning in the great drama of "Patience," and has
no conception of the tyrannous ugliness from which Bunthorne and his
friends delivered us. Their double achievement was to make ugliness
culpable, and to prove that beauty need not be expensive.
The same change may be observed in everything connected with Dinner. No
longer is the mind oppressed by those monstrous hecatombs under which,
as Bret Harte said, "the table groaned and even the sideboard sighed."
Frascatelli's monstrous bills of fare, with six "side dishes" and four
sweets, survive only as monuments of what our fathers could do. Racing
plate and "epergnes," with silver goddesses and sphinxes and rams'
horns, if not discreetly exchanged for prettier substitutes, hide their
diminished heads in pantries and safes. Instead of these horrors, we
have bright flowers and shaded lights; and a very few, perhaps too few,
dishes, which both look pretty and taste good. Here, again, expensive
ugliness has been routed, and inexpensive beauty enthroned in its place.
The same law, I believe, holds good about dress. With the mysteries
of woman's clothes I do not presume to meddle. I do not attempt to
estimate the relative cost of the satins and ermine and scarves which
Lawrence painted, and the "duck's-egg bolero" and "mauve hopsack"
which I have lately seen advertized in the list of a winter sale. But
about men's dress I feel more confident. The "rich cut Genoa velvet
waistcoat," the solemn frock coat, the satin stock, and the trousers
strapped under the wellingtons, were certainly hideous, and I shrewdly
suspect that they were vastly more expensive than the blue serge suits,
straw hats, brown boots, and sailor-knot ties in which the men of the
present day contrive to look smart without being stiff.
When Mr. Gladstone in old age revisited Oxford and lectured on Homer
to a great gathering of undergraduates, he was asked if he saw any
difference between his hearers and the men of his own time. He
responded briskly, "Yes, in their dress, an enormous difference. I am
told that I had among my audience some of the most highly-connected and
richest men in the university, and there wasn't one whom I couldn't
have dressed from top to toe for £5."
I have spoken so far of material beauty, and here the change in society
has been an inexpressible improvement; but, when I turn to beauty of
another kind, I cannot speak with equal certainty. Have our manners
improved? Beyond all question they have changed, but have they changed
for the better?
It may seem incongruous to cite Dr. Pusey as an authority on anything
more mundane than a hair-shirt, yet he was really a close observer
of social phenomena, as his famous sermon on Dives and Lazarus,
with its strictures on the modern Dives's dinner and Mrs. Dives's
ball-gown, sufficiently testifies. He was born a Bouverie in 1800,
when the Bouveries still were Whigs, and he testified in old age
to "the beauty of the refined worldly manners of the old school,"
which, as he insisted, were really Christian in their regard for the
feelings of others. "If in any case they became soulless as apart from
Christianity, the beautiful form was there into which real life might
re-enter."