(DATED FROM ADELAIDE.)
Imagine my wonder--Uncle Jack has just been with me, and--but hear the
dialogue.
UNCLE JACK.--So you are positively going back to that smoky,
fusty, old England, just when you are on your high road to a plumb. A
plumb, sir, at least! They all say there is not a more rising young man
in the colony. I think Bullion would take you into partnership. What
are you in such a hurry for?
PISISTRATUS.--To see my father, and mother, and Uncle Roland,
and----(_was about to name some one else, but stops_.)
You see, my dear uncle, I came out solely with the idea of repairing my
father's losses, in that unfortunate speculation of _The Capitalist_.
UNCLE JACK (_coughs and ejaculates_)--That villain Peck!
PISISTRATUS.--And to have a few thousands to invest in poor
Roland's acres. The object is achieved: why should I stay?
UNCLE JACK.--A few paltry thousands, when in twenty years
more, at the farthest, you would wallow in gold!
PISISTRATUS.--A man learns in the Bush how happy life can be
with plenty of employment, and very little money. I shall practise that
lesson in England.
UNCLE JACK.--Your mind's made up?
PISISTRATUS.--And my place in the chip taken.
UNCLE JACK.--Then there's no more to be said. (_Hums, haws,
and examines his nails--filbert nails, not a speck on them._) Then
suddenly, and jerking up his head. "That '_Capitalist!_' it has been on
my conscience, nephew, ever since; and, somehow or other, since I have
abandoned the cause of my fellow-creatures, I think I have cared more
for my relations."
PISISTRATUS, (_smiling, as he remembers his father's shrewd
predictions thereon_.)--Naturally, my dear uncle: any child who has
thrown a stone into a pond knows that a circle disappears as it widens.
UNCLE JACK.--Very true--I shall make a note of that,
applicable to my next speech, in defence of what they call the
"land monopoly." Thank you--stone--circle! (_Jots down notes in his
pocket-book._) But, to return to the point: I am well off now--I have
neither wife nor child; and I feel that I ought to bear my share in
your father's loss: it was our joint speculation. And your father,
good dear Austin, paid my debts into the bargain. And how cheering the
punch was that night, when your mother wanted to scold poor Jack! And
the £300 Austin lent me when I left him: nephew, that was the remaking
of me--the acorn of the oak I have transplanted. So here they are,
(added Uncle Jack with a heroical effort--and he extracted from the
pocket-book, bills for a sum between three and four thousand pounds.)
There, it is done--and I shall sleep better for it! _(With that Uncle
Jack got up, and bolted out of the room.)_
Ought I to take the money? Why, I think yes!--it is but fair. Jack must
be really rich, and can well spare the money; besides, if he wants it
again, I know my father will let him have it. And, indeed, Jack caused
the loss of the whole sum lost on _The Capitalist, &c._; and this is
not quite the half of what my father paid away. But is it not fine in
Uncle Jack! Well, my father was quite right in his milder estimate of
Jack's scalene conformation, and it is hard to judge of a man when he
is needy and down in the world. When one grafts one's ideas on one's
neighbour's money, they are certainly not so grand as when they spring
from one's own.
UNCLE JACK, (_popping his head into the room_.)--And you see,
you can double that money if you will just leave it in my hands for a
couple of years,--you have no notion what I shall make of the Tibbet's
Wheal! Did I tell you?--the German was quite right,--I have been
offered already seven times the sum which I gave for the land. But I am
now looking out for a Company: let me put you down for shares to the
amount at least of those trumpery bills. Cent per cent,--I guarantee
cent per cent! (_And Uncle Jack stretches out those famous smooth hands
of his, with a tremulous motion of the ten eloquent fingers._)
PISISTRATUS.--Ah, my dear uncle, if you repent----
UNCLE JACK.--Repent! when I offer you cent per cent, on my
personal guarantee!
PISISTRATUS, (_carefully putting the bills into his breast
coat-pocket_.) Then, if you don't repent, my dear uncle, allow me
to shake you by the hand, and say that I will not consent to lessen
my esteem and admiration for the high principle which prompts this
restitution, by confounding it with trading associations of loans,
interests, and copper mines. And, you see, since this sum is paid to my
father, I have no right to invest it without his permission.
UNCLE JACK, (_with emotion_.)--"Esteem, admiration, high
principle!"--these are pleasant words, from you, nephew.--(_Then
shaking his head and smiling._) You sly dog! you are quite right: get
the bills cashed at once. And hark ye, sir, just keep out of my way,
will you?--and don't let me coax you out of a farthing! (_Uncle Jack
slams the door, and rushes out. Pisistratus draws the bills warily
from his pocket, half-suspecting they must already have turned into
withered leaves, like fairy money; slowly convinces himself that the
bills are good bills, and by lively gestures testifies his delight and
astonishment._) SCENE CHANGES.
AUTOBIOGRAPHY--CHATEAUBRIAND'S MEMOIRS.[3]
Autobiography, when skilfully and judiciously done, is one of the
most delightful species of composition of which literature can boast.
There is a strong desire in every intelligent and well-informed mind
to be made acquainted with the private thoughts, and secret motives
of action, of those who have filled the world with their renown. We
long to learn their early history, to be made acquainted with their
first aspirations--to learn how they became so great as they afterwards
turned out. Perhaps literature has sustained no greater loss than that
of the memoirs which Hannibal wrote of his life and campaigns. From
the few fragments of his sayings which Roman admiration or terror has
preserved, his reach of thought and statesmanlike sagacity would appear
to have been equal to his military talents. Cæsar's _Commentaries_
have always been admired; but there is some doubts whether they really
were written by the dictator; and, supposing they were, they relate
almost entirely to military movements and public events, without giving
much insight into private character. It is that which we desire in
autobiography: we hope to find in it a window by which we may look into
a great man's mind. Plutarch's _Lives_ owe their vast and enduring
popularity to the insight into private character which the innumerable
anecdotes he has collected, of the heroes and statesmen of antiquity,
afford.
Gibbon's autobiography is the most perfect account of an eminent man's
life, from his own hand, which exists in any language. Independent
of the interest which naturally belongs to it as the record of the
studies, and the picture of the growth of the mind of the greatest
historian of modern times, it possesses a peculiar charm from the
simplicity with which it is written, and the judgment it displays,
conspicuous alike in what is revealed and what is withheld in the
narrative. It steers the middle channel so difficult to find, so
invaluable when found, between ridiculous vanity on the one side, and
affected modesty on the other. We see, from many passages in it, that
the author was fully aware of the vast contribution he had made to
literature, and the firm basis on which he had built his colossal fame.
But he had good sense enough to see, that those great qualities were
never so likely to impress the reader as when only cautiously alluded
to by the author. He knew that vanity and ostentation never fall to
make the character in which they predominate ridiculous--if excessive,
contemptible; and that, although the world would thankfully receive
all the details, how minute soever, connected with his immortal work,
they would not take off his hands any symptom of his own entertaining
the opinion of it which all others have formed. It is the consummate
judgment with which Gibbon has given enough of the details connected
with the preparation of his works to be interesting, and not enough to
be ridiculous, which constitutes the great charm, and has occasioned
the marked success, of his autobiography. There are few passages in
the English language so popular as the well-known ones in which he has
recounted the first conception, and final completion of his history,
which, as models of the kind, as well as passages of exquisite beauty,
we cannot refuse ourselves the pleasure of transcribing, the more
especially as they will set off, by way of contrast, the faults in some
parallel passages attempted by Chateaubriand and Lamartine.
"At the distance of twenty-five years, I can neither forget nor
express the strong emotions which agitated my mind as I first
approached and entered the Eternal City. After a sleepless
night, I trod with a lofty step the ruins of the Forum. Each
memorable spot--where Romulus stood, or Tully spoke, or Cæsar
fell--was at once present to my eyes; and several days of
intoxication were lost, or enjoyed, before I could descend to
a cool and minute investigation. It was at Rome, on the 15th
October 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol,
while the barefooted friars were singing vespers in the Temple
of Jupiter, that the idea of writing this Decline and Fall of
the city first started to my mind. But my original plan was
circumscribed to the decay of the city, rather than of the
empire; and though my reading and reflections began to point
towards that object, some years elapsed, and several avocations
intervened, before I was seriously engaged in the execution of
that laborious work."--(_Life_, p. 198, 8vo edition.)
Again, the well-known description of the conclusion of his labours:--
"I have presumed to mark the moment of conception: I shall now
commemorate the hour of my final deliverance. It was on the
day, or rather night, of the 27th June 1787, between the hours
of eleven and twelve, that I wrote the last lines of the last
page, in a summer-house in my garden. After laying down my
pen, I took several turns in a _berceau_, or covered walk of
acacias, which commands a prospect of the country, the lake,
and mountains. The air was temperate, the sky was serene, the
silver orb of the moon was reflected from the waters, and all
nature was silent. I will not dissemble the first emotions of
joy on recovery of my freedom, and perhaps the establishment of
my fame. But my pride was soon humbled, and a sober melancholy
was spread over my mind, by the idea that I had taken an
everlasting leave of an old and agreeable companion; and that,
whatever might be the future fate of my History, the life of
the historian must be short and precarious."--(_Life_, p. 255,
8vo edition.)
Hume's account of his own life is a model of perspicuity, modesty,
and good sense; but it is so brief that it scarcely can be called a
biography. It is not fifty pages long. The wary Scotch author was well
aware how vanity in such compositions defeats its own object: he had
too much good sense to let it appear in his pages. Perhaps, however,
the existence of such a feeling in the recesses of his breast may
be detected in the prominent manner in which he brings forward the
discouragement he experienced when the first volume of his history was
published, and the extremely limited sale it met with for some time
after its first appearance. He knew well how these humble beginnings
would be contrasted with its subsequent triumphant success. Amidst
his many great and good qualities, there is none for which Sir Walter
Scott was more admirable than the unaffected simplicity and good sense
of his character, which led him to continue through life utterly
unspotted by vanity, and unchanged by an amount of adulation from the
most fascinating quarters, which would probably have turned the head
of any other man. Among the many causes of regret which the world has
for the catastrophes which overshadowed his latter years, it is not the
least that it prevented the completion of that autobiography with which
Mr Lockhart has commenced his _Life_. His simplicity of character,
and the vast number of eminent men with whom he was intimate, as well
as the merit of that fragment itself, leave no room for doubt that he
would have made a most charming memoir, if he had lived to complete
it. This observation does not detract in the slightest degree from
the credit justly due to Mr Lockhart, for his admirable _Life_ of
his illustrious father-in-law: on the contrary, it forms its highest
encomium. The charm of that work is mainly owing to its being so embued
with the spirit of the subject, that it may almost be regarded as an
autobiography.
Continental writers of note have, more than English ones,
fallen into that error which is of all others the most fatal in
autobiography--inordinate vanity. At the head of all the delinquents
of this class we must place Rousseau, whose celebrated _Confessions_
contain a revelation of folly so extreme, vanity so excessive, and
baseness so disgraceful, that it would pass for incredible if not
proved by the book itself, which is to be found in every library. Not
content with affirming, when past fifty, that there was no woman of
fashion of whom he might not have made the conquest if he chose to
set about it,[4] he thought fit to entertain the world with all the
private details of his life, which the greater prudence of his most
indiscreet biographers would have consigned to oblivion. No one who
wishes to discredit the Genevese philosopher, need seek in the works
of others for the grounds of doing so. Enough is to be found in his
own to consign him to eternal execration and contempt. He has told us
equally in detail, and with the same air of infantine simplicity, how
he committed a theft when in service as a lackey, and permitted an
innocent girl, his fellow-servant, to bear the penalty of it; how he
alternately drank the wine in his master's cellars, and made love to
his wife; how he corrupted one female benefactress who had sheltered
him in extremity of want, and afterwards made a boast of her disgrace;
and abandoned a male benefactor who fell down in a fit of apoplexy on
the streets of Lyons, and left him lying on the pavement, deserted
by the only friend whom he had in the world. The author of so many
eloquent declamations against mothers neglecting their children, on
his own admission, when in easy circumstances, and impelled by no
necessity, consigned _five_ of his natural children to a foundling
hospital, with such precautions against their being known that he never
did or could hear of them again! Such was his vanity, that he thought
the world would gladly feed on the crumbs of this sort which fell from
the table of the man rich in genius. His grand theory was that the
human mind is born innocent, with dispositions only to good, and that
all the evils of society arise from the follies of education or the
oppression of government. Judging from the picture he has presented
of himself, albeit debased by no education but what he himself had
afforded, we should say his disposition was more corrupt than has even
been imagined by the most dark-minded and bigoted Calvinist that ever
existed.
Alfieri was probably as vain in reality as Rousseau; but he knew better
how to conceal it. He had not the folly of supposing that he could
entertain women by the boastful detail of his conquests over them. He
judged wisely, and more like a man who had met with _bonnes fortunes_,
that he would attain more effectually the object of interesting their
feelings, by painting their conquests over him. He has done this so
fully, so sincerely, and with such eloquence, that he has made one
of the most powerful pieces of biography in any language. Its charm
consists in the picture he has drawn, with equal truth and art, of
a man of the most impetuous and ardent temperament, alternately
impelled by the strongest passions which can agitate the breast--love
and ambition. Born of a noble family, inheriting a great fortune, he
exhibited an uncommon combination of patrician tastes and feelings
with republican principles and aspirations. He was a democrat because
he knew the great by whom he was surrounded, and did not know the
humble who were removed to a distance. He said this himself, after
witnessing at Paris the horrors of the 10th August.--"Je connais bien
les grands, _mais je ne connais pas les petits_." He drew the vices
of the former from observation, he painted the virtues of the latter
from imagination. Hence the absurdity and unnatural character of many
of his dramas, which, to the inhabitant of our free country, who is
familiar with the real working of popular institutions, renders them,
despite their genius, quite ridiculous. But, in the delineation of
what passed in his own breast, he is open to no such reproach. His
picture of his own feelings is as forcible and dramatic as that of any
he has drawn in his tragedies; and it is far more truthful, for it is
taken from nature, not an imaginary world of his own creation, having
little resemblance to that we see around us. His character and life
were singularly calculated to make such a narrative interesting, for
never was one more completely tossed about by vehement passions, and
abounding with melodramatic incidents. Alternately dreaming over the
most passionate attachments, and labouring of his own accord at Dante
fourteen hours a-day; at one time making love to an English nobleman's
wife, and fighting him in the Park, at another driving through
France with fourteen blood horses in harness; now stealing from the
Pretender his queen, now striving to emulate Sophocles in the energy
of his picture of the passions, he was himself a living example of the
intensity of those feelings which he has so powerfully portrayed in his
dramas. It is this variety, joined to the simplicity and candour of
the confessions, which constitutes the charm of this very remarkable
autobiography. It could have been written by no one but himself; for
an ordinary biographer would only have described the incidents of his
life, none else could have painted the vehement passions, the ardent
aspirations, from which they sprang.
From the sketches of Goethe's life which have been preserved, it is
evident that, though probably not less vain than the French philosopher
or the Italian poet, his vanity took a different direction from either
of theirs. He was neither vain of his turpitudes, like Rousseau, nor
of his passions, like Alfieri. His self-love was of a more domestic
kind; it partook more of the home-scenes of the Fatherland. No one
will question the depth of Goethe's knowledge of the heart, or the
sagacity of the light which his genius has thrown on the most profound
feelings of human nature. But his private life partook of the domestic
affections and unobtrusive rest in which it was passed, exempt alike
from the grinding poverty which too often impelled the Genevese
watchmaker's son into disgraceful actions, or the vehement passions
which drove the Italian nobleman into brilliant crimes. Hence his
biography exhibits an extraordinary mixture of lofty feelings with
puerile simplicity, of depth of views with childishness, of divine
philosophy with homely inclinations. Amidst all his enthusiasm and
effusions of sentiment, he was as much under the influence as any man
of creature comforts; and never hesitated to leave the most lofty
efforts of the muse, to participate in the substantial advantages
of rich preserves or sweet cakes. This singular mixture arose in a
great measure from the habits of his life, and the limited circle
by which, during the greater part of it, he was surrounded. Living
with a few friends in the quiet seclusion of a small German town, the
object of almost superstitious admiration to a few females by whom he
was surrounded, he became at once a little god of his own and their
idolatry, and warmly inclined, like monks all over the world, to the
innocent but not very elevating pleasures of breakfast and dinner.
Mahomet said that he experienced more difficulty in persuading his four
wives of his divine mission, than all the rest of the world besides;
and this, says Gibbon, was not surprising, for they knew best his
weaknesses as a man. Goethe thought, on the same principle, his fame
was secure, when he was worshipped as a god by his female coterie. He
had the highest opinion of his own powers, and of the lofty mission
on which he was sent to mankind; but his self-love was less offensive
than that of Rousseau, because it was more unobtrusive. It was allied
rather to pride than vanity--and though pride may often be hateful, it
is never contemptible.
From the _Life of Lord Byron_ which Moore has published, it may be
inferred that the latter acted wisely in consigning the original
manuscript of the noble poet's autobiography to the flames. Assuming
that a considerable part of that biography is taken from what the noble
bard had left of himself, it is evident that a more complete detail of
his feelings and motives of action would have done anything rather than
have added to his reputation. In fact, Moore's _Life_ has done more
than anything else to lower it. The poetical biographer had thought and
sung so much of the passions, that he had forgot in what light they
are viewed by the generality of men; he was so deeply imbued with the
spirit of his hero, that he had come to regard his errors and vices as
not the least interesting part of his life. That they may be so to that
class of readers, unhappily too extensive, who are engaged in similar
pursuits, is probably true; but how small a portion do these constitute
of the human race, and how weak and inaudible is their applause when
compared to the voice of ages! What has become of the innumerable
licentious works whose existence in antiquity has become known from
the specimens disinterred in the ruins of Herculaneum? Is there one of
them which has taken its place beside the _Lives of Plutarch_? Whatever
is fetid, however much prized at the moment, is speedily sunk in the
waves of time. Nothing permanently floats down its stream but what is
buoyant from its elevating tendency.
Boswell's _Life of Johnson_ is so replete with the sayings and thoughts
of the intellectual giant, whom it was so much his object to elevate,
even above his natural Patagonian stature, that it may be regarded
as a sort of autobiography, dictated by the sage in his moments of
_abandon_ to his devout worshipper. It is hardly going too far to say
that it is the most popular book in the English language. Johnson's
reputation now mainly rests on that biography. No one now reads the
_Rambler_ or the _Idler_--few the _Lives of the Poets_, interesting as
they are, and admirable as are the criticisms on our greatest authors
which they contain. But Boswell's _Life of Johnson_ is in everybody's
hands; you will hear the pithy sayings, the admirable reflections,
the sagacious remarks it contains, from one end of the world to the
other. The secret of this astonishing success is to be found in the
caustic tone, sententious brevity, and sterling good sense of Johnson,
and the inimitable accuracy, faithful memory, and almost infantine
simplicity of his biographer. From the unbounded admiration with which
he was inspired for the sage, and the faithful memory with which he
was gifted, he was enabled to commit to paper, almost as they were
delivered, those admirable sayings which have ever since been the
delight and admiration of the world. We almost live with the members
of the Literary Club; we hear their divers sentiments, and can almost
conceive their tones of voice. We see the gigantic form of the sage
towering above his intellectual compeers. Burke said that Johnson was
greater in conversation than writing, and greater in Boswell than
either; and it is easy to conceive that this must have been the case.
The _Life_ contains all the admirable sayings, _verbatim_ as they were
delivered, and without the asperity of tone and manner which formed
so great a blot in the original deliverer. Johnson's sayings were of
a kind which were susceptible of being accurately transferred, and
with full effect, to paper, because they were almost all reflections
on morals, men, or manners, which are of universal application, and
come home to the senses of mankind in every age. In this respect they
were much more likely to produce an impression in biography than the
conversation of Sir Walter Scott, which, however charming to those who
heard it, consisted chiefly of anecdotes and stories, great part of the
charm of which consisted in the mode of telling and expression of the
countenance, which, of course, could not be transferred to paper.
But it is not every eminent man who is so fortunate as to find a
biographer like Boswell, who, totally forgetful of self, recorded for
posterity with inimitable fidelity all the sayings of his hero. Nor
is it many men who would bear so faithful and searching an exposure.
Johnson, like every other man, had his failings; but they were those of
prejudice or manner, rather than morals or conduct. We wish we could
say that every other eminent literary man was equally immaculate, or
that an entire disclosure of character would in every case reveal
no more weaknesses or failings than have been brought to light by
Boswell's faithful chronicle. We know that every one is liable to err,
and that no man is a hero to his valet-de-chambre. But being aware of
all this, we were not prepared for the immense mass of weaknesses,
follies, and errors, which have been brought to light by the indiscreet
zeal of biographers, in the character of many of our ablest literary,
poetical, and philosophical characters. Certainly, if we look at the
details of their private lives, these men of literary celebrity have
had little title to set up as the instructors, or to call themselves
the benefactors of mankind. From the days of Milton, whose divine
genius was so deeply tarnished by the asperity of his feelings, and
the unpardonable license in controversy which he permitted to his
tongue, to those of Lord Byron, who scandalised his country and the
world by the undisguised profligacy of his private life, the biography
of literary men, with a few brilliant exceptions,--in the foremost
of which we must place Sir Walter Scott--consists in great part of a
series of follies, weaknesses, or faults, which it would be well for
their memory could they be buried in oblivion. We will not say that the
labours of their biographers have been the _Massacre of the Innocents_,
for truly there were very few innocents to massacre; but we will say
that they have, in general, done more to degrade those they intended
to elevate, than the envenomed hostility of their worst enemies. We
forbear to mention names, which might give pain to many respectable
persons still alive. The persons alluded to, and the truth of the
observation, will be at once understood and admitted by every person
acquainted with the literary history of France and England during the
last century.
Vanity and jealousy--vanity of themselves, jealousy of others--are
the great failings which have hitherto tarnished the character and
disfigured the biography of literary men. We fear it is destined
to continue the same to the end of the world. The qualities which
contribute to their greatness, which occasion their usefulness, which
insure their fame, are closely allied to failings which too often
disfigure their private lives, and form a blot on their memory,
when indiscreetly revealed in biography, either by themselves or
others. Genius is almost invariably united to susceptibility; and
this temperament is unhappily too apt to run into irritability. No
one can read D'Israeli's essay on _The Literary Character_, the most
admirable of his many admirable works, without being convinced of
that. Celebrity of any sort is the natural parent of vanity, and this
weakness is in a peculiar manner fostered in poets and romance writers,
because their writings interest so warmly the fair, who form the great
dispensers of general fame, and convey it in the most flattering form
to the author. It would perhaps be unjust to women to say that poets
and novelists share in their weaknesses; but it is certain that their
disposition is, in general, essentially feminine, and that, as they
attract the admiration of the other sex more strongly than any other
class of writers, so they are liable in a peculiar degree to the
failings, as well as distinguished by the excellencies, by which their
female admirers are characterised. We may regret that it is so: we may
lament that we cannot find poets and romancers, who to the genius of
Byron, or the fancy of Moore, unite the sturdy sense of Johnson, or
the simplicity of character of Scott; but it is to be feared such a
combination is as rare, and as little to be looked for in general life,
as the union of the strength of the war-horse to the fleetness of the
racer, or the courage of the mastiff to the delicacy of the greyhound.
Adam Smith long ago pointed out the distinction between those who serve
and those who amuse mankind; and the difference, it is to be feared,
exists not merely between the philosopher and the opera-dancer, but
between the instructors of men in every department of thought, and
those whose genius is devoted rather to the pleasing of the eye, the
melting of the feelings, or the kindling of the imagination. Yet this
observation is only generally, not universally, true; and Sir Joshua
Reynolds remains a memorable proof that it is possible for an artist
to unite the highest genius and most imaginative power of mind to the
wisdom of a philosopher, the liberality of a gentleman, the benevolence
of a Christian, and the simplicity of a child.
We are not at all surprised at the intoxication which seizes the
literary men and artists whose genius procures for them the favour
or admiration of women. Everybody knows it is the most fascinating
and transporting flattery which the mind of man can receive. But we
confess we are surprised, and that too not a little, at the _want of
sense_ which so frequently makes men even of the highest abilities mar
the influence of their own genius, and detract from the well-earned
celebrity of their own productions, by the indiscreet display of
this vanity, which the applause they have met with has produced in
their minds. These gentlemen are charmed with the incense they have
received, and of course desirous to augment it, and extend the circle
from which it is to be drawn. Well, that is their object; let us
consider what means they take to gain it. These consist too often
in the most undisguised display of vanity in their conduct, manner,
and conversation. Is this the way likely to augment the admiration
which they enjoy so much, and are so solicitous to extend? Are they
not clear-sighted enough to see, that, holding this to be their aim,
considering female admiration as the object of their aspirations, they
cannot in any way so effectually mar their desires as by permitting
the vanity, which the portion of it they have already received has
produced, to appear in their manner or conversation? Are they so
little versed in the female heart, as not to know that as self-love
acts, if not in a stronger at least in a more conspicuous way in
them than in the other sex, so there is nothing which repels them so
effectually as any display of that vanity in men which they are all
conscious of in themselves, and nothing attracts them so powerfully
as that self-forgetfulness, which, estimable in all, is in a peculiar
manner graceful and admirable when it is met with in those whom none
others can forget? Such a quality is not properly modesty--that is
the retiring disposition of those who have not yet won distinction.
No man who has done so is ignorant of it, as no woman of beauty is
insensible to her charms. It is more nearly allied to good sense, and
its invariable concomitant--a due regard for the feelings of others.
It not unfrequently exists, in the highest degree, in those who have
the strongest inward consciousness of the services they have rendered
to mankind. No man was more unassuming than Kepler, but he wrote in
reference to his great discoveries, and the neglect they at first met
with, "I may well be a century without a reader, since God Almighty
has been six thousand years without such an observer as me." Yet is
this universally felt to have been no unworthy effusion of vanity,
but a noble expression of great services rendered by one of his most
gifted creatures to the glory of the Almighty. Such men as Kepler are
proud, but not vain, and proud men do not bring their feelings so
prominently or frequently forward as vain ones; for pride rests on the
consciousness of superiority, and needs no external support; vanity
arises from a secret sense of weakness, and thirsts for a perpetual
solace from the applause of others.
It is in the French writers that this inordinate weakness of literary
men is most conspicuous, and in them it exists to such an extent
as, on this side of the Channel, to be altogether ridiculous. Every
Frenchman thinks his life worth recording. It was long ago said that
the number of unpublished memoirs which exist in France, on the war
of the League, would, if put together, form a large library. If those
relating to the war of the Revolution were accumulated, we have no
doubt they would fill the _Bibliothèque du Roi_. The number already
published exceeds almost the dimensions of any private collection of
books. The composition and style of these memoirs is for the most part
as curious, and characteristic of French character, as their number is
descriptive of their ruling passion. In the age of the religious wars,
every writer of memoirs seems to have placed himself in the first rank,
Henry IV. in the second; in that of the Revolution, the greater part
of the autobiographies scarcely disguise the opinion, that, if the
first place must be reluctantly conceded to Napoleon Buonaparte, the
second must, beyond all question, be assigned to themselves. The Abbé
de Pradt expressed the feeling almost every one entertained of himself
in France, not the sentiment of an individual man, when he said, "There
was one who overturned Napoleon, and that man was me." Most persons in
this country will exclaim, that this statement is overcharged, and that
it is incredible that vanity should so generally pervade the writers
of a whole nation. If they will take the trouble to read Lamartine's
_Confidences_ and _Raphael_, containing the events of his youth, or his
_Histoire de la Révolution de 1848_, recently published, they will find
ample confirmation of these remarks; nor are they less conspicuously
illustrated by the more elaborate _Mémoires d'Outre Tombe_ of
Chateaubriand, the name of which is prefixed to this essay.
One thing is very remarkable, and forcibly illustrates the marked
difference, in this respect, between the character of the French
and the English nation. In France all memoirs assume the form of
autobiographies: and so general is the thirst for that species of
composition that, where a man of any note has not compiled his own
life, his papers are put into the hands of some skilful bookmaker, who
speedily dresses them up, in the form of an attractive autobiography.
This was done with the papers of Brissot, Robespierre, Marshal Ney,
Fouché, and a great many others, all of which appeared with the name
of their authors, and richly stored with these private papers, though
it was morally certain that they could not by possibility have written
their own lives. In England nothing of the kind is attempted. Scarcely
any of the eminent men in the last age have left their own memoirs; and
the papers of the most remarkable of them have been published without
any attempt at biography. Thus we have the _Wellington Papers_, the
_Marlborough Papers_, the _Nelson Papers_, the _Castlereagh Papers_,
published without any autobiography, and only a slight sketch, though
in all these cases very ably done, of the author's life by their
editor. The lives of the other eminent men of the last age have been
given by others, not themselves: as that of Pitt, by Tomline and
Gifford; that of Fox, by Trotter; that of Sheridan, by Moore; that of
Lord Eldon, by Twiss; that of Lord Sidmouth, by Pellew. There is more
here than an accidental diversity: there is a difference arising from a
difference of national character. The Englishmen devoted their lives to
the public service, and bestowed not a thought on its illustration by
themselves; the French mainly thought of themselves when acting in the
public service, and considered it mainly as a means of elevation and
self-laudation to themselves.
In justice to the literary men of France, however, it must be stated
that, of late years at least, they have been exposed to an amount of
temptation, and of food for their self-love, much exceeding anything
previously seen among men, and which may go far to account for the
extraordinary vanity which they have everywhere evinced. In England,
literary distinction is neither the only nor the greatest passport
to celebrity. Aristocratic influences remain, and still possess the
deepest hold of the public mind: statesmen exist, whose daily speeches
in parliament render their names as household words. Fashion exercises
an extraordinary and almost inexplicable sway, especially over the
fairest part of creation. How celebrated soever an author may be,
he will in London soon be brought to his proper level, and a right
appreciation of his situation. He will see himself at once eclipsed by
an old nobleman, whose name is fraught with historic glory; by a young
marquis, who is an object of solicitude to the mothers and daughters
in the room; by a parliamentary orator, who is beginning to acquire
distinction in the senate house. We hold this state of things to be
eminently favourable to the right character of literary men; for it
saves them from trials before which, it is all but certain, both their
good sense and their virtue would succumb. But in Paris this salutary
check upon individual vanity and presumption is almost entirely
awanting. The territorial aristocracy is confiscated and destroyed;
titles of honour are abolished; historic names are almost forgotten
in the ceaseless whirl of present events; parliamentary orators are
in general unpopular, for they are for the most part on the side of
power. Nothing remains but the government of mind. The intellectual
aristocracy is all in all.
It makes and unmakes kings alternately; produces and stops revolutions,
at one time calls a new race to the throne, at another consigns them
with disgrace to foreign lands. Cabinets are formed out of the editors
of newspapers, intermingled with a few bankers, whom the public
convulsions have not yet rendered insolvent; prime ministers are to
be found only among successful authors. Thiers, the editor of the
_National_ and the historian of the Revolution; Guizot, the profound
professor of history; Villemain, the eloquent annalist of French
literature; Lamartine, the popular traveller, poet, and historian,
have been the alternate prime ministers of France since the revolution
of 1830. Even the great name of Napoleon cannot save his nephew from
the irksomeness of bending to the same necessity. He named Thiers
his prime minister at the time of the Boulogne misadventure, he is
caressing him now in the salons of the Elysée Bourbon. Successful
authors thus in France are surrounded with a halo, and exposed to
influences, of which in this country we cannot form a conception. They
unite in their persons the fame of Mr Fox and the lustre of Sir Walter
Scott: often the political power of Mr Pitt with the celebrity of Lord
Byron. Whether such a concentration is favourable either to their
present utility or lasting fame, and whether the best school to train
authors to be the instructors of the world is to be found in that which
exposes them to the combined influence of its greatest temptations,
are questions on which it is not necessary now to enter, but on which
posterity will probably have no difficulty in coming to a conclusion.
But while we fully admit that these extraordinary circumstances,
unparalleled in the past history of the world, go far to extenuate
the blame which must be thrown on the French writers for their
extraordinary vanity, they will not entirely exculpate them. Ordinary
men may well be carried away by such adventitious and flattering
marks of their power; but we cannot accept such an excuse from the
first men of the age--men of the clearest intellect, and the greatest
acquisitions--whose genius is to charm, whose wisdom is to instruct the
world through every succeeding age. If the teachers of men are not to
be above the follies and weaknesses which are general and ridiculous in
those of inferior capacity, where are we to look for such an exemption?
It is a poor excuse for the overweening vanity of a Byron, a Goethe, a
Lamartine, or a Chateaubriand, that a similar weakness is to be found
in a Madame Grisi or a Mademoiselle Cerito, in the first cantatrice or
most admired ballerina of the day. We all know that the professors of
these charming arts are too often intoxicated by the applause which
they meet with; we excuse or overlook this weakness from respect due
to their genius and their sex. But we know, at the same time, that
there are some exceptions to the general frailty; and in one enchanting
performer, our admiration for talents of the very highest order is
enhanced by respect for the simplicity of character and generosity of
disposition with which they are accompanied. We might desiderate in the
men who aspire to direct the thoughts of the world, and have received
from nature talents equal to the task, the unaffected singleness of
heart, and sterling good sense, which we admire, not less than her
admirable powers, in Mademoiselle Jenny Lind.
The faults, or rather frailties, we have alluded to, are in an especial
manner conspicuous in two of the most remarkable writers of France of
the present century--Lamartine and Chateaubriand. There is some excuse
for the vanity of these illustrious men. They have both acquired an
enduring fame--their names are known all over the world, and will
continue to be so while the French language is spoken on the earth; and
they have both, by their literary talents, been elevated to positions
far beyond the rank in society to which they were born, and which might
well make an ordinary head reel from the giddy precipices with which it
is surrounded. Chateaubriand powerfully aided in crushing Napoleon in
1814, when Europe in arms surrounded Paris: with still more honourable
constancy he resisted him in 1804, when, in the plenitude of his power,
he executed the Duke d'Enghien. He became ambassador to London for
the Restoration--minister of foreign affairs, and representative of
France at the Congress of Verona. He it was who projected and carried
into execution the French invasion of the Peninsula in 1823, the only
successful expedition of the Restoration. Lamartine's career, if
briefer, has been still more dazzling. He aided largely in the movement
which overthrew Louis Philippe; by the force of his genius he obtained
the mastery of the movement, "struggled with democracy when it was
strongest, and ruled it when it was wildest;" and had the glory, by his
single courage and energy, of saving the character of the revolution
from bloodshed, and coercing the Red Republicans in the very tumult
of their victory. He has since fallen from power, less from any known
delinquencies imputed to him, than from the inherent fickleness of
the French people, and the impossibility of their submitting, for any
length of time, to the lead of a single individual. The autobiography
of two such men cannot be other than interesting and instructive in the
highest degree; and if we see in them much which we in England cannot
altogether understand, and which we are accustomed to stigmatise with
the emphatic epithet "French," there is much also in them which candour
must respect, and an equitable spirit admire.
The great thing which characterises these memoirs, and is sufficient
to redeem a multitude of vanities and frailties, is the elevated and
chivalrous spirit in which they are composed. In this respect they are
a relic, we fear, of the olden time; a remnant of those ancient days
which Mr Burke has so eloquently described in his portrait of Marie
Antoinette. That is the spirit which pervades the breasts of these
illustrious men; and therefore it is that we respect them, and forgive
or forget many weaknesses which would otherwise be insupportable in
their autobiographies. It is a spirit, however, more akin to a former
era than the present; to the age which produced the crusades, more than
that which gave birth to railways; to the days of Godfrey of Bouillon,
rather than those which raised a monument to Mr Hudson. We are by no
means convinced, however, that it is not the more likely to be enduring
in the future ages of the world; at least we are sure it will be so, if
the sanguine anticipations everywhere formed, by the apostles of the
movement of the future improvement of the species, are destined in any
degree to be realised.
Although, however, the hearts of Chateaubriand and Lamartine are
stamped with the impress of chivalry, and the principal charm of their
writings is owing to its generous spirit, yet we should err greatly
if we imagined that they have not shared in the influences of the age
in which they lived, and become largely imbued with the more popular
and equalising notions which have sprung up in Europe during the last
century. They could not have attained the _political_ power which they
have both wielded if they had not done so; for no man, be his genius
what it may, will ever acquire a practical lead among men unless his
opinions coincide in the main with those of the majority by whom he
is surrounded. Chateaubriand's earliest work, written in London in
1793--the _Essai Historique_--is, in truth, rather of a republican and
sceptical tendency; and it was not till he had travelled in America,
and inhaled a nobler spirit amid the solitudes of nature, that the
better parts of his nature regained their ascendency, and his fame
was established on an imperishable foundation by the publication of
_Atala et René_, and the _Génie du Christianisme_. Throughout his
whole career, the influence of his early liberal principles remained
conspicuous: albeit a royalist, he was the steady supporter of the
freedom of the press and the extension of the elective suffrage; and
he kept aloof from the government of Louis Philippe less from aversion
to the semi-revolutionary spirit in which it was cradled, than from an
honourable fidelity to misfortune and horror at the selfish corrupt
multitude by which it was soon surrounded. Lamartine's republican
principles are universally known: albeit descended of a noble family,
and largely imbued with feudal feelings, he aided in the revolt which
overturned the throne of Louis Philippe in February 1848, and acquired
lasting renown by the courage with which he combated the sanguinary
spirit of the Red Republicans, when minister of foreign affairs. Both
are chivalrous in heart and feeling, rather than opinions; and they
thus exhibit curious and instructive instances of the fusions of the
moving principle of the olden time with the ideas of the present, and
of the manner in which the true spirit of nobility, _forgetfulness of
self_, can accommodate itself to the varying circumstances of society,
and float, from its buoyant tendency, on the surface of the most fetid
stream of subsequent selfishness.
In two works recently published by Lamartine, _Les Confidences_ and
_Raphael_, certain passages in his autobiography are given. The
first recounts the reminiscences of his infancy and childhood; the
second, a love-story in his twentieth year. Both are distinguished
by the peculiarities, in respect of excellences and defects, which
appear in his other writings. On the one hand we have an ardent
imagination, great beauty of language, a generous heart--the true
spirit of poetry--and uncommon pictorial powers. On the other, an
almost entire ignorance of human nature, extraordinary vanity, and that
susceptibility of mind which is more nearly allied to the feminine,
than the masculine character. Not but that Lamartine possesses great
energy and courage: his conduct, during the revolution of 1848,
demonstrates that he possesses these qualities in a very high degree;
but that the ardour of his feelings leads him to act and think like
women, from their impulse rather than the sober dictates of reason.
He is a devout optimist, and firm believer in the innocence of human
nature, and indefinite perfectibility of mankind, under the influence
of republican institutions. Like all other fanatics, he is wholly
inaccessible to the force of reason, and altogether beyond the reach of
facts, how strong or convincing soever. Accordingly, he remains to this
hour entirely convinced of the perfectibility of mankind, although he
has recounted, with equal truth and force, that it was almost entirely
owing to his own courage and energy that the revolution was prevented,
in its very outset, from degenerating into bloodshed and massacre;
and a thorough believer in the ultimate sway of pacific institutions,
although he owns that, despite all his zeal and eloquence, the whole
provisional government, with himself at its head, would on the 16th
April have been guillotined or thrown into the Seine, but for the
determination and fidelity of three battalions of the _Garde Mobile_,
whom Changarnier volunteered to arrange in all the windows and avenues
of the Hotel de Ville, when assailed by a column of thirty thousand
furious revolutionists.
Chateaubriand is more a man of the world than Lamartine. He has passed
through a life of greater vicissitudes, and been much more frequently
brought into contact with men in all ranks and gradations of society.
He is not less chivalrous than Lamartine, but more practical; his style
is less pictorial but more statesmanlike. The French of all shades
of political opinion agree in placing him at the head of the writers
of the last age. This high position, however, is owing rather to the
detached passages than the general tenor of his writings, for their
average style is hardly equal to such an encomium. He is not less vain
than Lamartine, and still more egotistical--a defect which, as already
noticed, he shares with nearly all the writers of autobiography in
France, but which appears peculiarly extraordinary and lamentable in
man of such talents and acquirements. His life abounded with strange
and romantic adventures, and its vicissitudes would have furnished a
rich field for biography even to a writer of less imaginative powers.
He was born on the 4th September 1768--the same year with Napoleon--at
an old melancholy chateau on the coast of Brittany, washed by the
waves of the Atlantic ocean. His mother, like those of almost all
other eminent men recorded in history, was a very remarkable woman,
gifted with a prodigious memory and an ardent imagination--qualities
which she transmitted in a very high degree to her son. His family was
very ancient, going back to the year 1000; but, till illustrated by
Francois René, who has rendered it immortal, the Chateaubriands lived
in unobtrusive privacy on their paternal acres. After receiving the
rudiments of education at home, he was sent at the age of seventeen
into the army; but the Revolution having soon after broken out, and
his regiment revolted, he quitted the service and came to Paris, where
he witnessed the horrors of the storming of the Tuileries on the 10th
of August, and the massacre in the prisons on 2d. September. Many of
his nearest relations--in particular his sister-in-law, Madame de
Chateaubriand, and sister, Madame Rozambo--were executed along with
Malesherbes, shortly before the fall of Robespierre. Obliged now to
fly to England, he lived for some years in London in extreme poverty,
supporting himself by his pen. It was there he wrote his earliest and
least creditable work, the _Essai Historique_. Tired of such an obscure
and monotonous life, however, he set out for America, with the Quixotic
design of discovering by land journey the North-west passage. He failed
in that attempt, for which, indeed, he had no adequate means; but he
dined with Washington, and in the solitudes of the Far West imbibed
many of the noblest ideas, and found the subjects of several of the
finest descriptions, which have since adorned his works. Finding that
there was nothing to be done in the way of discovery in America, he
returned to England. Afterwards he went to Paris, and there composed
his greatest works, _Atala et René_ and the _Génie du Christianisme_,
which soon acquired a colossal reputation, and raised the author to the
highest pinnacle of literary fame.
Napoleon, whose piercing eye discerned talent wherever it was to be
found, now selected him for the public service in the diplomatic line.
He gives the following interesting account of the first and only
interview he had with that extraordinary man, in the saloon of his
brother Lucien:--
"I was in the gallery when Napoleon entered; his appearance
struck me with an agreeable surprise. I had never previously
seen him but at a distance. His smile was sweet and
encouraging; his eye beautiful, especially from the way
in which it was overshadowed by the eyebrows. He had no
charlatanism in his looks, nothing affected or theatrical in
his manner. The _Génie du Christianisme_, which at that time
_was making a great deal of noise_, had produced its effect
on Napoleon. A vivid imagination animated his cold policy; he
would not have been what he was if the Muse had not been there;
reason in him worked out the ideas of a poet. All great men are
composed of two natures--for they must be at once capable of
inspiration and action,--the one conceives, the other executes.
"Buonaparte saw me, and knew me I know not how. When he moved
towards me, it was not known whom he sought. The crowd opened;
every one hoped the First Consul would stop to converse with
him; his air showed that he was irritated at these mistakes.
I retired behind those around me; Buonaparte suddenly raised
his voice, and called out, "Monsieur de Chateaubriand." I then
remained alone in front; for the crowd instantly retired, and
re-formed in a circle around us. Buonaparte addressed me with
simplicity, without questions, preamble, or compliments. He
began speaking about Egypt and the Arabs, as if I had been
his intimate friend, and he had only resumed a conversation
already commenced betwixt us. 'I was always struck,' said
he, 'when I saw the Scheiks fall on their knees in the
desert, turn towards the east, and touch the sand with their
foreheads. What is that unknown thing which they adore in
the east?' Speedily then passing to another idea, he said,
'Christianity! the _Idealogues_ wished to reduce it to a system
of astronomy! Suppose it were so, do they suppose they would
render Christianity little? Were Christianity only an allegory
of the movement of the spheres, the geometry of the stars, the
_esprits forts_ would have little to say: despite themselves,
they have left sufficient grandeur to _l'Infame_.'[5]
"Buonaparte immediately withdrew. Like Job in the night, I felt
as if a spirit had passed before me; the hairs of my flesh
stood up. I did not know its countenance; but I heard its voice
like a little whisper.
"My days have been an uninterrupted succession of visions.
Hell and heaven continually have opened under my feet, or over
my head, without my having had time to sound their depths, or
withstand their dazzling. I have met once, and once only, on
the shores of the two worlds, the man of the last age, and the
man of the new--Washington and Napoleon--I conversed a few
moments with each--both sent me back to solitude--the first by
a kind wish, the second by an execrable crime.
"I remarked that, in moving through the crowd, Buonaparte cast
on me looks more steady and penetrating than he had done before
he addressed me. I followed him with my eyes.
'Who is that great man who cares not
For conflagrations?'"[6]--(Vol. iv. 118-121.)
This passage conveys a just idea of Chateaubriand's Memoirs: his
elevation of mind, his ardent imagination, his deplorable vanity. In
justice to so eminent a man, however, we transcribe a passage in which
the nobleness of his character appears in its true lustre, untarnished
by the weaknesses which so often disfigure the character of men of
genius. We allude to his courageous throwing down the gauntlet to
Napoleon, on occasion of the murder of the Duke d'Enghien:--
"Two days before the fatal 20th March, I dressed myself, before
taking leave of Buonaparte, on my way to the Valais, to which
I had received a diplomatic mission; I had not seen him since
the time when he had spoken to me at the Tuileries. The gallery
where the reception was going on was full; he was accompanied
by Murat and his aide-de-camp. When he approached me, I was
struck with an alteration in his countenance: his cheeks were
fallen in, of a livid hue; his eyes stern; his colour pale;
his air sombre and terrible. The attraction which had formerly
drawn me towards him was at an end; instead of awaiting, I
fled his approach. He cast a look towards me, as if he sought
to recognise me, moved a few steps towards me, turned, and
disappeared. Returned to the Hôtel de France, I said to several
of my friends, 'Something strange, which I do not know, must
have happened: Buonaparte could not have changed to such a
degree unless he had been ill.' Two days after, at eleven in
the forenoon, I heard a man cry in the streets--'Sentence
of the military commission convoked at Vincennes, which has
condemned to the pain of DEATH Louis Antoine Henri
de Bourbon, born 2d August 1772 at Chantilly.' That cry
fell on me like a clap of thunder: it changed my life as it
changed that of Napoleon. I returned home, and said to Madame
de Chateaubriand--'The Duke d'Enghien has just been shot.' I
sat down to a table and began to write my resignation--Madame
de Chateaubriand made no opposition: she had a great deal of
courage. She was fully aware of my danger: the trial of Moreau
and Georges Cadoudal was going on: the lion had tasted blood:
it was not the moment to irritate him."--(Vol. iv. 228-229.)
After this honourable step, which happily passed without leading to
Chateaubriand's being shot, he travelled to the East, where he visited
Greece, Constantinople, the Holy Land, and Egypt, and collected
the materials which have formed two of his most celebrated works,
_L'Itinéraire à Jerusalem_, and _Les Martyrs_. He returned to France,
but did not appear in public life till the Allies conquered Paris in
1814, where he composed with extraordinary rapidity his famous pamphlet
entitled _Buonaparte and the Bourbons_, which had so powerful an effect
in bringing about the Restoration. The royalists were now in power,
and Chateaubriand was too important a man to be overlooked. In 1821 he
was sent as ambassador to London, the scene of his former penury and
suffering; in 1823 he was made Minister of Foreign Affairs, and in that
capacity projected, and successfully carried through, the expedition to
Spain which reseated Ferdinand on the throne of his ancestors; and he
was afterwards the plenipotentiary of France at the congress of Verona
in 1824. He was too liberal a man to be employed by the administration
of Charles X., but be exhibited an honourable constancy to misfortune
on occasion of the Revolution of 1830. He was offered the portfolio of
Foreign Affairs if he would abstain from opposition; but he refused
the proposal, made a last noble and eloquent speech in favour of his
dethroned sovereign in the Chamber of Peers; and, withdrawing into
privacy, lived in retirement, engaged in literary pursuits, and in the
composition or revising of his numerous publications, till his death,
which occurred in June 1848.
Such a life of such a man cannot be other than interesting, for it
unites the greatest possible range and variety of events with the
reflections of a mind of great power, ardent imagination, and extensive
erudition. His autobiography, or _Mémoires d'Outre Tombe_, as it is
called, was accordingly looked for with great interest, which has
not been sensibly diminished by the revolution of 1848, which has
brought a new set of political actors on the stage. Four volumes only
have hitherto been published, but the rest may speedily be looked
for, now that the military government of Prince Louis Napoleon has
terminated that of anarchy in France. The three first volumes certainly
disappointed us: chiefly from the perpetual and offensive vanity which
they exhibited, and the number of details, many of them of a puerile
or trifling character, which they contained. The fourth volume,
however, from which the preceding extracts have been taken, exhibits
Chateaubriand, in many places, in his original vigour; and if the
succeeding ones are of the same stamp, we propose to return to them.
THE GREEN HAND.
A "SHORT" YARN. PART IV.
"You must surely be tired by this time, ma'am, of this long-winded
yarn of mine?" said the commander of the Gloucester to the elder of
his fair listeners, next evening they met with the evident expectation
of hearing further; "but after all, this must be dull work for you at
present, so I daresay you are amused with anything by way of a change."
----Well, one morning when Westwood and I went on deck, it was a stark
staring calm; as dead as a mill-pond, save for the long winding heave
that seemed to come miles up out of the stale blue water, and get tired
with the journey--from the horizon to us in one lazy coil, and on
every side, just serving to jerk the wheel a spoke back and forward,
with nobody at it. The very bits of pumpkin-paring and fat which the
cook had thrown overboard the night before, lay still alongside, with
an oily track oozing round about them from the 'slush,'[7]--the sails
hanging from the yards, up and down, like clothes on a screen--and when
you looked over the side away from the sun, you saw your own face, like
a fellow's that had been long drowned, peering back at you as it were
round the keel--in fact, there you scarce knew where the water _was_.
Somehow or other the ship kept sheering round, by little and little,
till, although one had chosen a shady spot, all of a sudden the blazing
sun came right into his eyes; or the single streak of white cloud
laying behind you, to starboard, a while after stuck itself before your
face from the very opposite quarter--you fancying, too, you had your
eye the whole time on the same bit of water. Being lost in a wood or a
fog was nothing to it, especially with the sun at noon drawn up right
overhead, so that you couldn't look aloft, and staring down into the
sea out of a pool of bright light; "like one tremendously keen little
eye," as some of the passengers said, "examining a big blind one."
"Why," put in one of the "writers," "I fear he wants to take the _mote_
out of his brother's eye,--this vessel, that is to say!" "Hang it, I
hope not!" said Winterton, rather alarmed. "He promises well to do it,
then," said another young civilian, "but I wish he'd take the _beam_
out of his own, first--ha, Smythe?" However, few men have the spirit to
laugh at little in a calm near the Line, so Smythe gave no more than a
sickly grin, while Westwood looked the clergyman very properly.
Both passengers and crew, all of us that could swim, gave wistful looks
now and then alongside at the water, hot as it seemed, for a bathe;
just floating up, as it were, with the mere huge size of it, under
a dazzle of light, and so blue and smooth you could'nt see a hair's
breadth below; while, a bit off, the face of it, and the very air,
appeared to dance and quiver like little streams of glass. However,
all thoughts of bathing were put out of your head when you saw the
black three-cornered affair, with a rake aft, somewhat like the end
of a scythe, that went steering slowly round us; then cruising hither
and thither, till its infernal horn was as dry as the deck; and at
times driving straight off, as if it ran in a groove through the level
surface, when back again it came from the other side, creeping lazily
towards us, till it sank with a light _tip_, and a circle or two on
the blue water. The hook and chain were hanging up and down over the
taffrail, with the piece of rank pork looking green in the shadow near
the rudder, where you read the white figures of her draught as plain
as in dock; but the shark, a fifteen-feet customer, if he was an inch,
was too knowing to have touched it. "Pity he's gone, Collins," said
Ford to me, after we had watched him at last out of sight; "wasn't
there any plan of catching him, I wonder! Now we shall have a bathe
though, at any rate." "Gone?" said I, "he won't leave us in a hurry,
if we don't leave _him_!" "Poh, man!" said Ford, "I tell you he's
tired out and gone away!" Five minutes after, Ford was leaning over
the quarter, and wiping his face, while he fanned himself with his
straw-hat, which fell out of his hand into the water. He had got over
into the mizen-chains to throw a line round it, when he gave a loud
shriek, and jumped in-board again. Two or three fathoms of green came
up from the keel, balancing on a pair of broad fins under Ford's hat,
and a big round snout touched it; then a dozen feet of white belly
gleamed in the water, the hat gave a gulp as it was drawn down, and
a few small air-bells rose to the top. "He prefers some flavours to
others you see, Ford," said I. "'Tis the second hat I've seen you
lose: I hope your head won't be in the _third_; but you mariners, you
see----," however Ford had bolted to his cabin. On turning round I
perceived Miss Hyde with the General's lady under the awning on the
other side, where the old lady leant against a cushion, with her hands
crossed, and her bonnet-strings loose--though a strapping raw-boned
Irishwoman she was--and kept Miss Hyde's maid fanning her from behind
with a large feather _punkah_. The old lady had started at Ford's
cry, and gave a look round at me, half fierce and half order-wise, as
if she expected to know what was the matter at once. "Only my friend
lost his hat, ma'am," said I, stepping forward. "These cadets are so
taygious, my dear!" said she to the young lady, falling back again
without the least other notice of me. "They plague the life of me, but
the brigadier can't drill them as he would if this were a troop-ship--I
wish he could, for the sake of the profession!--now, my dear, d_h_o
kape out of the s-hun!" However I stuck where I was, fancying I caught
the slightest bit of an arch twinkle in the corner of the young lady's
eye, though she didn't look at me. "Keep going, can't ye!" said the
old lady crossly to the maid. "No, ma'am, indeed!" said the girl,
glancing over to her young mistress, "I'm ready to drop!" "Send up
papa's kitmagar, then, Wilkins," said Miss Hyde; and the girl went off
toward the gallery stair, muttering she "hoped she didn't come--here to
be--made a black Indian slave of--at least to an old"--the remainder
being lost in the stair. As I leant on the rail-netting, behind the
old lady, I happened to tread on her fat pug-dog's tail, whereupon the
ugly brute made its teeth meet without farther notice in the small
of my leg, after which it gave a yelp, and ran beneath the chairs.
"What's that, Die?" exclaimed its mistress: "good hivens! is that
same griffin here yet, my dear! Hadn't he ayven the spirit to take a
hint?--I say, was it _you_ hurt Dianny, young man?" "Oh, dear! no,
ma'am, not for the world!" said I, looking at my trousers, hard as the
thing was to stand, but thinking to smooth her over, though I was'nt
quite up to the old Irishwoman, it turned out. "Ha! ha! so she bit
you?" said she, with a flash of her hawk's-eye, and leaning back again
coolly: "If he'd only kicked poor Die for it under my chair, now, I'd
have forgiven him; but he hadn't ayven the heart at the time to drop
her a curse,--and _I_ thinking all the while, too, by the luke of his
eye, he was from the county Clare! My heart warms to the county Clare
always, because, although I'm not Irish myself, you know, I'd once a
schoolfellow was born in it--without counting all my relations! Oh, the
smooth spalpeen!" continued she, harder than before, glancing at me as
I looked all abroad from one to the other;--"listen, niver you let that
fellow spake to you, my dear! he's too----." But here I walked quietly
off, to put the poop's length betwixt me and the talking old vixen,
cursing her and her dog both, quite enough to have pleased her Irish
fancy.
On the quarterdeck, the Judge and the General seemed to enjoy the heat
and quiet, sitting with their feet up before the round-house, and
smoking their long red-twisted hookahs, while they watched the wreaths
of smoke go whirling straight up from the bowls to the awning, and
listened to the faint bubble of it through the water in the bottles,
just dropping a word now and then to each other. A tall thin "native"
servant, with long sooty hair hanging from his snow-white turban,
stood behind the Judge's chair, bolt upright, with his arms folded, and
twice as solemn as Sir Charles himself: you saw a stern-window shining
far abaft, through one of the round-house doors, and the fat old fellow
of a _consumah_[8] busy laying the cloth for tiffin, while the sole
breath of air there was came out of there-away.
Suddenly eight bells struck, and every one seemed glad of something
new; the Judge's _consumah_ came out salaaming to say tiffin was
ready; the cuddy passengers went below for wine-and-water and biscuit;
and the men were at dinner. There being nothing to take care of on
deck, and the heat of course getting greater, not a soul staid up but
myself; but I preferred at the moment lighting a cheroot, and going
up aft to see clear of the awnings. The cockatoo had been left on
the poop-rail, with his silver chain hitched round one of the mizen
back-stays, where it shifted from one leg to the other, hooked itself
up the back-stay as far as it could go, then hurried down again, and
mused a bit, as wise as Solomon,--then screamed out at the top of its
voice--"Tip--tip--pr-r-retty cacka--tip-poo--cok-ka--whee-yew-ew-ew!"
finishing by a whistle of triumph fit to have split one's ears, or
brought a gale of wind--though not on account of skill in its books, at
any rate. Again it took to swinging, quietly head-down, at a furious
rate, and then slewed upright to plume its feathers, and shake the pink
tuft on its head. No sooner had I got up the stair, however, than, to
my perfect delight, I saw Violet Hyde was still sitting aft, and the
old Irishwoman gone; so I stepped to the taffrail at once, and, for
something to be about, I hauled tip the shark-hook from astern. The
moment I caught her eye, the young lady smiled--by way of making up,
no doubt, for the old one. "How _very_ lonely it is!" said she, rising
and looking out; "the ship almost seems deserted, except by us!" "By
Jove! I almost wish it were," thought I. "A dead calm, madam," I said,
"and likely to hold--the under-swell's gone quite down, and a haze
growing." "Are we sure _ever_ to leave this spot then?" asked she,
with a slight look of anxiety. "Never fear it, ma'am," said I; "as
soon as the haze melts again, we're near a breeze I assure you--only,
by the length of the calm and the heat together, not to speak of our
being so far to east'ard, I'm afraid we mayn't get rid of it without
a gale at the end to match." "Indeed?" said Miss Hyde. The fact was,
Westwood and I had been keeping a log, and calculated just now we were
somewhere to south-eastward of Ascension; whereas, by the captain and
mate's reckoning, she was much farther to west. "I never thought the
sea could appear so awful," said she, as if to herself--"much more than
in a storm." "Why, madam," said I, "you haven't exactly seen one this
voyage--one needs to be close-hauled off the Cape for that." Somehow
or other, in speaking to _her_, by this time I forgot entirely about
keeping up the sham cadet, and slipped into my own way again; so all
at once I _felt_ her two dark-blue eyes looking at me, curiously.
"How!--why," exclaimed she suddenly, and then laughing, "you seem to
know all about it!--why, you speak--have you been studying sea affairs
so thoroughly, sir, with your friend, who--but I _do_ think, now, one
can scarcely _trust_ to what you have said?" "Well--why--well," said
I, fiddling with the shark-hook, "I don't know how it is, but I feel
as if I must have been at sea some time or other before;--you wouldn't
suppose it, ma'am, but whenever I fix my eyes on a particular rope, I
seem almost to know the name of it!" "And its _use_, too?" asked she,
merrily. "I shouldn't wonder!" said I; "perhaps I was _born_ at sea,
you know, ma'am?" and I gave a side-look to notice how she took it.
"Ah! perhaps!" said Miss Hyde, laughing; "but do you know one sometimes
fancies these things; and now I think of it, sir, I even imagined for
a moment I had seen _yourself_ before!" "Oh," said I, "that couldn't
be the case; I'm sure, for my part, I should recollect clear enough
if I'd seen--a--a _lady_ anywhere! I think you said something of
the kind, ma'am, that night of the last squall--about the water and
the clouds, ma'am, you remember?" The young lady looked away, though
a notion seemed to flash through her mind. "Yes," said she, "that
terrible rain--_you_ were----" "Washed into the lee-scuppers," said I,
indifferently, for I didn't want her to suspect it was _I_ that had
kissed her hand in the dark as I carried her in. "I hope Sir Charles
and yourself got in safe, madam?" However, she was watching the water
alongside, and suddenly she exclaimed--"Dear! what a pretty little
fish!" "By heavens!" said I, seeing the creature with its sharp nose
and blue bars, as it glanced about near the surface, and then swam
in below the ship's bilge again, "that's one of the old villain's
pilots--he's lying right across our keel! I wish I could catch that
shark!" The pork was of no use for such an old sea-lawyer, and I cast
a wistful eye on the Irishwoman's fat pug-dog stretched asleep on her
shawl by the bulwark; she was far gone in the family way, and, thought
I, "he'd take _that_ in a trice!" I even laid out some marline from
a stern-locker, and noticed how neatly one could pass the hook under
her belly round to the tail, and seize her so snugly on, muzzled and
all; but it was no go, with the devil to pay afterwards. All of a
sudden I heard somebody hawking and spitting above the awning forward,
near where the cockatoo kept still trying to master his own name.
"The Yankee, for a thousand!" thought I, "is Daniel trying to walk
along the spanker-boom!" Next, someone sung out, "Hal-loo-oo-oo!" as
if there was a tomahawk over him, ready to split his brain. Miss Hyde
looked alarmed, when the Scotch mate, as I thought, roared, "Shiver
my tops'ls!" then it was a sailor hailing gruffly, "Bloody Capting
Brown--bloody Capting Brown, damn your--Capting Brown!" "Somebody
drunk aloft!" thought I, walking forward to see; when a funny little
black head peeped round the awning, with a yellow nose as sharp as
a marlinspike, and red spectacles, seemingly, round its keen little
eyes; then, with a flutter and a hop, the steward's pet Mina-bird came
down, and lighted just under the cockatoo. "Ha!" said I, laughing,
"it's only Parson Barnacle!" as the men called him--a sooty little
creature scarce bigger than a blackbird, with a white spot on each
wing, and a curious pair of natural glasses on his head, which they
kept in the forecastle and taught all sorts of "jaw," till they swore
he could have put the ship about, took kindly to tar, and hunted the
cockroaches like a cat. No doubt he was glad to meet his countryman
the cockatoo, but Tippoo stuck up his crest, swelled his chops, and
looked dreadfully frightened; while the Mina-bird[9] cocked his head
on one side, gave a knowing wink as it were, though all the time as
grave with his spectacles as a real parson. "How's her head?" croaked
he, in a voice like a quarter-master's, "blowing hard!" "Damn Capting
Brown!" and hopped nearer to the poor cockatoo, who could stand it no
longer, but hooked himself up the backstay as fast as possible, out of
sight, the chain running with him: and just as I swung myself clear of
the awning to run aloft for a catch of it, out flew Parson Barnacle to
the end of the crojack-yard, while the cockatoo gave a flap that loosed
the kitmagar's lubberly hitch, and sent him down with his wings spread
on the water. At another time it wouldn't have cost me a thought to go
head-foremost after him, when I heard his young mistress exclaiming,
"Oh, poor dear Tippoo will be drowned!" but recollecting our hungry
green friend on the other side, I jumped down for the end of a rope to
slip myself quietly alongside with. However, at the very moment, Tom
the man-o'-war's man happening to come up from the fore-hatchway to
throw something overboard, and seeing Miss Hyde's cockatoo, off went
his shoes and jacket at once, and I heard the splash as he struck the
water. I had scarce time to think, either, before I saw Mick O'Hooney's
red head shoot up on deck, and heard him sing out, "Man overboard, be
the powers, boys! Folly my lader! Hurroo!" and over he sprang. "Here's
dip," said another, and in half a minute every man that could swim was
floundering in the smooth water alongside, or his head showing as it
came up,--pitching the cockatoo to each other, and all ready to enjoy
their bathe; though, for my part, I made but one spring to the ship's
starboard quarter, to use the only chance of saving the thoughtless
fellows from a bloody fate to some of them. I knew the shark would
be cautious at first, on such a sudden to-do, and I had marked his
whereabouts while the men were all well toward the bows; and "hang
it!" thought I, seeing the old woman's fat pug in my way, "Dianny,
or die-all; I bear no malice, but you must go for it, my beauty!" As
quick as thought, I made one turn of marline round her nose, took off
the pork, and lashed her fast on to the hook all standing, in spite of
her squeaks; then twisted the lady's shawl round the chain for a blind
to it, and flung the whole right over the larboard quarter, where I
guessed the old fellow would be slewing round astern to have a lookout
before he went fairly in chase. I watched the line sink slowly with the
weight over the gunwale for half a minute, afraid to let him see my
head, and trembling for fear I should hear a cry from one of the men;
when jerk went the rope clear of a belaying-pin as he ran off with his
bait. I took a quick turn to hook him smartly in the throat, and then
eased off again till the "cleets" brought him up with a "surge" fit to
have parted the line, had it not been good new three-inch rope--though,
as it was, the big Indiaman would soon have sheered stern-round to the
force of it, if he'd only pulled fair. The young lady stood noticing
what I did, first in a perplexed sort of way, and then with no small
surprise, especially when the shark gave every now and then a fiercer
tug, as he took a sweep astern: by this time, however, everybody was on
deck in a crowd, the passengers all in a flurry, and half of the men
scrambling up from alongside to tail on to the line, and run him out
of water. So away they went with it full speed towards the bows, as
soon as the ladies were out of the way--dragging two or three cadets
back foremost, head over heels, down the poop stair--till, in spite of
his tugging, the shark's round snout showed over the taffrail, with
the mouth wide open under his chin, as it were, and one row of teeth
laid flat behind another, like a comb-maker's shop. A running bowline
passed round his handsome waist, then another pull, and over he came on
the poop, floundering fourteen feet long, and flourishing his tail for
room, till the carpenter chopped it across, in a lucky moment, with his
axe.
All hands gathered round the shark to see him cut up, which was as good
as a play to them, becalmed as we were; when, to my no small dismay, I
heard Mrs Brigadier Brady's loud voice asking where her dog was; and
the Brigadier himself, who seemed more afraid of his wife than anybody
else, kept poking about with his red-faced English butler to find the
animal. "For godsake," said he, in a half whisper, twenty times over,
"haven't ye seen Mrs Brady's dog, any of ye?--she'll rout the ship
inside out for it, captain, if we don't soon ase her mind!" However, I
knew only Miss Hyde was aware who caught the shark, and as she didn't
appear to have told, why of course I kept all fast, myself. "Here's
a 'baccy-box!" sung out the big old boatswain, standing astride over
the tail, while the cook and his black mate ripped away from the tail
up. "Hand over, if ye please, sir," said 'ugly' Harry, it's mine's,
Mr Burton!" Harry gave it a wipe on his knee, and coolly bit a quid
off the end of his lost pigtail. The next thing was Ford's hat, which
no one claimed, so black Sambo clapped it on his woolly head. "What's
that you've got there now, Sambo?" said the boatswain, "out with it,
my lad!" "Golly!" chuckled the nigger, rolling the whites of his eyes
and grinning like mad; "oh sar, misser Barton! dis 'ere shark riglar
navligator! I 'clare to you, sar, um got chr'ometer aboard! Oh gum!
berry much t'ink dis you own lost silber tickler, misser Barton!"
"Bless me, so it is, my lad!" said the boatswain, as the black handed
him a silver watch as big as a turnip, and he looked at the cook, who
was busy fumbling with his knife. "Sorry as you was _taxed_ with
it, doctor!"[10] said he, doubtfully,--"well I'm blowed, though!--it
only goes an hour and a-half,--and here it's a-ticking yet!" Here a
burst of laughter went round, and somebody sung out, "Maybe the ould
pawn-broking Judas of a shark winded it up, hisself, jist to mark the
time o' his 'goin' off the hooks'!" "I say, doctor!" hailed another,
"too bloody bad, an't it though, to cut up _yer uncle_?" "Ha! ha! ha!"
cried the cadets and writers, looking at the Scotch surgeon, "d'ye hear
that, doctor? I wouldn't stand it! They say you ain't particular in
Edinbro', though! Some rum mistakes happened there, eh, doctor?" The
Scotchman got into a passion at this, being the worst cut they could
give any fellow from a country where they were famous for kindred and
body-snatching at once--but all of a sudden there was a "Hulloo! Shiver
my taw'sels! What's this? Let's see!" and the whole poopful of us were
shoving together, and jumping on each other's shoulders to have a look.
"Well, we-ell!" said the old boatswain, as he peered curiously into
the mess of shark's bowels--"I'll be d----d!" "The likes o' that now!"
croaked the old sailmaker, lifting up his two hands, "tan't lucky, Mr
Burton!" "My eye! them's not young _sharks_, anyhow!" said one of the
men. "What's t'ou think they be, mun," said the north-country Chips,
"but litter o' yoong blind poops? an' here's t' ou'd un, see, as deed's
mutton! Dang him, but some un's got an' baited t' hook wi't, there's
nou't else in 's guts!" The whole poop was one roar of laughing, when
Mrs Brady's pug was found delivered of four pups, inside the shark,
since she went overboard, and two of 'em alive; the news ran fore and
aft in a moment. "_Took short_ she's been, Jack!" said one. "Beats
the profit Joney!" "I say, 'mate, them whelps is born twice over.
Blessed if my Sal at home, now, wouldn't give a year's 'lotment for one
on 'em!" "Poor devil!" said one of the writers, "she must have been
sadly in want of a lying-in hospital!" "Look out, all hands of ye!"
cried some one, "there's the old girl herself coming on deck! sharp's
the word!" And away we scuttled right and left, some aloft, and some
down one poop-ladder, as Mrs Brady, with the Brigadier and his butler
after her, came fuming up the other. The black made one spring over
the quarter as soon as he saw her; but the Irish topman, Mick, slipped
his foot amongst the shark's blood, and rolled on his back, while the
old bo'sun made stand in the thick of it behind. "Saze the villains, I
charge ye, Brigadier!" screamed Mrs Brady, though he and his manservant
only kept dodging the boatswain round a sort of a quagmire of blood and
grease, while the old vixen caught Mick by his red hair and whiskers.
"Where's my dog, ye murdering spalpeen?" said she, panting for breath,
"what have ye done with my Dianny, ye monsther? Spake, or I'll----"
"Be the holy elaven thousand, yer ladyship!" said Mick, "an' it's
_lost_ did ye think she wor! isn't there _five_ of 'em back! Whisper!
yer ladyship's riv'rence,--she's _laid in_, poor craythure, an'----"
"_Oh!_ you Irish thief!" roared Mrs Brady, hitting him a slap as he
tried to rise, that sent him down again, "is it _that_ you'd say
to----" "No, thin'," sung out Mick, rubbing his ear, and guarding with
one arm,--"rest her sowl! but I'm innycint! Av _that_'ll plase, mim,
och an' I'll swear she died a vargin ----" Tug came both Mrs Brady's
hands through his hair, while the butler caught a kick in the stomach
from Mick's foot. "Murther!" gasped the poor fellow, "sure an' I dun'
know she was ayven a faym'le; bad luck t'ye, 'mates, give uz a hand.
Och, an' is this the road ye thrate a counthryman, mim?" "_Me_ your
countryman! ye bogtrottin' wretch ye!" screamed the old fury, her
brogue getting worse the more she heated,--"take _that_!--don't rise,
if ye dare!" "Faix thin, yer ladyship darlin'," said O'Hooney, grinning
in spite of his hard usage, "I tould a lie,--och, lave some o' me
hair!--murther intirely! I'm----" All the time none of us could stir
for sheer laughing, but seeing poor Mick like to fare hard with the old
vixen, who was near as big as himself, and as strong as a horse, I
whispered to the men to run round and let go the poop awning--so down
it came, with a few buckets of water in it, over the five of them; and
you just saw Mrs Brady's sharp elbow through the canvass, lifted for
the next slap, when we had her all fast, struggling like a cat in a
bag, while O'Hooney and the boatswain crept out below. "D----d breeze
that we've had!" said the bo'sun, shaking himself on the forecastle.
"Couldn't ye've bowsed over on the old jade's pitticuts, Mick?" said
one of his shipmates, "and capsized her all standing?" "Sorra fut you'd
stir, yourself, 'mate," said he, wiping his face, "wid such a shay
grinnydeer! she'd manhandle ye as asy's twurl a mop!"
After all this you may suppose one didn't weary even of the calm. As
soon as the decks were clear, most of us took tea on the poop, for
fear of meeting the Brigadier's lady below, every one holding his cup
ready for a start. Rollock the planter, who had slept and swung in his
cot half the day, was like to split his sides when he heard the story:
by the way, I believe both the little pups lived and throve on goats'
milk, and the men called one of them 'Young Jonah,' though he had so
much of the terrier that the old lady disowned him. It was quite dark,
and cool for a night near the Line, though not a ripple stirred, and I
staid after the rest to smoke a cigar, stopping every now and then near
the aftermost bull's-eye, that shone through the deck, and thinking of
Lota. "By Jove!" thought I, "she hasn't said a word of it. Think of
having a secret, almost, with _her_!" After all, though, I felt well
enough I might as soon hope for the Emperor of China's daughter as
for such a creature, unless something wonderfully strange fell out:
deucedly in love as I was, I wasn't puppy enough to fancy I'd ever
succeed by mere talk; "but here's for a bold heart and a weather-eye!"
I thought; "and if these can do it, I _will_!" said I aloud, when some
one clapped me on the shoulder. "Well, Tom, are you there?" said I,
thinking it was Westwood. "Why," answered old Rollock, laughing, "not
so far wrong, my boy,--but as it's thirty years since any one called
me so, I thought you _were_, for a moment!--meditating, eh?" "Only a
cigar before bed-time--will you have one, sir?" "Ah--well," said the
planter, "I'll take a light, at least--queer life this, eh? Shouldn't
know this _was_ water, now--more like train-oil! Looks _junglish_ a
little under the stars yonder." "Nothing but the haze come down,"
said I; "'tis clear enough aloft, though,--look out for squalls ere
long!" "As your friend Ford would have it,"--said Rollock; "but how a
lad of your spirit can manage to stand this so well, I can't think!"
"Deyvilish dull, sir!" said I, with a lazy drawl, "but can't be helped,
you know." Come, come, now, don't mend it by copying poor Winterton,"
chuckled Rollock; "you're no fool, Collins, so don't pretend to be.
I say though, Collins my boy," continued he, rather gravely, "there
is one really soft piece I begin to notice in you lately--I fear
you're falling in love with that girl!" "_I_, sir!" said I; "dear
me! what makes you--" "My dear boy," went on the kind-hearted old
fellow, "I take an interest in you; no lad of your stuff practises all
this tomfoolery without something under it, and I see you've _some_
serious meaning or other. Did you know her before?" "Oh--why--not
exactly," I dropped out, taken rather short. "I see, I see!" he went
on; "but I tell you what, Collins, a cadet can do nothing madder
than marry at first landing; she had better be a cold-hearted flirt,
after all--though, God knows, no man can say what _that_ does but one
that's--felt it! I--I mean I _knew_--a young fellow that went out as
ambitious as you can be, and he--" Here the planter's voice shook a
little, and he stopped, puffing at his cheroot till the short end of
it just lighted up his hook nose and part of his big white whiskers
in the dark, only you saw his eye glistening too. "Devil take it!"
thought I, "who'd have expected the old boy to be so sharp, though."
"Well but, Collins," said he at last, "just you enter heart and soul
into your profession; I'd stake my life you'll rise, who knows how
far--get your captain's pay even, _then_ you may think of it--that is,
if she--" "Why," said I, "d'ye suppose the Judge would--" "_Judge!_"
exclaimed Mr Rollock, "when--worse and worse! weren't we talking of
pretty little Kate Fortescue? My _dear_ boy, you don't intend to say
you mean Miss Hyde! I left _that_ to your first officer, as they call
him!--why, that young girl will be the beauty of Calcutta." At this I
fancied some one else gave a whistle near us. "Of course, sir," said I,
raising my voice, "you didn't suppose me such a fool." In fact, Miss
Fortescue, had never entered my head at all. "Something strange about
_you_, Collins!" I said the planter, a little shortly; "you puzzle me,
I must say." As we turned to go below, I heard somebody walk down the
poop-ladder, and then the mate's voice sting out from the binnacle to
"strike eight bells!"
The calm was as dead as ever next morning, and, if possible, hotter
than before--not a rope changed aloft, nor a cloth in the sails moved;
but it was pretty hazy round us, which made the water a sort of pale
old-bottle blue, that sickened you to look at; and a long dipping and
drawling heave gradually got up as if there were blankets on it; the
ship, of course, shifting round and round again slowly, like a dog
going to lie down, and the helm getting every now and then a sudden
jolt. Near noon it cleared up with a blaze of light, as it were; the
sole difference at first being, that what looked like melting lead
before, now turned into so many huge bright sheets of tin, every bend
of it as good as flashing up thousands of needles in your eyes. A good
deal surprised we were, however, shortly after, to find there was a
sail in sight, another square-rigged vessel, seemingly standing up on
the horizon six or seven miles off. Being end on to us at the time,
though every glass in the ship was brought to bear on her, 'twas hard
to say what she was; then she and we went bobbing and going up and down
with a long round heave between us, slowly enough, but always at cross
purposes, like two fellows see-sawing on a plank over a dyke. When she
was up, we were down, and we just caught sight of her royal, no bigger
than a gull on the water; yerk went our rudder, and next time she
seemed to have vanished out of the glasses altogether, till we walked
round to the other side, and made her out again under the awning on
the opposite beam. At length she lifted broad to us for a moment or
two, showing a long pale sort of hull with a red streak, apparently
without ports, and brig-rigged, though the space betwixt her two masts
was curious for that kind of craft. "Wonderful light-sparred for her
size that brig, sir," said the third officer, dropping his glass. "Ay,
so she is, Mr Small," replied Captain Williamson: "what would you call
her, then? You've as good knowledge of craft as any man, Mr Small, I
think." "Why," said the old mate, screwing his eye harder for a long
look, "I'd say she's--not a cruiser, Captin Williamson--no, nor a
Greenock Indyman--nor a--" "Oh!" said Finch, "some African timberer
or other, I daresay, Small." "Well, Mr Finch," said the third mate,
handing him the glass, "mayhap you'll just say yourself, sir." "No,
no, Mr Small," said the captain; "I'd trust to you as soon as any
man, sir, in a matter of the kind." "Why, the hull of her's wonderful
Yankee-like, sir," said Small again; "I'm thinking they've been and
_squared_ her out of a schooner--and a d----d bad job of it, sir! Bless
us! what a lean-headed pair o'taups'ls, too,--as high as our fore one,
sir." Suddenly the old mate gave his thigh a slap, and laid down his
glass on the capstan: "Lord, sir!" said he, "that's the thing; she's
nothing more nor less but a John Crapeau, Captain Williamson!" "I
daresay you're right, Mr Small," said the skipper, taking the glass;
"just so,--ay, ay,--I thought it myself!" "Pity old Nap's boxed up
yonder then, sir," said the first officer, rubbing his hands and
pointing to eastward, where he thought St Helena was: "why, sir, we
should have the peppering of the Frenchman; I don't suppose we'd need
to care though she were twice the size--and what's more, we want fresh
water before seeing the Cape, sir!" "Well," said the old skipper,
laughing, "that is the worst of it, Finch! As for spirit, you've as
much as any man, Mr Finch, and I _do_ think we'd know how to take the
weather-hand of him--eh?" "I'll be bound we should!" said Finch,
laughing too. As for the Frenchman, both Westwood and I had made him
out by his rig at once, thanks to man-o'-war practice; but we smiled to
each other at the notion of making a prize of Monsieur, under Finch's
management, with not a gun that could have been used for half a day,
and everything else at sixes and sevens.
In a little while it was proposed amongst the cadets, hot as the calm
was, to make a party to go and see the French vessel. Ford of course
was at the head of it. Winterton thought they would no doubt have
plenty of champagne on board, and some others, who could row, wanted
to try their hands. Accordingly the captain's gig was got ready, a
sort of awning rigged over it, and two or three of them got in; when
one, who was Miss Fortescue's cousin, persuaded her to join, if Mr
Rollock would come. Then the Brigadier, being rather a goodhumoured
man, said he should like to face the French once more, and Daniel
Snout shoved himself in without asking by your leave. One of the men
was sent to take charge; and as there was room still, I was just going
to jump in too, for the amusement of it, when Mrs Brady hurried to
the taffrail with her parasol up, and said, if the Brigadier went,
she should go as well,--in fact, the old woman's jealousy of her rib
was always laughably plain. "Hang it! then," thought I, "catch me
putting myself in the same boat with _her_! the same ship is enough,
in all conscience!" So away they were lowered off the davits, and
began pulling in tolerable style for the brig, a couple of hours'
good work for such hands at mid-day, smooth water as it was. "Now,
gentlemen," said the first officer briskly, as we looked after, them
dipping over the long bright blue heave--"now, gentlemen, and ladies
also, if they please, we'll have another party as soon as the men get
their dinner--give these gentlemen a full hour's law, we'll overhaul
them. See the larboard quarter-boat clear, Jacobs." It was just the
least possible hazy again behind the brig in the distance, and as the
Judge stood talking to his daughter on the poop, I heard her say, "Is
the other vessel not coming nearer already, papa? See how much more
distinct its sails are this moment--there!--one almost observes the
white canvass!" "Pooh, Lota child!" answered Sir Charles, "that cannot
be--'tis perfectly calm, don't you know?" In fact, however, Lota
showed a sailor's eye for air, and I was noticing it myself; but it
was _only_ the air made it look so. "All! now," exclaimed she again,
"'tis as distant as ever! That must have been the light:" besides, the
brig had been lifting on a wide swell. "I beg pardon, Sir Charles,"
said the mate, coming up and taking off his cap, "but might I use the
freedom--perhaps yourself and Miss Hyde would like to visit the French
brig?" The Judge looked at his daughter as much as to ask if she would
like it. "Oh yes! so much!" exclaimed she, her bright eyes sparkling,
"shall we? No, the deuce! Not _I_!" said Sir Charles: "I shall take
my siesta. Quite safe, sir--eh?" "Oh, quite safe, Sir Charles!" said
Finch, "a dead calm, sir--I'll take the utmost care you may be sure,
Sir Charles--as safe as the deck, sir!" "Oh, very well," replied the
Judge, and he walked down to see after his tiffin. The young lady was
going down the quarter-gallery stair, when I caught my opportunity
to say--"I hope you'll excuse it, Miss Hyde, ma'am--but I _do_ trust
you'll not risk going in the boat so far, just now!" Half a minute
after I spoke, she turned round, and looked at me with a curious sort
of expression in her charming face, which I couldn't make out,--whether
it was mischievous, whether it was pettish, or whether 'twas
inquisitive. "Dear me!" said she, "why--do you--" "The weather might
change," I said, looking round about, "and I shouldn't wonder if it
did--or a swell might get up--or--" "I must say, Mr--Mr Collins," said
she, laughing slightly, "you are very gloomy in anticipating--almost
timorous, I declare! I wonder how you came to be so weather-wise! But
why did you not advise--poor Mrs Brady, now?" I couldn't see her face
as she spoke, but the tone of the last words made me feel I'd have
given worlds to look round and see what it was like at the moment.
"Perhaps, ma'am," said I, "you may remember the _rain_?" "Well, we
shall see, sir!" replied she, glancing up with a bright sparkle in her
eye for an instant, but only toward the end of the spanker-boom, as it
were; and then tripping down the stair.
I kept watching the gig pull slowly toward the brig in the distance,
and the cutter making ready on our quarter, till the men were in, with
Jacobs amongst them; where they sat waiting in no small glee for the
mate and his party, who came up a few minutes after: and I was just
beginning to hope that Violet Hyde had taken my advice, when she and
another young lady came out of the round-house, dressed for the trip,
and the captain gallantly handed them in. "My compliments to the French
skipper, Mr Finch," said the captain, laughing, "and if he an't better
engaged, happy to see him to dinner at two bells[11] in the dog-watch,
we'll make it!" "Ay, ay, sir," said Finch. "Now then!-all ready?"
"Smythe's coming yet," said a "writer." "We can't wait any longer for
him," replied the mate; "ease away the falls, handsomely, on deck!"
"Stop," said I, "I'll go, then!" "Too late, young gentleman," answered
the mate, sharply, "you'll cant us gunnel up, sir!--lower away, there!"
However, I caught hold of a rope and let myself down the side, time
enough to jump lightly into her stern-sheets the moment they touched
the water. The officer stared at me as he took the yokelines to steer,
but he said nothing, and the boat shoved off; while Miss Hyde's blue
eyes only opened out, as it were, for an instant, at seeing me drop
in so unceremoniously; and her companion laughed. "I shouldn't have
supposed you so nimble, Mr Collins!" said the writer, looking at
me through his eye-glass. "Oh," said I, "Ford and I have practised
climbing a good deal lately." "Ha! ha!" said the civilian, "shouldn't
be surprised, now, if your friend were to take the navigation out of
Mr Finch's hands, some day!" "Bless me, yes, sir!" said Finch, with a
guffaw, as he sat handling the lines carelessly, and smiling to the
ladies, with his cap over one ear; "to be sure--ha! ha! ha!--it's
certain, Mr Beveridge! Wouldn't you take the helm here, sir?" to me.
"Oh, thank you, no, sir!" replied I, modestly, "I'm not quite so far
_yet_--but we've got a loan of Hamilton Moore and Falconer's Dictionary
from the midshipmen, and mean to--" "No doubt you'll teach us a trick
or two yet!" said Finch, with a sneer. "Now, for instance," said I
coolly, "aloft yonder, you've got the _throat halliards_ jammed in the
block with a gasket, and the mizen-topsail cluelines rove wrong-side
of it, which Hamilton Moore distinctly--" "Hang the lubber that did
it, so they are!" exclaimed the mate, looking through the spy-glass we
had with us. "Now you've your _jibs_ hauled down, sir," continued I,
"and if a squall came on abeam, no doubt they'd wish to shorten sail
from _aft_, and keep her away--however, she would broach-to at once,
as Hamilton Moore shows must--" "You and Hamilton Moore be ----; no
fear of a squall just now, at any rate, ladies," said he. "Stretch
out, men--let's head upon Mr Ford and his gig, yet!" Terribly hot it
was close to the water, and so stifling that you scarce could breathe,
while the long glassy swell was far higher than one thought it from the
ship's deck; however, we had an awning hoisted, and it refreshed one a
little both to hear the water and feel it below again, as the cutter
went sliding and rippling over it to long slow strokes of the oars;
her crew being all man-o'-war's-men, that knew how to pull together
and take it easy. The young ladies kept gazing rather anxiously at the
big old Seringapatam, as she rose and dropped heavily on the calm,
amused though they were at first by a sight of their late home turning
"gable" on to us, with her three masts in one, and a white straw hat or
two watching us from her taffrail; whereas, ahead, they only now and
then caught a glimpse of the brig's upper canvass, over a hot, hazy,
sullen-looking sweep of water as deep-blue as indigo--with six hairy
brown breasts bending before them to the oars, and as many pair of
queer, rollicking, fishy sort of eyes fixed steadily on their bonnets,
in a shame-faced, down-hill kind of way, like fellows that couldn't
help it. In fact, I noticed a curious grin now and then on every one
of the men's faces, and a look to each other, when they caught sight
of myself, sitting behind the mate as he paid off his high-flying
speeches; Jacobs, again, regarding me all the while out of the whites
of his eyes, as it were, in a wooden, unknowing fashion, fit to have
made a cat laugh--seeing he never missed his mark for one moment, and
drew back his head at every pull with the air of a drunk man keeping
sight of his waistcoat buttons. By the time we were half-way, the
swell began to get considerable, and the mate stepped up abaft to look
for the gig. "Can't see the boat yet," said he; "give way there, my
lads--stretch out and bend your backs! there's the brig!" "Hal-lo!"
exclaimed he again, "she's clued up royals and to'gallants'ls! By
heavens! there go her tops'ls down too! Going to bend new sails,
though, I daresay, for it looks clear enough there." "The ship's run up
a flag aft, sir," said Jacobs. "The--so she has," said Finch, turning
round; "recall signal! What's wrong? Sorry _we_ can't dine aboard the
French vessel this time, ladies!" said he--"extremely _so_--and the
griffins there after all, too. I hope you won't be disappointed in any
great measure, Miss Hyde--but if _you_ wished it now, Miss, I'd even
_keep_ on, and--" The young lady coloured a little at this, and turned
to her companion just as I remembered her doing from the dragoon in
the ball-room. "Do you not think, Miss Wyndham," said she, "_we_ ought
not to wish any officer of the ship should get reproved, perhaps, on
_our_ account?" "Oh dear no," said Miss Wyndham; "indeed, Mr Finch,
you had better go back, if the captain orders you." "Hold on there
with your larboard oars, you lubbers!" sang out Finch, biting his lip,
and round we went pulling for the Indiaman again; but by this time the
swell was becoming so heavy as to make it hard work, and it was soon
rarely we could see her at all; for nothing gets up so fast as a swell,
sometimes, near the Line; neither one way nor the other, but right up
and down, without a breath of wind, in huge smooth hills of water,
darker than lead, not a speck of foam, and the sky hot and clear.
'Twas almost as if a weight had been lifted from off the long heaving
calm, and the whole round of it were going up dark into the sky, in
one weltering jumble, the more strange that it was quiet: sweep up it
took the boat, and the bright wet oar-blades spread feathering out for
another stroke to steady her, let alone making way; though that was
nothing to the look of the Indiaman when we got near. She was rolling
her big black hull round in it as helpless as a cask; now one side,
then the other, dipping gunwale to in the round swell that came heaping
up level with her very rail, and went sheeting out bright through the
bulwarks again the masts jumping, clamps and boom-irons creaking on
the yards, and every sail on her shaking, as her lower yardarms took
it by turns to aim at the water--you heard all the noise of it, the
plunge of her flat broadside, the plash from her scuppers, the jolts of
her rudder, and voices on board; and wet you may swear she _was_ from
stem to stern. "Comfortable!" thought I; "we've come home too soon of
a washing-day, and may wait at the door, I fear!" "Oh dear," exclaimed
the three griffins, "how are we to get in!" and the young ladies looked
pale at the sight. The mate steered for her larboard quarter without
saying a word, but I saw he lost coolness and got nervous--not at all
the man for a hard pinch: seemingly, he meant to dash alongside and
hook on. "If you do, sir," said I, "you'll be smashed to staves;" and
all at once the ship appeared almost over our heads, while the boat
took a send in. I looked to Jacobs and the men, and they gave one long
stroke off, that seemed next heave to put a quarter of a mile between
us. "D----d close shave that," said the bowman. "Begs pardon, sir,"
said Jacobs, touching his hat, with his eyes still fixed past the mate,
upon me; "hasn't we better keep steadying off, sir, till such time as
the swell--" "Hold your jaw, sirrah," growled Finch, as he looked ahead
still more flurried; "there's a _squall_ coming yonder, gentlemen, and
if we don't get quick aboard, we may lose the ship in it! Pull round,
d'ye hear there." Sure enough, when we lifted, there was the French
brig clear out against a sulky patch of dark-gray sky, growing in as
it were far off behind the uneven swell, till _it_ began to pale; the
Indiaman's topsails gave a loud flap out, too, one after the other, and
fell to the mast again. Suddenly I caught the glance of Violet Hyde's
eyes watching me seriously as I sat overhauling the Indiaman for a
notion of what to do, and I fancied the charming girl had somehow got
nearer to me during the last minute or two, whether she knew it or not:
at any rate the thought of protecting such a creature made all my blood
tingle. "Never fear, ma'am," said I, in a half whisper; when Finch's
eye met mine, and he threw me a malicious look, sufficient to show what
a devil the fellow would be if ever he had occasion; however, he gave
the sign for the men to stretch out again, and high time it was, as
the Indiaman's maintopsail made another loud clap like a musket-shot.
Still he was holding right for her _quarter_--the roll the ship had on
her was fearful, and it was perfect madness to try it; but few merchant
mates have chanced to be boating in a Line swell, I daresay: when just
as we came head on for her starboard counter, I took the boat's tiller
a sudden shove with my foot, as if by accident, that sent us sheering
in close under her _stern_. The bowman prized his boat-hook into the
rudder-chains, where the big hull swung round us on both sides like an
immense wheel round its barrel, every stern-window with a face watching
us--though one stroke of the loose rudder would have stove us to bits,
and the swell was each moment like to make the men let go, as it hove
us up almost near enough to have caught a hand from the lower-deck.
"For godsake steady your wheel," said I; "hard a-port!" while the mate
was singing out for a line. "Now, up you go," said I to Jacobs in
the hubbub, "look sharp, and send us down a whip and basket from the
boom-end, as we did once in the Pandora, you know!" Up the rope went
Jacobs like a cat, hand over hand; and five minutes after, down came
the "basket" over our heads into the boat, made out of a studding-sail
and three capstan-bars, like a big grocer's scale dangling from the
spanker-boom. The mate proposed to go up first with Miss Hyde, but she
hung back in favour of her companion; so away aloft went Miss Wyndham
and he, swinging across the Indiaman's stern as she rolled again, with
a gantline to steady them in--Finch holding on to the whip by one hand,
and the other round the young lady, while my blood crept at the thought
how it might have been Lota herself! As soon as it came down again,
she looked for a moment from me to Jacobs, when Captain Williamson
himself shouted over the taffrail, "Sharp, sharp there! the squall's
coming down! she'll be up in the wind! let's get the helm free!" and
directly after I found myself swinging twenty feet over the water with
Violet Hyde, as the ship heeled to a puff that filled the spanker, and
rose again on a huge swell, gathering steerage way, while every bolt
of canvass in her flapped in again at once like thunder. I felt her
shudder and cling to me--there was one half minute we swung fairly
clear of the stern, they stopped hoisting,--and I almost thought I'd
have wished that same half minute half a day; but a minute after she
was in the Judge's arms on the poop; the men had contrived to get the
cadets on board, too, and the boat was dragging astern, with the line
veered out, and her crew still in it baling her out.
I fixed my eyes at once, breathless as we of the boat-party were, on
the weather-signs and the other vessel, which everybody on the poop
was looking at, as soon as we were safe, and our friends in the gig
had to be thought of. The short top-swell was beginning to soften in
long regular seas, with just air enough aloft to give our light sails a
purchase on it, and put an end to the infernal clatter; but the vapour
had gathered quicker than you could well fancy behind the brig in the
distance, so that she looked already a couple of miles nearer, rising
up two or three times on as many huge swells that shone like blue
glass, while she steadied herself like a tightrope dancer on the top of
them, by a studding-sail set high from each side. On the far horizon
beyond her, you'd have thought there was a deep black ditch sunk along
under the thickening blue haze, as it stretched out past her to both
hands, till actually the solid breast of it seemed to shove the brig
bodily forward over the oily-like water, every spar and rope distinct;
then the fog lifted below as if the teeth of a saw came spitting
through it, and we saw her bearing down toward us--cloud, water, and
all, as it were--with a white heap of foam at her bows. "Brace up
sharp, Mr Finch!" said the old skipper hastily, "and stand over to meet
her. Confound this! we _must_ have these people out of that brig in a
trice! we shall soon have a touch of the Horse Latitudes, or my name's
not Richard Williamson--ay, and bid good-bye to 'em, too, I think!"
For a quarter of an hour or so, accordingly, we kept forging slowly
ahead, while the brig continued to near us. No one spoke, almost--you
heard the lazy swash of the water round our fore-chains, and the
stillness aboard had a gloomy enough effect, as one noticed the top of
the haze creep up into round vapoury heads upon the sky, and felt it
darkening aloft besides. We were scarce three quarters of a mile apart,
and could see her sharp black bows drip over the bright sheathing,
as she rolled easily on the swell, when the Indiaman suddenly lost
way again, sheered head round, and slap went all her sails from the
royals down, as if she had fired a broadside. Almost the next moment, a
long, low growl ran muttering and rumbling far away round the horizon,
from the clouds and back to them again, as if they had been some huge
monster or other on the watch, with its broad grim muzzle shooting
quietly over us as it lay; the brig dipped her gilt figurehead abeam of
us, and then showed her long red streak; the swell sinking fast, and
the whole sea, far and wide coming out from the sky as dark and round
as the mahogany drum-head of the capstan.
"Bless me, Small," said the Captain, "but I hope they've not knocked
a hole in my gig--ay, there _they_ are, I think, looking over the
brig's quarter; but don't seem to have a boat to swim! Get the cutter
hauled alongside, Mr Stebbing," continued he to the fourth mate,
"and go aboard for them at once--confounded bothering, this! Mind
get my gig safe, sir, if you please--can you _parley-voo_, though,
Mr Stebbing?" "Not a word, sir," said the young mate, a gentlemanly,
rather soft fellow, whom the other three all used to snub. "Bless me,
can't we muster a bit o' French amongst us?" said the skipper; "catch a
_monshoor_ that knows a word of English like any other man--'specially
if they've a chance of keeping my gig!" "Well, sir," said I, "I'll
be happy to go with the officer, as I can speak French well enough!"
"Thank ye, young gentleman, thank ye," said he, "you'll do it as well
as any man, I'm sure--only look sharp, if you please, and bring my gig
with you!" So down the side we bundled into the cutter, and pulled
straight for the brig, which had just hoisted French colours, not old
"three-patches," of course, but the new Restoration flag.
I overhauled her well as we got near, and a beautiful long
schooner-model she was, with sharp bows, and a fine easy-run hull from
stem to stern, but dreadfully dirty and spoilt with top-bulwarks, as if
they meant to make her look as clumsy as possible; while the brig-rig
of her aloft, with the ropes hanging in bights and hitches, gave her
the look of a hedge-parson on a race-horse: at the same time, I counted
six closed ports of a side, in her red streak, the exact breadth and
colour of itself. Full of men, with a long gun, and schooner-rigged,
she could have sailed round the Indiaman in a light breeze, and mauled
her to any extent.