of the Assertion questioned.—Comfort.—Curious
Conveniences.—Pocket-fender.—Hunting-razors._
There are two words in their language on which these people pride
themselves, and which they say cannot be translated. _Home_ is the one,
by which an Englishman means his house. As the meaning is precisely the
same whether it be expressed by one word or by two, and the feeling
associated therewith is the same also, the advantage seems wholly
imaginary; for assuredly this meaning can be conveyed in any language
without any possible ambiguity. In general, when a remark of this kind
is made to me, if I do not perceive its truth, I rather attribute it to
my own imperfect conception than to any fallacy in the assertion; but
when this was said to me, I recollected the exquisite lines of Catullus,
and asked if they were improved in the English translation:
O quid solutis est beatius curis,
Cum mens onus reponit, ac peregrino
Labore fessi, venimus _larem ad nostrum_
Desideratoque acquiescimus lecto?
We may with truth say that our word _solar_[14] is untranslatable, for
the English have not merely no equivalent term, but no feeling
correspondent to it. That reverence for the seat of our ancestors, which
with us is almost a religion, is wholly unknown here. But how can it be
otherwise in a land where there is no pride of blood, and where men who
would be puzzled to trace the place of their grandfather’s birth, are
not unfrequently elevated to a level with the grandees!
Footnote 14:
_Solar_ is the floor of a house. _Hidalgo de solar conocido_, is the
phrase used for a man of old family.—TR.
The other word is _comfort_; it means all the enjoyments and privileges
of _home_, or which, when abroad, makes us feel no want of _home_; and
here I must confess that these proud islanders have reason for their
pride. In their social intercourse and their modes of life they have
enjoyments which we never dream of. Saints and philosophers teach us
that they who have the fewest wants are the wisest and the happiest; but
neither philosophers nor saints are in fashion in England. It is
recorded of some old Eastern tyrant, that he offered a reward for the
discovery of a new pleasure;—in like manner this nation offers a
perpetual reward to those who will discover new wants for them, in the
readiness wherewith they purchase any thing, if the seller will but
assure them that it is exceedingly convenient. For instance, in the
common act of drawing a cork, a common screw was thought perfectly
sufficient for the purpose from the time when bottles were invented,
till within the last twenty years. It was then found somewhat
inconvenient to exert the arm, that the wine was spoilt by shaking, and
that the neck of the bottle might come off: to prevent these evils and
this danger, some ingenious fellow adapted the mechanical screw, and the
cork was extracted by the simple operation of turning a lever. Well,
this lasted for a generation, till another artificer discovered, with
equal ingenuity, that it was exceedingly unpleasant to dirt the fingers
by taking off the cork; a compound concave screw was therefore invented,
first to draw the cork and then to discharge it, and the profits of this
useful invention are secured to the inventor by a patent.—The royal arms
are affixed to this Patent Compound Concave Corkscrew; and the inventor,
in defiance to all future corkscrew-makers, has stamped upon it _Ne plus
ultra_, signifying that the art of making corkscrews can be carried no
further.—The tallow candles which they burn here frequently require
snuffing; but the common implement for this purpose had served time out
of mind, till within the present reign, the great epoch of the rise of
manufactures, and the decline of every thing else; a machine was then
invented to prevent the snuff from falling out upon the table; another
inventor supplanted this by using a revolving tube or cylinder, which
could never be so filled as to strain the spring; and now a still more
ingenious mechanic proposes to make snuffers which shall, by their own
act, snuff the candle whenever it is required, and to save all trouble
whatever.—One sort of knife is used for fish, another for butter, a
third for cheese. Penknives and scissars are not sufficient here; they
have an instrument to make pens, and an instrument to clip the nails.
They have a machine for slicing cucumbers; one instrument to pull on the
shoe, another to pull on the boot, another to button the knees of the
breeches. Pocket-toasting-forks have been invented, as if it were
possible to want a toasting-fork in the pocket; and even this has been
exceeded by the fertile genius of a celebrated projector, who ordered a
pocket-fender for his own use, which was to cost 200_l._ The article was
made, but as it did not please, payment was refused; an action was in
consequence brought, and the workman said upon the trial that he was
very sorry to disoblige so good a customer, and would willingly have
taken the thing back, if there could be any chance of selling it, but
that really nobody except the gentleman in question ever would want a
pocket-fender. This same gentleman has contrived to have the whole set
of fire-irons made hollow instead of solid; to be sure, the cost is more
than twenty-fold, but what is that to the convenience of holding a few
ounces in the hand, when you stir the fire, instead of a few pounds?
This curious projector is said to have taken out above seventy patents
for inventions equally ingenious, and equally useful; but a more
extraordinary invention than any of his threescore and ten, is that of
the hunting-razor, with which you may shave yourself while riding full
gallop.
There is no end of these oddities; but the number of real conveniences
which have been created by this indiscriminate demand for novelty is
truly astonishing. These are the refinements of late years, the devices
of a people made wanton by prosperity. It is not for such superfluities
that the English are to be envied; it is for their domestic habits, and
for that unrestrained intercourse of the sexes, which, instead of
producing the consequences we should expect, gives birth not only to
their greatest enjoyments, but also to their best virtues.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
LETTER XVIII.
_Drury-Lane Theatre.—The Winter’s Tale.—Kemble.—Mrs Siddons.—Don Juan._
There is nothing in a foreign land which a traveller is so little able
to enjoy as the national theatre: though he may read the language with
ease, and converse in it with little difficulty, still he cannot follow
the progress of a story upon the stage, nor catch the jests, which set
all around him in a roar, unless he has lived so long in the country,
that his ear has become perfectly naturalized. Fully aware of this, I
desired J— to take me there on some evening when the drama would be most
intelligible to the sense of sight; and we went accordingly yesternight
to see The Winter’s Tale, a play of the famous Shakespeare’s, which has
been lately revived for the purpose of displaying to advantage their two
most celebrated performers, Kemble, and his sister Mrs Siddons.
In the reigns of Elizabeth and James, the golden age of the English
drama, London was not a tenth part of its present size, and it then
contained seventeen theatres. At present there are but two. More would
succeed, and indeed more are wanted, but these have obtained exclusive
privileges. Old people say the acting was better in their younger days,
because there were more schools for actors; and the theatres being
smaller, the natural voice could be heard, and the natural expression of
the features seen, and therefore rant and distortion were unnecessary.
They, however, who remember no other generation of actors than the
present, will not be persuaded that there has ever been one more
perfect. Be this as it may, all are agreed that the drama itself has
wofully degenerated, though it is the only species of literary labour
which is well paid. They are agreed also as to the cause of this
degeneracy, attributing it to the prodigious size of the theatres. The
finer tones of passion cannot be discriminated, nor the finer movements
of the countenance perceived from the front, hardly from the middle of
the house. Authors, therefore, substitute what is here called broad
farce for genuine comedy; their jests are made intelligible by grimace,
or by that sort of mechanical wit which can be seen; comedy is made up
of trick, and tragedy of processions, pageants, battles, and explosions.
The two theatres are near each other, and tolerably well situated for
the more fashionable and more opulent parts of the town; but buildings
of such magnitude might have been made ornamental to the metropolis, and
both require a more open space before them. Soldiers were stationed at
the doors; and as we drew near we were importuned by women with oranges,
and by boys to purchase a bill of the play. We went into the pit that I
might have a better view of the house, which was that called Drury-lane,
from the place where it stands, the larger and more beautiful of the
two. The price here is three shillings and sixpence, about sixteen
reales. The benches are not divided into single seats, and men and women
here and in all parts of the house sit promiscuously.
I had heard much of this theatre, and was prepared for wonder; still the
size, the height, the beauty, the splendour, astonished me. Imagine a
pit capable of holding a thousand persons, four tiers of boxes supported
by pillars scarcely thicker than a man’s arm, and two galleries in
front, the higher one at such a distance, that they who are in it must
be content to see the show, without hoping to hear the dialogue; the
colours blue and silver, and the whole illuminated with chandeliers of
cut glass, not partially nor parsimoniously; every part as distinctly
seen as if in the noon sunshine. After the first feeling of surprise and
delight, I began to wish that a massier style of architecture had been
adopted. The pillars, which are iron, are so slender as to give an idea
of insecurity; their lightness is much admired, but it is
disproportioned and out of place. There is a row of private boxes on
each side of the pit, on a level with it; convenient they must doubtless
be to those who occupy them, and profitable to the proprietors of the
house; but they deform the theatre.
The people in the galleries were very noisy before the representation
began, whistling and calling to the musicians; and they amused
themselves by throwing orange-peel into the pit and upon the stage:
after the curtain drew up they were sufficiently silent. The pit was
soon filled; the lower side-boxes did not begin to fill till towards the
middle of the first act, because that part of the audience is too
fashionable to come in time; the back part of the front boxes not till
the half play; they were then filled with a swarm of prostitutes, and of
men who came to meet them. In the course of the evening there were two
or three quarrels there which disturbed the performance, and perhaps
ended in duels the next morning. The English say, and I believe they say
truly, that they are the most moral people in Europe; but were they to
be judged by their theatres,—I speak not of the representation, but of
the manners which are exhibited by this part of the audience,—it would
be thought that no people had so little sense of common decorum, or paid
so little respect to public decency.
No prompter was to be seen; the actors were perfect, and stood in no
need of his awkward presence. The story of the drama was, with a little
assistance, easily intelligible to me; not, indeed, by the dialogue; for
of that I found myself quite unable to understand any two sentences
together, scarcely a single one: and when I looked afterwards at the
printed play, I perceived that the difficulty lay in the peculiarity of
Shakespeare’s language, which is so antiquated, and still more so
perplexed, that few even of the English themselve can thoroughly
understand their favourite author. The tale, however, is this.
Polixenes, king of Bohemia, is visiting his friend Leontes, king of
Sicily; he is about to take his departure; Leontes presses him to stay
awhile longer, but in vain—urges the request with warmth, and is still
refused; then sets his queen to persuade him; and, perceiving that she
succeeds, is seized with sudden jealousy, which, in the progress of the
scene, becomes so violent, that he orders one of his courtiers to murder
Polixenes. This courtier acquaints Polixenes with his danger, and flies
with him. Leontes throws the queen into prison, where she is delivered
of a daughter; he orders the child to be burnt; his attendants
remonstrate against this barbarous sentence, and he then sends one of
them to carry it out of his dominions, and expose it in some wild place.
He has sent messengers to Delphos to consult the oracle; but, instead of
waiting for their return to confirm his suspicions or disprove them, he
brings the queen to trial. During the trial the messengers arrive, the
answer of the god is opened, and found to be that the queen is innocent,
the child legitimate, and that Leontes will be without an heir, unless
this which is lost shall be found. Even this fails to convince him; but
immediately tidings come in that the prince, his only son, has died of
anxiety for his mother: the queen at this faints, and is carried off;
and her woman comes in presently to say that she is dead also.
The courtier meantime lands with the child upon the coast of Bohemia,
and there leaves it: a bear pursues him across the stage, to the great
delight of the audience, and eats him out of their sight; which is
doubtless to their great disappointment. The ship is lost with all on
board in a storm, and thus no clue is left for discovering the princess.
Sixteen years are now supposed to elapse between the third and fourth
acts: the lost child, Perdita, has grown up a beautiful shepherdess, and
the son of Polixenes has promised marriage to her. He proceeds to
espouse her at a sheep-shearing feast; where a pedlar, who picks
pockets, excites much merriment. Polixenes, and Camillo the old courtier
who had preserved his life, are present in disguise and prevent the
contract. Camillo, longing to return to his own country, persuades the
prince to fly with his beloved to Sicily: he then goes with the king in
pursuit of them. The old shepherd, who has brought up Perdita as his own
child, goes in company with her; he produces the things which he had
found with her; she is thus discovered to be the lost daughter of
Leontes, and the oracle is accomplished. But the greatest wonder is yet
to come. As Leontes still continues to bewail the loss of his wife,
Paulina, the queen’s woman, promises to show him a statue of her,
painted to the life, the work of Julio Romano, that painter having
flourished in the days when Bohemia was a maritime country, and when the
kings thereof were used to consult the oracle of Apollo, being
idolaters. This statue proves to be the queen herself, who begins to
move to slow music, and comes down to her husband. And then to conclude
the play, as it was the husband of this woman who has been eaten by the
bear, old Camillo is given her that she may be no loser.
Far be it from me to judge of Shakespeare by these absurdities, which
are all that I can understand of the play. While, however, the English
tolerate such, and are pleased not merely in spite of them, but with
them, it would become their travellers not to speak with quite so much
contempt of the Spanish theatre. That Shakespeare was a great dramatist,
notwithstanding his Winter’s Tale, I believe; just as I know Cervantes
to have been a great man, though he wrote _El Rufián Dichoso_.
But you cannot imagine any thing more impressive than the finer parts of
this representation; the workings of the king’s jealousy, the dignified
grief and resentment of the queen, tempered with compassion for her
husband’s phrensy; and the last scene in particular, which surpassed
whatever I could have conceived of theatrical effect. The actress who
personated the queen is acknowledged lo be perfect in her art: she stood
leaning upon a pedestal with one arm, the other hanging down—the best
Grecian sculptor could not have adjusted her drapery with more grace,
nor have improved the attitude; and when she began to move, though this
was what the spectators were impatiently expecting, it gave every person
such a start of delight, as the dramatist himself would have wished,
though the whole merit must be ascribed to the actress.
The regular entertainments on the English stage consist of a play of
three or five acts, and an afterpiece of two; interludes are added only
on benefit nights. The afterpiece this evening was Don Juan, our old
story of the reprobate cavalier and the statue, here represented wholly
in pantomime. Nothing could be more insipid than all the former part of
this drama, nothing more dreadful, and indeed unfit for scenic
representation, than the catastrophe: but either the furies of Æschylus
were more terrible than European devils, or our Christian ladies are
less easily frightened than the women of Greece, for this is a favourite
spectacle everywhere. I know not whether the invention be originally
ours or the Italians; be it whose it may, the story of the Statue is in
a high style of fancy, truly fine and terrific. The sound of his marble
footsteps upon the stage struck a dead silence through the house. It is
to this machinery that the popularity of the piece is owing; and in
spite of the dulness which precedes this incident, and the horror which
follows it, I do not wonder that it is popular. Still it would be
decorous in English writers to speak with a little less disrespect of
the Spanish stage, and of the taste of a Spanish audience, while their
own countrymen continue to represent and to delight in one of the most
monstrous of all our dramas.
The representation began at seven; and the meals in London are so late,
that even this is complained of as inconveniently early. We did not
reach home till after midnight.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
LETTER XIX.
_English Church Service.—Banns of Marriage.—Inconvenience of having the
Sermon a regular Part.—Sermons an Article of Trade.—Popular
Preachers.—Private Chapels._
The ceremonies of the English Church Service are soon described. Imagine
a church with one altar covered with crimson velvet, the Creed and the
Decalogue over it in golden letters, over these the Hebrew name of God,
or the I.H.S. at the pleasure of the painter, and half a dozen winged
heads about it, clumsily painted, or more clumsily carved: the nakedness
of the other walls concealed by a gallery; an organ over the door, and
below it, immediately fronting the priest, a clock. Here also in some
conspicuous place is a tablet to record in what year the church was
repaired or beautified, and to perpetuate the names of the
church-wardens at that time in letters of gold. Another tablet
enumerates, but in faded lettering, and less conspicuous situation, all
the benefactors to the parish; that is, all who have left alms to the
poor, or fees to the minister for an anniversary sermon. The gallery and
the area of the church are divided into pews, as they are called, by
handsome mahogany partitions, within which the rich sit on cushioned
seats, and kneel on hassocks, while the poor stand in the aisle, and
kneel upon the stones. These pews are usually freehold, attached to
houses in the parish. In towns a rent is exacted for them; and in
private chapels, of which I shall speak hereafter, the whole income is
derived from them, as in a theatre. The reading-desk of the priest is
under the pulpit, and under it that of the clerk; there are no other
assistants except the sexton and his wife, who open the pews, and expect
a fee for accommodating a stranger with a seat. The priest wears a
surplice; the clerk is no otherwise distinguished from the laity than as
he has a stronger voice than usual, reads worse than other people, that
is, more like a boy at a village school, and more frequently speaks
through the nose. The catholic church has no corresponding office; he is
to the congregation what the leader of the band is to an orchestra.
Some part of the service is repeated by the clerk and the people after
the priest; with others, as the psalms, and all the hymns, they proceed
alternately verse by verse; the priest reads the scripture lessons and
many of the prayers alone; he also reads the Litany, and the clerk and
congregation make the petition at the end of every clause. There is
nothing in the Liturgy to which a Catholic must necessarily object,
except the absolution; and with respect to that, his objection would be
to the sense in which it is taken, not to that which it was intended to
convey. After the first lesson the organist relieves the priest by
playing a tune, good or bad according to his own fancy. This is an
interlude of modern interpolation, which would have shocked the
Protestants in those days when their priests were more zealous and
longer-winded. At the end of what is properly called the morning
service, though on the Sunday it is but the first part of three, a
portion of the Psalms in vile verse, is given out by the clerk, and sung
by the whole congregation: the organ seems to have been introduced in
all opulent churches to hide the hideous discord of so many untuned and
unmusical voices, and overpower it by a louder strain. A second part
follows, which is usually performed beside the altar, but this is at the
option of the officiating priest; in this the congregation and their
leader have little more to do than to cry Amen, except that they repeat
the Nicene Creed; this part also is terminated by psalm-singing, during
which the priest exchanges his white vestment for a black one, and
ascends the pulpit. He begins with a short prayer, of which the form is
left to himself; then proceeds to the sermon. In old times the sermon
was a serious thing, both for the preacher and the hearers; the more,
the better, was the maxim in the days of fanaticism, and when the sands
of one hour were run out the people heard with pleasure the invitation
of the preacher to take another glass with him. But times are changed;
the hour-glass has disappeared, the patience of a congregation is now
understood to last twenty minutes, and in this instance short measure is
preferred. Immediately after the valediction the organ strikes up a loud
peal, with much propriety, as it drowns the greetings and salutations
which pass from one person to another. The Litany and the whole of the
second part are omitted in the evening service.
Thus you perceive, that having apostatized and given up the essentials
of religion, the schismatics have deprived divine service of its
specific meaning and motive. It is no longer a sacrifice for the people.
The congregation assemble to say prayers which might as well be said in
their oratories, and to hear sermons which might more conveniently be
read at home. Nothing is done which might not be done with the same
propriety in a chamber as in a church, and by a layman as by a priest.
A curious legal form is observed in the midst of the service; the priest
reads a list of all the persons in the parish who are about to be
married. This is done three successive Sundays, that if any person
should be acquainted with any existing impediment to the marriage, he
may declare it in time. The better classes avoid this publicity by
obtaining a license at easy expense. Those of high rank choose to be
married at their own houses, a license for which can be obtained from
only the primate. In Scotland, where the schismatics succeeded in
abolishing all the decencies as well as the ornaments of religion, this
is the universal practice; the sacrament of marriage may be celebrated
in any place, and by any person, in that country, and the whole funeral
ceremony there consists in digging a hole, and putting the body into it!