There must be many people to whom the above heading will be at once
suggestive of the famous chapter upon Snakes in Iceland; but to the
philosophical mind—and it is marvellous how philosophical one can
become under adversity—there are certain compensating advantages in
the state of ruin, which, if not quite so intense as the Pleasures of
Hope, or Memory, or Imagination, do much to reconcile us to the change
in our circumstances. The first feeling is one of extreme relief that
the whole thing is over and we are out of suspense. The smash has
come; writs and summonses have blossomed into sheriffs’ officers, and
the auctioneer, whose fell and inexorable hammer has made short work
of our goods and chattels; our wealthy friends have said that they
knew it would come to this; and Jones, who used to look dinners and
five-pound notes at us whenever he met us formerly, now crosses over
to the opposite side of the street. The cheap lodgings in the shady
neighbourhood have become hard and ineradicable facts, and we can look
about us at last and endeavour to make the best we can of the position.
You now have a newly acquired sense of freedom and independence
to which perhaps you have long been a stranger. It is no longer a
question of whether you shall dine at the _Bristol_ or the _Blue
Posts_, but in all likelihood the choice will lie between the _diner du
jour_ in Leicester Square, a chop, or Duke Humphrey. Nor, if you be a
married man, need you now vex your soul with the proper precedence of a
brigadier-general, an Indian judge, a colonial bishop, and a resident
commissioner from the Punjab, as has happened in the days gone by when
you gave a dinner. Nor will the varying merits of asparagus soup and
turtle, salmon mayonnaise and aspic of lobster, truffled turkey and
oyster-stuffed capon, and all the rest of it, come between you and
your night’s rest. Again, your circumstances are such that you are no
longer harassed by the touters for subscriptions, male and female, and
you find it therefore needless to discuss the comparative merits of the
claims put forward by the friends of the Cannibal Islanders for French
mustard, and by the friends of the Mayor of Little Pedlington for a new
pump in the market-place in honour of that excellent cheesemonger and
municipal chief.
When you go to the theatre or opera, you are no longer compelled to
pay fifty or a hundred per cent. for the privilege of receiving your
ticket from an agent, and you go to the pit, where, if the orange peel
and ginger beer and nuts are a bit of a nuisance at first, you are
not long in getting used to it; and at anyrate you are permitted to
hear the piece without being bored by one of Smith’s ‘good stories’
during Patti’s chief _aria_, or while Irving is giving some fine piece
of declamation. You discover sources of gratuitous amusement which
indifference has hitherto hidden from you. That glorious rotunda in
Bloomsbury, the British Museum Reading-room—the mausoleum of the mind
of the world—gives you opportunities for study and recreation of which
you have never before thought of availing yourself; and the treasures
of South Kensington and the National Gallery, which you have hitherto
neglected as ‘slow’ and ‘bad form,’ are now a source of delight to
you. The only fault that you can now find with the latter institution
is, that it spoils you for all the modern galleries about Pall Mall
and Piccadilly. You have a feeling of proprietorship now in the royal
parks, which you never had when you sauntered in the Row, or attended
the meet of the Coaching Club at the Magazine, or dawdled about the
Mall in St James’s Park on a Drawing-room day. You don’t attend these
‘functions’ now, for, though they are open to you as to the rest of
the world, you feel yourself rather out of the race. But you often
enjoy the air in the higher ground of Hyde Park, which you will come to
consider as bracing as the Sussex Downs; nor are you to be persuaded
that Burnham Beeches has a much finer show of trees than Kensington
Gardens.
But the time when you do really and thoroughly enjoy the Pleasures
of Ruin is when that delectable moment comes—which it inevitably
will, sooner or later—when a temporary, or, let us hope, it may be a
permanent, change in your fortunes takes place. Your book has found
a publisher; your picture a buyer; some one pays up an old debt; or
an unknown relative mentions your name in his will. Whatever it may
be, the keen appreciation of the benefits we formerly enjoyed which
our vicissitudes have taught us, and the knowledge we have acquired
of the dingier side of nature, give a remarkable zest to our return
to a brighter life. And if a man has good health and good spirits, he
will find that it is as true that ‘hope springs eternal in the human
breast,’ as that when things are at their worst they mend; and if he
is of an extra-hopeful disposition, he will welcome the increased
depression of his fortunes as a sure forerunner of a change of luck.