Round the neighbourhood of Lakelands it was known that the day of the
great gathering there had been authoritatively foretold as fine, by
Mr. Victor Radnor; and he delivered his prophecy in the teeth of
the South-western gale familiar to our yachting month; and he really
inspired belief or a kind of trust; some supposing him to draw from
reserves of observation, some choosing to confide in the singularly
winged sparkle of his eyes. Lady Rodwell Blachington did; and young Mrs.
Blathenoy; and Mrs. Fanning; they were enamoured of it. And when women
stand for Hope, and any worshipped man for Promise, nothing less than
redoubled confusion of him dissolves the union. Even then they cling to
it, under an ejaculation, that it might and should have been otherwise;
fancy partly has it otherwise, in her caerulean home above the weeping.
So it is good at all points to prophecy with the aspect of the radiant
day foretold.
A storm, bearing battle overhead, tore the night to pieces. Nataly’s
faith in the pleasant prognostic wavered beneath the crashes. She had
not much power of heart to desire anything save that which her bosom
disavowed. Uproar rather appeased her, calmness agitated. She wished
her beloved to be spared from a disappointment, thinking he deserved all
successes, because of the rigours inflicted by her present tonelessness
of blood and being. Her unresponsive manner with him was not due to lack
of fire in the blood or a loss of tenderness. The tender feeling, under
privations unwillingly imposed, though willingly shared, now suffused
her reflections, owing to a gratitude induced by a novel experience of
him; known, as it may chance, and as it does not always chance, to both
sexes in wedded intimacy here and there; known to women whose mates are
proved quick to compliance with delicate intuitions of their moods of
nature. A constant, almost visible, image of the dark thing she desired,
and was bound not to desire, and was remorseful for desiring, oppressed
her; a perpetual consequent warfare of her spirit and the nature subject
to the thousand sensational hypocrisies invoked for concealment of its
reviled brutish baseness, held the woman suspended from her emotions.
She coldly felt that a caress would have melted her, would have been
the temporary rapture. Coldly she had the knowledge that the considerate
withholding of it helped her spirit to escape a stain. Less coldly, she
thanked at heart her beloved, for being a gentleman in their yoke. It
plighted them over flesh.
He talked to her on the pillow, just a few sentences; and, unlike
himself, a word of City affairs: ‘That fellow Blathenoy, with his
increasing multitude of bills at the Bank: must watch him there, sit
there regularly. One rather likes his wife. By the way, if you see him
near me to-morrow, praise the Spanish climate; don’t forget. He heads
the subscription list of Lady Blachington’s Charity.’
Victor chuckled at Colney’s humping of shoulders and mouth, while
the tempest seemed echoing a sulphurous pessimist. ‘If old Colney had
listened to me, when India gave proof of the metal and South Africa
began heaving, he’d have been a fairly wealthy man by now... ha! it
would have genialized him. A man may be a curmudgeon with money: the
rule is for him to cuddle himself and take a side, instead of dashing at
his countrymen all round and getting hated. Well, Colney popular, can’t
be imagined; but entertaining guests would have diluted his acid. He
has the six hundred or so a year he started old bachelor on; add his
miserable pay for Essays. Literature! Of course, he sours. But don’t
let me hear of bachelors moralists. There he sits at his Temple Chambers
hatching epigrams... pretends to have the office of critic! Honest old
fellow, as far as his condition permits. I tell him it will be fine
to-morrow.’
‘You are generally right, dear,’ Nataly said.
Her dropping breath was audible.
Victor smartly commended her to slumber, with heaven’s blessing on her
and a dose of soft nursery prattle.
He squeezed her hand. He kissed her lips by day. She heard him sigh
settling himself into the breast of night for milk of sleep, like one of
the world’s good children. She could have turned to him, to show him she
was in harmony with the holy night and loving world, but for the fear
founded on a knowledge of the man he was; it held her frozen to the
semblance of a tombstone lady beside her lord, in the aisle where horror
kindles pitchy blackness with its legions at one movement. Verily it was
the ghost of Mrs. Burman come to the bed, between them.
Meanwhile the sun of Victor Radnor’s popularity was already up over the
extended circle likely to be drenched by a falsification of his daring
augury, though the scud flew swift, and the beeches raved, and the oaks
roared and snarled, and pine-trees fell their lengths. Fine tomorrow, to
a certainty! he had been heard to say. The doubt weighed for something;
the balance inclined with the gentleman who had become so popular: for
he had done the trick so suddenly, like a stroke of the wizard; and was
a real man, not one of your spangled zodiacs selling for sixpence and
hopping to a lucky hit, laughed at nine times out of ten. The reasoning
went--and it somewhat affected the mansion as well as the cottage,--that
if he had become popular in this astonishing fashion, after making one
of the biggest fortunes of modern times, he might, he must, have secret
gifts. ‘You can’t foretell weather!’ cried a pothouse sceptic. But the
workmen at Lakelands declared that he had foretold it. Sceptics among
the common folk were quaintly silenced by other tales of him, being a
whiff from the delirium attending any mention of his name.
How had he become suddenly so popular as to rouse in the mind of Mr.
Caddis, the sitting Member for the division of the county (said to
have the seat in his pocket), a particular inquisitiveness to know the
bearing of his politics? Mr. Radnor was rich, true: but these are days
when wealthy men, ambitious of notoriety, do not always prove faithful
to their class; some of them are cunning to bid for the suffrages of the
irresponsible, recklessly enfranchised, corruptible masses. Mr. Caddis,
if he had the seat in his pocket, had it from the support of a class
trusting him to support its interests: he could count on the landowners,
on the clergy, on the retired or retiring or comfortably cushioned
merchants resident about Wrensham, on the many obsequious among
electoral shopmen; annually he threw open his grounds, and he
subscribed, patronized, did what was expected; and he was not popular;
he was unpopular. Why? But why was the sun of this 23rd August, shining
from its rise royally upon pacified, enrolled and liveried armies of
cloud, more agreeable to earth’s populations than his pinched appearance
of the poor mopped red nose and melancholic rheumy eyelets on a January
day! Undoubtedly Victor Radnor risked his repute of prophet. Yet his
popularity would have survived the continuance of the storm and deluge.
He did this:--and the mystery puzzling the suspicious was nothing
wonderful: in addition to a transparent benevolence, he spread a sort of
assurance about him, that he thought the better of the people for their
thinking well of themselves. It came first from the workmen at his
house. ‘The right sort, and no humbug: likes you to be men.’ Such a
report made tropical soil for any new seed.
Now, it is a postulate, to strengthen all poor commoners, that not even
in comparison with the highest need we be small unless we yield to think
it of ourselves. Do but stretch a hand to the touch of earth in you, and
you spring upon combative manhood again, from the basis where all are
equal. Humanity’s historians, however, tell us, that the exhilaration
bringing us consciousness of a stature, is gas which too frequently
has to be administered. Certes the cocks among men do not require the
process; they get it off the sight of the sun arising or a simple hen
submissive: but we have our hibernating bears among men, our yoked oxen,
cab horses, beaten dogs; we have on large patches of these Islands,
a Saxon population, much wanting assistance, if they are not to feel
themselves beaten, driven, caught by the neck, yoked and heavyheaded.
Blest, then, is he who gives them a sense of the pride of standing on
legs. Beer, ordinarily their solitary helper beneath the iron canopy
of wealth, is known to them as a bitter usurer; it knocks them flat
in their persons and their fortunes, for the short spell of recreative
exaltation. They send up their rough glory round the name of the
gentleman--a stranger, but their friend: and never is friend to be
thought of as a stranger--who manages to get the holiday for Wrensham
and thereabout, that they may hurl away for one jolly day the old hat of
a doddered humbleness, and trip to the strains of the internal music he
has unwound.
Says he: Is it a Charity Concert? Charity begins at home, says he: and
if I welcome you gentry on behalf of the poor of London, why, it follows
you grant me the right to make a beginning with the poor of our parts
down here. He puts it so, no master nor mistress neither could refuse
him. Why, the workmen at his house were nigh pitching the contractors
all sprawling on a strike, and Mr. Radnor takes train, harangues ‘em and
rubs ‘em smooth; ten minutes by the clock, they say; and return train to
his business in town; by reason of good sense and feeling, it was; poor
men don’t ask for more. A working man, all the world over, asks but
justice and a little relaxation--just a collar of fat to his lean.
Mr. Caddis, M.P., pursuing the riddle of popularity, which irritated and
repelled as constantly as it attracted him, would have come nearer to an
instructive presentment of it, by listening to these plain fellows, than
he was in the line of equipages, at a later hour of the day. The remarks
of the comfortably cushioned and wheeled, though they be eulogistic
to extravagance, are vapourish when we court them for nourishment;
substantially, they are bones to the cynical. He heard enumerations
of Mr. Radnor’s riches, eclipsing his own past compute. A merchant, a
holder of mines, Director of a mighty Bank, projector of running rails,
a princely millionaire, and determined to be popular--what was the aim
of the man? It is the curse of modern times, that we never can be sure
of our Parliamentary seat; not when we have it in our pockets! The
Romans have left us golden words with regard to the fickleness of the
populace; we have our Horace, our Juvenal, we have our Johnson; and in
this vaunted age of reason it is, that we surrender ourselves into the
hands of the populace! Panem et circenses! Mr. Caddis repeated it, after
his fathers; his fathers and he had not headed them out of that original
voracity. There they were, for moneyed legislators to bewail their
appetites. And it was an article of his legislation, to keep them there.
Pedestrian purchasers of tickets for the Charity Concert, rather openly,
in an envelope of humour, confessed to the bait of the Radnor bread with
bit of fun. Savoury rumours were sweeping across Wrensham. Mr. Radnor
had borrowed footmen of the principal houses about. Cartloads of
provisions had been seen to come. An immediate reward of a deed of
benevolence, is a thing sensibly heavenly; and the five-shilling tickets
were paid for as if for a packet on the counter. Unacquainted with Mr.
Radnor, although the reports of him struck a summons to their gastric
juices, resembling in its effect a clamorous cordiality, they were
chilled, on their steps along the halfrolled new gravel-roads to the
house, by seeing three tables of prodigious length, where very evidently
a feast had raged: one to plump the people--perhaps excessively courted
by great gentlemen of late; shopkeepers, the villagers, children. These
had been at it for two merry hours. They had risen. They were beef and
pudding on legs; in some quarters, beer amiably manifest, owing to the
flourishes of a military band. Boys, who had shaken room through their
magical young corporations for fresh stowage, darted out of a chasing
circle to the crumbled cornucopia regretfully forsaken fifteen minutes
back, and buried another tart. Plenty still reigned: it was the will of
the Master that it should.
We divert our attention, resigned in stoic humour, to the bill of the
Concert music, handed us with our tickets at the park-gates: we have no
right to expect refreshment; we came for the music, to be charitable.
Signora Bianca Luciani: of whom we have read almost to the hearing her;
enough to make the mistake at times. The grand violinist Durandarte:
forcibly detained on his way to America. Mr. Radnor sent him a blank
cheque:--no!--so Mr. Radnor besought him in person: he is irresistible;
a great musician himself; it is becoming quite the modern style. We have
now English noblemen who play the horn, the fife--the drum, some say! We
may yet be Merrie England again, with our nobles taking the lead.
England’s nobles as a musical band at the head of a marching and dancing
population, pictured happily an old Conservative country, that retained
its members of aristocracy in the foremost places while subjecting
them to downright uses. Their ancestors, beholding them there, would be
satisfied on the point of honour; perhaps enlivened by hearing them at
fife and drum.
But middle-class pedestrians, having paid five shillings for a ticket to
hear the music they love, and not having full assurance of refreshment,
are often, latterly, satirical upon their superiors; and, over this
country at least, require the refreshment, that the democratic sprouts
in them may be reconciled with aristocracy. Do not listen to them
further on the subject. They vote safely enough when the day comes, if
there is no praetematurally strong pull the other way.
They perceive the name of the Hon. Dudley Sowerby, fourth down the
Concert-bill; marked for a flute-duet with Mr. Victor Radnor, Miss Nesta
Victoria Radnor accompanying at the piano. It may mean?... do you want
a whisper to suggest to you what it may mean? The father’s wealth is
enormous; the mother is a beautiful majestic woman in her prime. And
see, she sings: a wonderful voice. And lower down, a duet with her
daughter: violins and clarionet; how funny; something Hungarian. And
in the Second Part, Schubert’s Ave Maria--Oh! when we hear that, we
dissolve. She was a singer before he married her, they say: a lady by
birth one of the first County families. But it was a gift, and she could
not be kept from it, and was going, when they met--and it was love! the
most perfect duet. For him she abandoned the Stage. You must remember,
that in their young days the Stage was many stages beneath the esteem
entertained for it now. Domestic Concerts are got up to gratify her: a
Miss Fredericks: good old English name. Mr. Radnor calls his daughter,
Freddy; so Mr. Taplow, the architect, says. They are for modern music
and ancient. Tannhauser, Wagner, you see. Pergolese.
Flute-duet, Mercadante. Here we have him! O--Durandarte: Air Basque,
variations--his own. Again, Senor Durandarte, Mendelssohn. Encore
him, and he plays you a national piece. A dark little creature a
Life-guardsman could hold-up on his outstretched hand for the fifteen
minutes of the performance; but he fills the hall and thrills the heart,
wafts you to heaven; and does it as though he were conversing with his
Andalusian lady-love in easy whispers about their mutual passion
for Spanish chocolate all the while: so the musical critic of the
Tirra-Lirra says. Express trains every half hour from London; all the
big people of the city. Mr. Radnor commands them, like Royalty. Totally
different from that old figure of the wealthy City merchant; young,
vigorous, elegant, a man of taste, highest culture, speaks the languages
of Europe, patron of the Arts, a perfect gentleman. His mother was one
of the Montgomerys, Mr. Taplow says.
And it was General Radnor, a most distinguished officer, dying knighted.
But Mr. Victor Radnor would not take less than a Barony--and then only
with descent of title to his daughter, in her own right.
Mr. Taplow had said as much as Victor Radnor chose that he should say.
Carriages were in flow for an hour: pedestrians formed a wavy coil.
Judgeing by numbers, the entertainment was a success; would the hall
contain them? Marvels were told of the hall. Every ticket entered and
was enfolded; almost all had a seat. Chivalry stood. It is a breeched
abstraction, sacrificeing voluntarily and genially to the Fair, for a
restoring of the balance between the sexes, that the division of good
things be rather in the fair ones’ favour, as they are to think: with
the warning to them, that the establishment of their claim for equality
puts an end to the priceless privileges of petticoats. Women must be
mad, to provoke such a warning; and the majority of them submissively
show their good sense. They send up an incense of perfumery, all the
bouquets of the chemist commingled; most nourishing to the idea of
woman in the nose of man. They are a forest foliage--rustle of silks and
muslins, magic interweaving, or the mythology, if you prefer it. See,
hear, smell, they are Juno, Venus, Hebe, to you. We must have poetry
with them; otherwise they are better in the kitchen. Is there--but there
is not; there is not present one of the chivalrous breeched who could
prefer the shocking emancipated gristly female, which imposes propriety
on our sensations and inner dreams, by petrifying in the tender bud of
them.
Colonel Corfe is the man to hear on such a theme. He is a colonel of
Companies. But those are his diversion, as the British Army has been
to the warrior. Puellis idoneus, he is professedly a lady’s man, a
rose-beetle, and a fine specimen of a common kind: and he has been that
thing, that shining delight of the lap of ladies, for a spell of years,
necessitating a certain sparkle of the saccharine crystals preserving
him, to conceal the muster. He has to be fascinating, or he would look
outworn, forlorn. On one side of him is Lady Carmine; on the other,
Lady Swanage; dames embedded in the blooming maturity of England’s
conservatory. Their lords (an Earl, a Baron) are of the lords who go
down to the City to sow a title for a repair of their poor incomes, and
are to be commended for frankly accepting the new dispensation while
they retain the many advantages of the uncancelled ancient. Thus gently
does a maternal Old England let them down. Projectors of Companies,
Directors, Founders; Railway magnates, actual kings and nobles (though
one cannot yet persuade old reverence to do homage with the ancestral
spontaneity to the uncrowned, uncoroneted, people of our sphere);
holders of Shares in gold mines, Shares in Afric’s blue mud of the
glittering teeth we draw for English beauty to wear in the ear, on the
neck, at the wrist; Bankers and wives of Bankers. Victor passed among
them, chatting right and left.
Lady Carmine asked him: ‘Is Durandarte counted on?’
He answered: ‘I made sure of the Luciani.’
She serenely understood. Artistes are licenced people, with a Bohemian
instead of the titular glitter for the bewildering of moralists; as
paste will pass for diamonds where the mirror is held up to Nature by
bold supernumeraries.
He wished to introduce Nesta. His girl was on the raised orchestral
flooring. Nataly held her fast to a music-scroll.
Mr. Peridon, sad for the absence and cause of absence of Louise de
Seilles,--summoned in the morning abruptly to Bourges, where her brother
lay with his life endangered by an accident at Artillery practise,--Mr.
Peridon was generally conductor. Victor was to lead the full force of
amateurs in the brisk overture to Zampa. He perceived a movement of
Nataly, Nesta, and Peridon. ‘They have come,’ he said; he jumped on the
orchestra boards and hastened to greet the Luciani with Durandarte in
the retiring-room.
His departure raised the whisper that he would wield the baton. An
opinion was unuttered. His name for the flute-duet with the Hon. Dudley
Sowerby had not provoked the reserve opinion; it seemed, on the whole,
a pretty thing in him to condescend to do: the sentiment he awakened
was not flustered by it. But the act of leading, appeared as an official
thing to do. Our soufe of sentiment will be seen subsiding under
a breath, without a repressive word to send it down. Sir Rodwell
Blachington would have preferred Radnor’s not leading or playing either.
Colonel Corfe and Mr. Caddis declined to consider such conduct English,
in a man of station... notwithstanding Royal Highnesses, who are at
least partly English: partly, we say, under our breath, remembering our
old ideal of an English gentleman, in opposition to German tastes. It is
true, that the whole country is changeing, decomposing!
The colonel fished for Lady Carmine’s view. And Lady Swanage too? Both
of the distinguished ladies approved of Mr. Radnor’s leading--for a
leading off. Women are pleased to see their favourite in the place of
prominence--as long as Fortune swims him unbuffeted, or one should say,
unbattered, up the mounting wave. Besides these ladies had none of
the colonel’s remainder of juvenile English sense of the manly, his
adolescent’s intolerance of the eccentric, suspicion and contempt of any
supposed affectation, which was not ostentatiously, stalkingly practised
to subdue the sex. And you cannot wield a baton without looking
affected. And at one of the Colonel’s Clubs in town, only five years
back, an English musical composer, who had not then made his money--now
by the mystery of events knighted!--had been (he makes now fifteen
thousand a year) black-balled. ‘Fiddler? no; can’t admit a Fiddler to
associate on equal terms with gentlemen.’ Only five years back: and at
present we are having the Fiddler everywhere.
A sprinkling of the minor ladies also would have been glad if Mr. Radnor
had kept himself somewhat more exclusive. Dr. Schlesien heard remarks,
upon which his weighty Teutonic mind sat crushingly. Do these English
care one bit for music?--for anything finer than material stuffs?--what
that man Durance calls, ‘their beef, their beer, and their pew in
eternity’? His wrath at their babble and petty brabble doubted that they
did.
But they do. Art has a hold of them. They pay for it; and the thing
purchased grapples. It will get to their bosoms to breathe from them in
time: entirely overcoming the taste for feudalism, which still a little
objects to see their born gentleman acting as leader of musicians. A
people of slow movement, developing tardily, their country is wanting
in the distincter features, from being always in the transitional state,
like certain sea-fish rolling head over-you know not head from tail.
Without the Welsh, Irish, Scot; in their composition, there would not be
much of the yeasty ferment: but it should not be forgotten that Welsh,
Irish, Scot, are now largely of their numbers; and the taste for
elegance, and for spiritual utterance, for Song, nay, for Ideas, is
there among them, though it does not everywhere cover a rocky surface to
bewitch the eyes of aliens;--like Louise de Seilles and Dr. Schlesien,
for example; aliens having no hostile disposition toward the people they
were compelled to criticize; honourably granting, that this people has a
great history. Even such has the Lion, with Homer for the transcriber of
his deeds. But the gentle aliens would image our emergence from wildness
as the unsocial spectacle presented by the drear menagerie Lion, alone
or mated; with hardly an animated moment save when the raw red joint is
beneath his paw, reminding him of the desert’s pasture.
Nevertheless, where Strength is, there is hope:--it may be said more
truly than of the breath of Life; which is perhaps but the bucket of
breath, muddy with the sediment of the well: whereas we have in Strength
a hero, if a malefactor; whose muscles shall haul him up to the light he
will prove worthy of, when that divinity has shown him his uncleanness.
And when Strength is not exercising, you are sure to see Satirists
jump on his back. Dozens, foreign and domestic, are on the back of Old
England; a tribute to our quality if at the same time an irritating
scourge. The domestic are in excess; and let us own that their view of
the potentate, as an apathetic beast of power, who will neither show the
power nor woo the graces; pretending all the while to be eminently above
the beast, and posturing in an inefficient mimicry of the civilized,
excites to satire. Colney Durance had his excuses. He could point to the
chief creative minds of the country for generations, as beginning their
survey genially, ending venomously, because of an exasperating unreason
and scum in the bubble of the scenes, called social, around them. Viola
under his chin, he gazed along the crowded hall, which was to him a rich
national pudding of the sycophants, the hypocrites, the burlies, the
idiots; dregs of the depths and froth of the surface; bowing to one,
that they may scorn another; instituting a Charity, for their poorer
fawning fellows to relieve their purses and assist them in tricking the
world and their Maker: and so forth, a tiresome tirade: and as it was
not on his lips, but in the stomach of the painful creature, let him
grind that hurdy-gurdy for himself. His friend Victor set it stirring:
Victor had here what he aimed at!
How Success derides Ambition! And for this he imperilled the happiness
of the worthy woman he loved! Exposed her to our fen-fogs and foul
snakes--of whom one or more might be in the assembly now: all because
of his insane itch to be the bobbing cork on the wave of the minute!
Colney’s rapid interjections condensed upon the habitual shrug at human
folly, just when Victor, fronting the glassy stare of Colonel Corfe,
tapped to start his orchestra through the lively first bars of the
overture to Zampa.
We soon perceive that the post Mr. Radnor fills he thoroughly fills,
whatever it may be. Zampa takes horse from the opening. We have no
amateur conductor riding ahead: violins, ‘cellos, piano, wind-stops:
Peridon, Catkin, Pempton, Yatt, Cormyn, Colney, Mrs. Cormyn, Dudley
Sowerby: they are spirited on, patted, subdued, muted, raised, rushed
anew, away, held in hand, in both hands. Not earnestness worn as a
cloak, but issuing, we see; not simply a leader of musicians, a leader
of men. The halo of the millionaire behind, assures us of a development
in the character of England’s merchant princes. The homage we pay him
flatters us. A delightful overture, masterfully executed; ended too
soon; except that the programme forbids the ordinary interpretation
of prolonged applause. Mr. Radnor is one of those who do everything
consummately. And we have a monition within, that a course of spiritual
enjoyment will rouse the call for bodily refreshment. His genial nod and
laugh and word of commendation to his troop persuade us oddly, we know
not how, of provision to come. At the door of the retiring-room, see, he
is congratulated by Luciani and Durandarte. Miss Priscilla Graves is
now to sing a Schumann. Down later, it is a duet with the Rev. Septimus
Barmby. We have nothing to be ashamed of in her, before an Italian
Operatic singer! Ices after the first part is over.