If Providence, instead of a vagabond, had made me a justice of the
peace, there is no species of penalty I would not have enforced against
a class of offenders, upon whom it is the perverted taste of the day
to bestow wealth, praise, honour, and reputation; in a word, upon that
portion of the writers for our periodical literature whose pastime it
is by high-flown and exaggerated pictures of society, places, and
amusements, to mislead the too credulous and believing world; who, in
the search for information and instruction, are but reaping a barren
harvest of deceit and illusion.
Every one is loud and energetic in his condemnation of a bubble
speculation; every one is severe upon the dishonest features of
bankruptcy, and the demerits of un-trusty guardianship; but while
the law visits these with its pains and penalties, and while heavy
inflictions follow on those breaches of trust, which affect our pocket,
yet can he “walk scatheless,” with port erect and visage high who, for
mere amusement--for the passing pleasure of the moment--or, baser still,
for certain pounds per sheet, can, present us with the air-drawn daggers
of a dyspeptic imagination for the real woes of life, or paint the most
commonplace and tiresome subjects with colours so vivid and so glowing
as to persuade the unwary reader that a paradise of pleasure and
enjoyment, hitherto unknown, is open before him. The treadmill and the
ducking-stool, “_me judice_” would no longer be tenanted by rambling
gipsies or convivial rioters, but would display to the admiring gaze of
an assembled multitude the aristocratic features of Sir Edward Bulwer
Lytton, the dark whiskers of Disraeli, the long and graceful proportions
of Hamilton Maxwell, or the portly paunch and melodramatic frown of
that right pleasant fellow, Henry Addison himself.
You cannot open a newspaper without meeting some narrative of what, in
the phrase of the day, is denominated an “attempted imposition.” Count
Skryznyzk, with black moustachoes and a beard to match, after being a
lion of Lord Dudley Stuart's parties, and the delight of a certain set
of people in the West-end--who, when they give a tea-party, call it a
_soiree_, and deem it necessary to have either a Hindoo or a Hottentot,
a Pole, or a Piano-player, to interest their guests--was lately brought
up before Sir Peter Laurie, charged by 964 with obtaining money under
false pretences, and sentenced to three months' imprisonment and hard
labour at the treadmill.
The charge looks a grave one, good reader, and perhaps already some
notion is trotting through your head about forgery or embezzlement; you
think of widows rendered desolate, or orphans defrauded; you lament over
the hard-earned pittance of persevering industry lost to its possessor;
and, in your heart, you acknowledge that there may have been some cause
for the partition of Poland, and that the Emperor of the Russias, like
another monarch, may not be half so black as he is painted. But spare
your honest indignation; our unpronounceable friend did none of
these. No; the head and front of his offending was simply exciting the
sympathies of a feeling world for his own deep wrongs; for the fate
of his father, beheaded in the Grand Place at Warsaw; for his four
brothers, doomed never to see the sun in the dark mines of Tobolsk; for
his beautiful sister, reared in the lap of luxury and wealth, wandering
houseless and an outcast around the palaces of St. Petersburg, wearying
heaven itself with cries for mercy on her banished brethren; and last of
all, for himself--he, who at the battle of Pultowa led heaven-knows how
many and how terrific charges cf cavalry,--whose breast was a galaxy
of orders only out-numbered by his wounds--that he should be an exile,
without friends, and without home! In a word, by a beautiful and
highly-wrought narrative, that drew tears from the lady and ten
shillings from the gentleman of the house, he became amenable to our
law as a swindler and an impostor, simply because his narrative was a
fiction.
In the name of all justice, in the name of truth, of honesty, and fair
dealing, I ask you, is this right? or, if the treadmill be the fit
reward for such powers as his, what shall we say, what shall we do, with
all the popular writers of the day? How many of Bulwer's stories are
facts? What truth is there in James? Is that beautiful creation of
Dickens, “Poor Nell,” a real or a fictitious character? And is the
offence, after all, merely in the manner, and not the matter, of the
transgression? Is it that, instead of coming before the world printed,
puffed, and hot-pressed by the gentlemen of the Row, he ventured to
edite himself, and, instead of the trade, make his tongue the medium of
publication? And yet, if speech be the crime, what say you to Macready,
and with what punishment are you prepared to visit him who makes your
heart-strings vibrate to the sorrows of _Virginius_, or thrills
your very blood with the malignant vengeance of _Iago?_ Is what is
permissible in Covent Garden, criminal in the city? or, stranger still,
is there a punishment at the one place, and praise at the other? Or is
it the costume, the foot-lights, the orange-peel, and the sawdust--are
they the terms of the immunity? Alas, and alas! I believe they are.
Burke said, “The age of chivalry is o'er;” and I believe the age of
poetry has gone with it; and if Homer himself were to chant an Iliad
down Fleet Street, I 'd wager a crown that 964 would take him up for a
ballad-singer.
But a late case occurs to me. A countryman of mine, one Bernard
Cavanagh, doubtless, a gentleman of very good connections, announced
some time ago that he had adopted a new system of diet, which was
neither more nor less than going without any food. Now, Mr. Cavanagh was
a stout gentleman, comely and plump to look at, who conversed pleasantly
on the common topics of the day, and seemed, on the whole, to enjoy
life pretty much like other people. He was to be seen for a
shilling--children half-price; and although Englishmen have read of our
starving countrymen for the last century and a-half, yet their curiosity
to see one, to look at him, to prod him with their umbrellas, punch him
with their knuckles, and otherwise test his vitality, was such, that
they seemed just as much alive as though the phenomenon was new to them.
The consequence was, Mr. Cavanagh, whose cook was on board wages, and
whose establishment was of the least expensive character, began to wax
rich. Several large towns and cities, in different parts of the empire,
requested him to visit them; and Joe Hume suggested that the corporation
of London should offer him ten thousand pounds for his secret, merely
for the use of the livery. In fact, Cavanagh was now the cry, and as
Barney appeared to grow fat on fasting, his popularity knew no bounds.
Unfortunately, however, ambition, the bane of so many other great men,
numbered him also among its victims. Had he been content with London as
the sphere of his triumphs and teetotalism, there is no saying how long
he might have gone on starving with satisfaction. Whether it is that
the people are less observant there, or more accustomed to see similar
exhibitions, I cannot tell; but true it is they paid their shillings,
felt his ribs, walked home, and pronounced Barney a most exemplary
Irishman. But not content with the capital, he must make a tour in
the provinces, and accordingly went starring it about through Leeds,
Birmingham, Manchester, and all the other manufacturing towns, as if
in mockery of the poor people who did not know the secret how to live
without food.
Mr. Cavanagh was now living--if life it can be called--in one of the
best hotels, when, actuated by that spirit of inquiry that characterises
the age, a respectable lady,' who kept a boarding-house, paid him a
visit, to ascertain, if possible, how far his system might be made
applicable to her guests, who, whatever their afflictions, laboured
under no such symptoms as his.
She was pleased with Barney,--she patted him with her hand; he was
round, and plump, and fat, much more so, indeed, than many of her
daily dinner-party; and had, withal, that kind of joyous, rollicking,
devil-may-care look, that seems to bespeak good condition;--but this the
poor lady, of course, did not know to be an inherent property in Pat,
however poor his situation.
After an interview of an hour long she took her leave, not exhibiting
the usual satisfaction of other visitors, but with a dubious look and
meditative expression, that betokened a mind not made up, and a heart
not at ease; she was clearly not content, perhaps the abortive effort
to extract a confession from Mr. Cavanagh might be the cause, or perhaps
she felt like many respectable people whose curiosity is only the
advanced guard to their repentance, and who never think that in any
exhibition they get the worth of their money. This might be the case,
for as fasting is a negative process, there is really little to see
in the performer. Had it been the man that eats a sheep; “_à la bonne
heure!_” you have something for your money there: and I can even
sympathize with the French gentleman who follows Van Amburgh to this
day, in the agreeable hope, to use his own words, of “assisting at
the _soirée_, when the lions shall eat Mr. Van Amburgh.” This, if not
laudable is at least intelligible. But to return, the lady went her way,
not indeed on hospitable thoughts intent, but turning over in her mind
various theories about abstinence, and only wishing she had the whole of
the Cavanagh family for boarders at a guinea a-week.
Late in the evening of the same day this estimable lady, whose inquiries
into the properties of gastric juice, if not as scientific, were to
the full as enthusiastic as those of Bostock or Tiedeman himself,
was returning from an early tea, through an unfrequented suburb of
Manchester, when suddenly her eye fell upon Bernard Cavanagh, seated in
a little shop--a dish of sausages and a plate of ham before him, while a
frothing cup of porter ornamented his right hand. It was true, he wore
a patch above his eye, a large beard, and various other disguises, but
they served him not: she knew him at once. The result is soon told:
the police were informed; Mr. Cavanagh was captured; the lady gave her
testimony in a crowded court, and he who lately was rolling on the wheel
of fortune, was now condemned to foot it on a very different wheel, and
all for no other cause than that he could not live without food.
The magistrate, who was eloquent on the occasion, called him an
impostor; designating by this odious epithet, a highly-wrought and
well-conceived work of imagination. Unhappy Defoe, your Robinson Crusoe
might have cost you a voyage across the seas; your man Friday might have
been a black Monday to you had you lived in our days. 964 is a severer
critic than _The Quarterly_, and his judgment more irrevocable.
We have never heard of any one who, discovering the fictitious character
of a novel he had believed as a fact, waited on the publisher with a
modest request that his money might be returned to him, being obtained
under false pretences; much less of his applying to his worship for a
warrant against G. P. R. James, Esq., or Harrison Ainsworth, for certain
imaginary woes and unreal sorrows depicted in their writings: yet the
conduct of the lady towards Mr. Cavanagh was exactly of this nature. How
did his appetite do her any possible disservice? what sins against her
soul were contained in his sausages? and yet she must appeal to the
justice as an injured woman: Cavanagh had imposed upon her--she
was wronged because he was hungry. All his narrative, beautifully
constructed and artfully put together, went for nothing; his look, his
manner, his entertaining anecdotes, his fascinating conversation, his
time--from ten in the morning till eight in the evening--went all for
nothing: this really is too bad. Do we ask of every author to be the
hero he describes? Is Bulwer, Pelham, and Paul Clifford, Eugene Aram,
and the Lady of Lyons? Is James, Mary of Burgundy, Darnley, the
Gipsy, and Corse de Leon? Is Dickens, Sara Weller, Quilp, and Barnaby
Rudge?--to what absurdities will this lead us! and yet Bernard Cavanagh
was no more guilty than any of these gentlemen. He was, if I may so
express it, a pictorial--an ideal representation of a man that fasted:
he narrated all the sensations want of food suggests; its dreamy
debility, its languid stupor, its painful suffering, its stage of
struggle and suspense, ending in a victory, where the mind, the
conqueror over the baser nature, asserts its proud and glorious
supremacy in the triumph of volition; and for this beautiful creation of
his brain he is sent to the treadmill, as though, instead of a poet, he
had been a pickpocket.
If Bulwer be a baronet; if Dickens' bed-room be papered with
bank-debentures; then do I proclaim it loudly before the world, Bernard
Cavanagh is an injured man: you are either absurd in one case, or unjust
in the other; take your choice. Ship off Sir Edward to the colonies;
send James to Swan River; let Lady Blessington card wool, or Mrs. Norton
pound oyster-shells; or else we call upon you, give Mr. Cavanagh freedom
of the guild; call him the author of “The Hungry One;” let him be
courted and _fêted_,--you may ask him to dinner with an easy conscience,
and invite him to tea without remorse. Let a Whig-radical borough
solicit him to represent it; place him at the right hand of Lord John;
let his picture be exhibited in the print-shops, and let the cut of his
coat and the tie of his cravat be so much in vogue, that bang-ups _à la_
Barney shall be the only things seen in Bond-street: one course or the
other you must take. If the mountain will not go to Mahomet, Mahomet
must go to the mountain: or in other words, if Bulwer descend not to
Barney, Barney must mount up to Bulwer. It is absurd, it is worse than
absurd, to pretend that he who so thoroughly sympathises with his hero,
as to embody him in his own thoughts and acts, his look, his dress, and
his demeanour, that he, I say, who so penetrated with the impersonation
of a part, finds the pen too weak, and the press too slow, to picture
forth his vivid creations, should be less an object of praise, of
honour, and distinction, than the indolent denizen of some
drawing-room, who, in slippered ease, dictates his shadowy and imperfect
conceptions--visions of what he never felt, dreamy representations of
unreality.
“The poet,” as the word implies, is the maker or the creator; and
however little of the higher attributes of what the world esteems as
poetry the character would seem to possess, he who invents a personage,
the conformity of whose traits to the rule of life is acknowledged for
its truth, he, I say, is a poet. Thus, there is poetry in Sancho Panza,
Falstaff, Dugald Dalgetty, and a hundred other similar impersonations;
and why not in Bernard Cavanagh?
Look for a moment at the effects of your system. The Caraccis, we are
told, spent their boyish years drawing rude figures with chalk on the
doors and even the walls of the palaces of Rome: here the first germs of
their early talent displayed themselves; and in those bold conceptions
of youthful genius were seen the first dawnings of a power that
gave glory to the age they lived in. Had Sir Peter Laurie been their
cotemporary, had 964 been loose in those days, they would have been
treated with a trip to the mill, and their taste for design cultivated
by the low diet of a penitentiary. You know not what budding genius
you have nipped with this abominable system: you think not of the early
indications of mind and intellect you may be consigning to prison: or is
it after all, that the matter-of-fact spirit of the age has sapped the
very vital? of our law-code, and that in your utilitarian zeal you have
doomed to death all that bears the stamp of imagination? if this be
indeed your object, have a good heart, encourage 964, and you 'll not
leave a novelist in the land.
Good reader, I ask your pardon for all this honest indignation; I know
it is in vain: I cannot reform our jurisprudence; and our laws, like the
Belgian revolution, must be regarded “_comme un fait accompli_;” in other
words, what can't be cured must be endured. Let us leave then our friend
the Pole to perform his penance; let us say adieu to Barney, who is at
this moment occupying a suite of apartments in the Penitentiary, and let
us turn to the reverse of the medal, I mean to those who would wile us
away by false promises and flattering speeches to entertain such views
of life as are not only impossible but inconsistent, thus rendering our
path here devoid of interest and of pleasure, while compared with the
extravagant creations of their own erring fancies. Yes, princes may
be trusted, but put not your faith in periodicals. Let no pictorial
representations of Alpine scenery, under the auspices of Colburn or
Bentley, seduce you from the comforts of your hearth and home: let no
enthusiastic accounts of military greatness, no peninsular pleasures,
no charms of campaigning life, induce you to change your garb of country
gentleman for the livery of the Horse-Guards,--“making the green one
red.”
Be not mystified by Maxwell, nor lured by Lorrequer; let no panegyrics
of pipe-clay and the brevet seduce you from the peaceful path in life;
let not Marryat mar your happiness by the glories of those who dwell
in the deep waters; let not Wilson persuade you that the “Lights and
Shadows of Scottish Life” have any reference to that romantic people,
who betake themselves to their native mountains with a little oatmeal
for food and a little sulphur for friction; do not believe one syllable
about the girls of the west; trust not in the representations of
their blue eyes, nor of their trim ankles peering beneath a jupe of
scarlet--we can vouch it is true, for the red petticoat, but the rest
is apocryphal. Fly, we warn you, from Summers in Germany, Evenings in
Brittany, Weeks on the Rhine; away with tours, guide-books, and all
the John Murrayisms of travels. A plague upon Egypt! travellers have a
proverbial liberty of conscience, and the farther they go, the more does
it seem to stretch; not that near home matters are much better, for
our “Wild Sports” in Achill are as romantic as those in Africa, and the
Complete Angler is a complete humbug.
There is no faith--no principle in any of these men. The grave writer,
the stern moralist, the uncompromising advocate of the inflexible rule
of right, is a dandy with essenced locks, loose trousers, and looser
morals, who breakfasts at four in the afternoon, and spends his evenings
among the side scenes of the opera; the merry writer of whims and
oddities, who shakes his puns about like pepper from a pepper-castor,
is a misanthropic, melancholy gentleman, of mournful look and unhappy
aspect: the advocate of field-sports, of all the joyous excitement of
the hunting-field, and the bold dangers of the chase, is an asthmatic
sexagenarian, with care in his heart and gout in his ankles; and lastly,
he who lives but in the horrors of a charnel-house, whose gloomy mind
finds no pleasure save in the dark and dismal pictures of crime and
suffering, of lingering agony, or cruel death, is a fat, round, portly,
comely gentleman, with a laugh like Falstaff, and a face whose every
lineament and feature seems to exhale the merriment of a jocose
and happy temperament. I speak not of the softer sex, many of whose
productions would seem to have but little sympathy with themselves; but
once for all, I would ask you what reliance, what faith can you place
in any of them? Is it to the denizen of a coal mine you apply for
information about the Nassau balloon? Do you refer a disputed point in
dress to an Englishman, in climate to a Laplander, in politeness to a
Frenchman, or in hospitality to a Belgian? or do you net rather feel
that these are not exactly their attributes, and that you are moving the
equity for a case at common law? exactly in the same way, and for the
same reason, we repeat it, put not your faith in periodicals, nor in the
writers thereof.
How ridiculous would it appear if the surgeon-general were to open
a pleading, or charge a jury in the Queen's Bench, while the
solicitor-general was engaged in taking up the femoral artery! What
would you say if the Archbishop of Canterbury were to preside over
the artillery-practice at Woolwich, while the Commander of the Forces
delivered a charge to the clergy of the diocese? How would you look
if Justice Pennefather were to speak at a repeal meeting, and Daniel
O'Connell to conduct himself like a loyal and discreet citizen? Would
you not at once say the whole world is in masquerade? and would you not
be justified in the remark? And yet this it is which is exactly taking
place before your eyes in the wide world of letters. The illiterate and
unreflecting man of underbred habits and degenerate tastes will write
nothing but a philosophic novel; the denizen of the Fleet, or the
Queen's Bench, publishes an ascent of Mont Blanc, with a glowing
description of the delights of liberty; the nobleman writes slang; the
starving author, with broken boots and patched continuations, will
not indite a name undignified by a title; and after all this, will you
venture to tell me that these men are not indictable by the statute for
obtaining money under false pretences?
I have run myself out of breath; and now, if you will allow me a few
moments, I will tell you what, perhaps, I ought to have done earlier in
this article, namely, its object.
It is a remarkable feature in the complex and difficult machinery of
our society, that while crime and the law code keep steadily on the
increase, moving in parallel lines one beside the other, certain
prejudices, popular fallacies---nuts, as we have called them at the
head of this paper--should still disgrace our social system; and that,
however justice maybe administered in our courts of law, in the private
judicature of our own dwellings we observe an especial system of
jurisprudence, marked by injustice and by wrong. To endeavour to depict
some instances of this, I have set about my present undertaking. To
disabuse the public mind as to the error, that what is punishable in one
can be praiseworthy in another; and what is excellent in the court can
be execrable in the city. Such is my object, such my hope. Under this
title I shall endeavour to touch upon the undue estimation in which we
hold certain people and places--the unfair depreciation of certain sects
and callings. Not confining myself to home, I shall take the habits of
my countrymen on the Continent, whether in their search for climate,
economy, education, or enjoyment; and, as far as my ability lies, hold
the mirror up to nature, while I extend the war-cry of my distinguished
countrymen, not asking “justice for Ireland” alone, but “justice for the
whole human race.” For the gaoler as for the guardsman, for the
steward of the Holyhead as for him of the household; from the Munster
king-at-arms to the monarch of the Cannibal Island--“_nihil à me alienum
puto_;” from the priest to the plenipotentiary; from Mr. Arkins to
Abd-el-Kader: my sympathy extends to all.