FANNY MILLINGER ONCE MORE.--LOVE.--WOMAN.--BOOKS.--A HUNDRED TOPICS
TOUCHED ON THE SURFACE.--GODOLPHIN’S STATE OF MIND MORE MINUTELY
EXAMINED.--THE DINNER AT SAVILLE’S.
Godolphin went to see and converse with Fanny Millinger.
She was still unmarried, and still the fashion. There was a sort of
allegory of real life, in the manner in which, at certain epochs,
our Idealist was brought into contact with the fair actress of ideal
creations. There was, in short, something of a moral in the way these
two streams of existence--the one belonging to the Actual, the other to
the Imaginary--flowed on, crossing each other at stated times. Which
was the more really imaginative--the life of the stage, or that of the
world’s stage? The gay Fanny was rejoiced to welcome back again her
early lover. She ran on, talking of a thousand topics, without remarking
the absent mind and musing eye of Godolphin, till he himself stopped her
somewhat abruptly:--
“Well, Fanny, well, and what do you know of Saville? You have grown
intimate with him, eh? We shall meet at his house this evening.”
“Oh, yes, he is a charming person in his little way; and the only man
who allows me to be a friend without dreaming of becoming a lover. Now
that’s what I like. We poor actresses have so much would-be love in the
course of our lives, that a little friendship now and then is a novelty
which other and soberer people can never appreciate. On reading Gil Blas
the other day--I am no great reader, as you may remember--I was struck
by that part in which the dear Santillane assures us that there was
never any love between him and Laura the actress. I thought it so
true to nature, so probable, that they should have formed so strong an
intimacy for each other, lived in the same house, had every opportunity
for love, yet never loved. And it was exactly because she was an
actress, and a light good-for-nothing creature that it so happened;
the very multiplicity of lovers prevented her falling in love; the very
carelessness of her life, poor girl, rendered a friend so charming to
her. It would have spoiled the friend to have made him an adorer; it
would have turned the rarity into the every-day character. Now, so it
is with me and Saville; I like his wit, he likes my good temper. We see
each other as often as if we were in love; and yet I do not believe it
even possible that he should ever kiss my hand. After all,” continued
Fanny, laughing, “love is not so necessary to us women as people think.
Fine writers say, ‘Oh, men have a thousand objects, women but one!’
That’s nonsense, dear Percy; women have their thousand objects too. They
have not the bar, but they have the milliner’s shop; they can’t fight,
but they can sit by the window and embroider a work-bag; they don’t rush
into politics, but they plunge their souls into love for a parrot or a
lap-dog. Don’t let men flatter themselves; Providence has been just as
kind in that respect to one sex as to the other; our objects are small,
yours great; but a small object may occupy the mind just as much as the
loftiest.”
“Ours great! pshaw!” said Godolphin, who was rather struck with Fanny’s
remarks; “there is nothing great in those professions which man is
pleased to extol. Is selfishness great? Are the low trickery, the
organised lies of the bar, a great calling? Is the mechanical slavery
of the soldier--fighting because he is in the way of fighting, without
knowing the cause, without an object, save a dim, foolish vanity which
he calls glory, and cannot analyse--is that a great aim and vocation?
Well: the senate! look at the outcry which wise men make against the
loathsome corruption of that arena; then look at the dull hours,--the
tedious talk, the empty boasts, the poor and flat rewards, and tell me
where is the greatness? No, Fanny! the embroidered work-bag, and the
petted parrot, afford just as great--morally great--occupations as those
of the bar, the army, the senate. It is only the frivolous who talk of
frivolities; there is nothing frivolous; all earthly occupations are
on a par--alike important if they alike occupy; for to the wise all are
poor and valueless.”
“I fancy you are very wrong,” said the actress, pressing her pretty
fingers to her forehead, as if to understand him; “but I cannot tell you
why, and I never argue. I ramble on in my odd way, casting out my shrewd
things without defending them if any one chooses to quarrel with them.
What I do I let others do. My maxim in talk is my maxim in life. I claim
liberty for myself, and give indulgence to others.”
“I see,” said Godolphin, “that you have plenty of books about you,
though you plead not guilty to reading. Do you learn your philosophy
from them? for I think you have contracted a vein of reflection since we
parted which I scarcely recognise as an old characteristic.”
“Why,” answered Fanny, “though I don’t read, I skim. Sometimes I canter
through a dozen novels in a morning. I am disappointed, I confess, in
all these works; I want to see more real knowledge of the world than
they ever display. They tell us how Lord Arthur looked, and Lady Lucy
dressed, and what was the colour of those curtains, and these eyes, and
so forth; and then the better sort, perhaps, do also tell us what the
heroine felt as well as wore, and try with might and main to pull some
string of the internal machine; but still I am not enlightened, not
touched. I don’t recognise men and women; they are puppets with holiday
phrases: and I tell you what, Percy, these novelists make the last
mistake you would suppose them guilty of; they have not romance enough
in them to paint the truths of society. Old gentlemen say novels are
bad teachers of life, because they make it too ideal; quite the reverse:
novels are too trite! too superficial! Their very talk about love, and
the fuss they make about it, show how shallow real romance is with them;
for they say nothing new on it, and real romance is for ever striking
out new thoughts. Am I not right, Percy?--No! life, be it worldly as
it may, has a vast deal of romance in it. Every one of us (even poor
I) have a mine of thoughts, and fancies, and wishes, that books are too
dull and commonplace to reach the heart is a romance in itself.”
“A philosophical romance, my Fanny; full of mysteries and conceits,
and refinements, mixed up with its deeper passages. But how came you so
wise?”
“Thank you!” answered Fanny, with a profound curtsey. “The fact
is--though you, as in duty bound, don’t perceive it--that I am older
than I was when we last met. I reflect where I then felt. Besides, the
stage fills our heads with a half sort of wisdom, and gives us that
strange melange of shrewd experience and romantic notions which is, in
fact, the real representation of nine human hearts out of ten.
Talking of books, I want some one to write a novel, which shall be
a metaphysical Gil Blas; which shall deal more with the mind than Le
Sage’s book, and less with the actions; which shall make its hero the
creature of the world, but a different creation, though equally true;
which shall give a faithful picture in the character of one man of the
aspect and the effects of our social system; making that man of a better
sort of clay than the amusing lacquey was, and the produce of a more
artificial grade of society. The book I mean would be a sadder one than
Le Sage’s but equally faithful to life.”
“And it would have more of romance, if I rightly understand what you
mean?”
“Precisely: romance of idea as well as incident--natural romance. By the
way, how few know what natural romance is: so that you feel the ideas in
a book or play are true and faithful to the characters they are ascribed
to, why mind whether the incidents are probable? Yet common readers
only go by the incidents; as if the incidents in three-fourths of
Shakspeare’s plays were even ordinarily possible! But people have so
little nature in them, that they don’t know what is natural!”
Thus Fanny ran on, in no very connected manner; stringing together those
remarks which, unless I am mistaken, show how much better an uneducated,
clever girl, whose very nature is a quick perception of art, can play
the critic, than the pedants who assume the office.
But it was only for the moment that the heavy heart of Godolphin could
forget its load. It was in vain that he sought to be amused while yet
smarting under the freshness of regret. A great shock had been given to
his nature; he had loved against his will; and as we have seen, on
his return to the Priory, he had even resolved on curing himself of
a passion so unprofitable and unwise. But the jealousy of a night had
shivered into dust a prudence which never of right belonged to a very
ardent and generous nature: that jealousy was soothed, allayed; but
how fierce, how stunning was the blow that succeeded it! Constance had
confessed love, and yet had refused him--for ever! Clear and noble as to
herself her motives might seem in that refusal, it was impossible that
they should appear in the same light to Godolphin. Unable to penetrate
into the effect which her father’s death-bed and her own oath had
produced on the mind of Constance; how indissolubly that remembrance
had united itself with all her schemes and prospects for the future; how
marvellously, yet how naturally, it had converted worldly ambition into
a sacred duty;--unable, I say, to comprehend all these various, and
powerful, and governing motives, Godolphin beheld in her refusal only
the aversion to share his slender income, and the desire for loftier
station. He considered, therefore, that sorrow was a tribute to her
unworthy of himself; he deemed it a part of his dignity to strive to
forget. That hallowed sentiment which, in some losses of the heart,
makes it a duty to remember, and preaches a soothing and soft lesson
from the very text of regret, was not for the wrung and stricken soul of
Godolphin. He only strove to dissipate his grief, and shut out from
his mental sight the charmed vision of the first, the only woman he had
deeply loved.
Godolphin felt, too, that the sole impulse which could have united the
fast-expiring energy and enterprise of his youth to the ambition of life
was for ever gone. With Constance--with the proud thoughts that belonged
to her--the aspirings after earthly honours were linked, and with her
were broken. He felt his old philosophy--the love of ease, the profound
contempt for fame,--close, like the deep waters over those glittering
hosts for whose passage they had been severed for a moment--whelming the
crested and gorgeous visions for ever beneath the wave! Conscious of his
talents--nay, swayed to and fro by the unquiet stirrings of no common
genius--Godolphin yet foresaw that he was not henceforth destined to
play a shining part in the crowded drama of life. His career was already
closed; he might be contented, prosperous, happy, but never great. He
had seen enough of authors, and of the thorns that beset the paths
of literature, to experience none of those delusions which cheat
the blinded aspirer into the wilderness of publication--that mode of
obtaining fame and hatred to which those who feel unfitted for more
bustling concerns are impelled. Write he might: and he was fond (as
disappointment increased his propensities to dreaming) of brightening
his solitude with the golden palaces and winged shapes that lie glassed
within the fancy--the soul’s fairy-land. But the vision with him was
only evoked one hour to be destroyed the next. Happy had it been for
Godolphin, and not unfortunate perhaps for the world, had he learned at
that exact moment the true motive for human action which he afterwards,
and too late, discovered. Happy had it been for him to have learned that
there is an ambition to do good--an ambition to raise the wretched as
well as to rise.
Alas!--either in letters or in politics, how utterly poor, barren, and
untempting, is every path that points upward to the mockery of public
eminence, when looked upon by a soul that has any real elements of wise
or noble; unless we have an impulse within, which mortification chills
not--a reward without, which selfish defeat does not destroy.
But, unblest by one friend really wise or good, spoilt by the world,
soured by disappointment, Godolphin’s very faculties made him inert, and
his very wisdom taught him to be useless. Again and again--as the spider
in some cell where no winged insect ever wanders, builds and rebuilds
his mesh,--the scheming heart of the Idealist was doomed to weave net
after net for those visions of the Lovely and the Perfect which can
never descend to the gloomy regions wherein mortality is cast. The most
common disease to genius is nympholepsy--the saddening for a spirit that
the world knows not. Ah! how those outward disappointments which should
cure, only feed the disease!
The dinner at Saville’s was gay and lively, as such entertainments with
such participators usually are. If nothing in the world is more heavy
than your formal banquet,--nothing, on the other hand, is more agreeable
than those well-chosen laissez aller feasts at which the guests are as
happily selected as the wines; where there is no form, no reserve, no
effort; and people having met to sit still for a few hours are willing
to be as pleasant to each other as if they were never to meet again. Yet
the conversation in all companies not literary turns upon persons
rather than things; and your wits learn their art only in the School for
Scandal.
“Only think, Fanny,” said Saville, “of Clavers turning beau in his old
age! He commenced with being a jockey; then he became an electioneerer;
then a Methodist parson; then a builder of houses; and now he has dashed
suddenly up to London, rushed into the clubs, mounted a wig, studied an
ogle, and walks about the Opera House swinging a cane, and, at the age
of fifty-six, punching young minors in the side, and saying tremulously,
‘_We_ young fellows!’”
“He hires pages to come to him in the Park with three-cornered notes,”
said Fanny, “he opens each with affected nonchalance; looks full at the
bearer; and cries aloud--‘Tell your mistress I cannot refuse her:’--then
canters off, with the air of a man persecuted to death!”
“But did you see what an immense pair of whiskers Chester has mounted?”
“Yes,” answered a Mr. De Lacy; “A---- says he has cultivated them in
order to ‘plant out’ his ugliness.”
“But vy _you_ no talk, Monsieur de Dauphin?” said the Linettini gently,
turning to Percy; “you ver silent.”
“Unhappily, I have been so long out of town that these anecdotes of the
day are caviare to me.”
“But so,” cried Saville, “would a volume of French Memoirs be to any
one that took it up for the first time; yet the French Memoirs amuse
one exactly as much as if one had lived with the persons written of.
Now that ought to be the case with conversations upon persons. I flatter
myself, Fanny, that you and I hit off characters so well by a word or
two, that no one who hears us wants to know anything more about them.”
“I believe you,” said Godolphin; “and that is the reason you never talk
of yourselves.”
“Bah! Apropos of egoism, did you meet Jack Barabel in Rome?”
“Yes, writing his travels. ‘Pray,’ said he to me (seizing me by the
button) in the Coliseum, ‘What do you think is the highest order of
literary composition?’ ‘Why, an epic, I fancy,’ said I; ‘or perhaps a
tragedy, or a great history, or a novel like Don Quixote.’ ‘Pooh!’ quoth
Barabel, looking important, ‘there’s nothing so high in literature as a
good book of travels;’ then sinking his voice into a whisper and laying
his finger wisely on his nose, he hissed out, ‘I have a quarto, sir, in
the press!’”
“Ha! ha!” laughed Stracey, the old wit, picking his teeth, and speaking
for the first time; “if you tell Barabel you have seen a handsome
woman, he says, mysteriously frowning, ‘Handsome, sir! has she
travelled?--answer me that!’”
“But have you seen Paulton’s new equipage? Brown carriage, brown
liveries, brown harness, brown horses, while Paulton and his wife sit
within dressed in brown cap-a-pie. The best of it is that Paulton went
to his coachmaker, to order his carriage, saying, ‘Mr. Houlditch, I am
growing old--too old to be eccentric any longer; I must have something
remarkably plain;’ and to this hour Paulton goes _brown_-ing about the
town, crying out to every one, ‘Nothing like simplicity, believe me.’”
“He discharged his coachman for wearing white gloves instead of brown,”
said Stracey. “‘What do you mean, sir,’ cried he, ‘with your d--d showy
vulgarities?--don’t you see me toiling my soul out to be plain and
quiet, and you must spoil all, by not being _brown_ enough!’”
“Ah, Godolphin, you seem pensive,” whispered Fanny; “yet we are
tolerably amusing, too.”
“My dear Fanny,” answered Godolphin, rousing himself, “the dialogue is
gay, the actors know their parts, the lights are brilliant; but--the
scene--the scene cannot shift for me! Call it what you will, I am not
deceived. I see the paint and the canvas, but--and yet, away these
thoughts! Shall I fill your glass, Fanny?”