Welshman, sitting behind me, asked if I had not felt my heart burn within
me during the continuance of the race? I said--No; because we were not
racing with a mail, so that no glory could be gained. In fact, it was
sufficiently mortifying that such a Birmingham thing should dare to
challenge us. The Welshman replied, that he didn't see _that_; for that a
cat might look at a king, and a Brummagem coach might lawfully race the
Holyhead mail. "_Race_ us perhaps," I replied, "though even _that_ has an
air of sedition, but not _beat_ us. This would have been treason; and for
its own sake I am glad that the Tallyho was disappointed." So dissatisfied
did the Welshman seem with this opinion, that at last I was obliged to tell
him a very fine story from one of our elder dramatists, viz.--that once, in
some oriental region, when the prince of all the land, with his splendid
court, were flying their falcons, a hawk suddenly flew at a majestic eagle;
and in defiance of the eagle's prodigious advantages, in sight also of all
the astonished field sportsmen, spectators, and followers, killed him on
the spot. The prince was struck with amazement at the unequal contest, and
with burning admiration for its unparalleled result. He commanded that the
hawk should be brought before him; caressed the bird with enthusiasm, and
ordered that, for the commemoration of his matchless courage, a crown
of gold should be solemnly placed on the hawk's head; but then that,
immediately after this coronation, the bird should be led off to execution,
as the most valiant indeed of traitors, but not the less a traitor that had
dared to rise in rebellion against his liege lord the eagle. "Now," said I
to the Welshman, "How painful it would have been to you and me as men of
refined feelings, that this poor brute, the Tallyho, in the impossible case
of a victory over us, should have been crowned with jewellery, gold, with
Birmingham ware, or paste diamonds, and then led off to instant execution."
The Welshman doubted if that could be warranted by law. And when I hinted
at the 10th of Edward III., chap. 15, for regulating the precedency of
coaches, as being probably the statute relied on for the capital punishment
of such offences, he replied drily--that if the attempt to pass a mail was
really treasonable, it was a pity that the Tallyho appeared to have so
imperfect an acquaintance with law.
These were among the gaieties of my earliest and boyish acquaintance with
mails. But alike the gayest and the most terrific of my experiences rose
again after years of slumber, armed with preternatural power to shake my
dreaming sensibilities; sometimes, as in the slight case of Miss Fanny on
the Bath road, (which I will immediately mention,) through some casual or
capricious association with images originally gay, yet opening at some
stage of evolution into sudden capacities of horror; sometimes through the
more natural and fixed alliances with the sense of power so various lodged
in the mail system.
The modern modes of travelling cannot compare with the mail-coach system
in grandeur and power. They boast of more velocity, but not however as
a consciousness, but as a fact of our lifeless knowledge, resting upon
_alien_ evidence; as, for instance, because somebody _says_ that we have
gone fifty miles in the hour, or upon the evidence of a result, as that
actually we find ourselves in York four hours after leaving London. Apart
from such an assertion, or such a result, I am little aware of the pace.
But, seated on the old mail-coach, we needed no evidence out of ourselves
to indicate the velocity. On this system the word was--_Non magna
loquimur_, as upon railways, but _magna vivimus_. The vital experience of
the glad animal sensibilities made doubts impossible on the question of our
speed; we heard our speed, we saw it, we felt it as a thrilling; and this
speed was not the product of blind insensate agencies, that had no sympathy
to give, but was incarnated in the fiery eyeballs of an animal, in his
dilated nostril, spasmodic muscles, and echoing hoofs. This speed was
incarnated in the _visible_ contagion amongst brutes of some impulse, that,
radiating into _their_ natures, had yet its centre and beginning in man.
The sensibility of the horse, uttering itself in the maniac light of his
eye, might be the last vibration of such a movement; the glory of Salamanca
might be the first--but the intervening link that connected them, that
spread the earthquake of the battle into the eyeball of the horse, was
the heart of man--kindling in the rapture of the fiery strife, and then
propagating its own tumults by motions and gestures to the sympathies, more
or less dim, in his servant the horse.
But now, on the new system of travelling, iron tubes and boilers have
disconnected man's heart from the ministers of his locomotion. Nile nor
Trafalgar has power any more to raise an extra bubble in a steam-kettle.
The galvanic cycle is broken up for ever: man's imperial nature no longer
sends itself forward through the electric sensibility of the horse; the
inter-agencies are gone in the mode of communication between the horse and
his master, out of which grew so many aspects of sublimity under accidents
of mists that hid, or sudden blazes that revealed, of mobs that agitated,
or midnight solitudes that awed. Tidings, fitted to convulse all nations,
must henceforwards travel by culinary process; and the trumpet that once
announced from afar the laurelled mail, heart-shaking, when heard screaming
on the wind, and advancing through the darkness to every village
or solitary house on its route, has now given way for ever to the
pot-wallopings of the boiler.
Thus have perished multiform openings for sublime effects, for interesting
personal communications, for revelations of impressive faces that could not
have offered themselves amongst the hurried and fluctuating groups of
a railway station. The gatherings of gazers about a mail-coach had one
centre, and acknowledged only one interest. But the crowds attending at
a railway station have as little unity as running water, and own as many
centres as there are separate carriages in the train.
How else, for example, than as a constant watcher for the dawn, and for
the London mail that in summer months entered about dawn into the lawny
thickets of Marlborough Forest, couldst thou, sweet Fanny of the Bath road,
have become known to myself? Yet Fanny, as the loveliest young woman for
face and person that perhaps in my whole life I have beheld, merited
the station which even _her_ I could not willingly have spared; yet
(thirty-five years later) she holds in my dreams: and though, by an
accident of fanciful caprice, she brought along with her into those dreams
a troop of dreadful creatures, fabulous and not fabulous, that were more
abominable to a human heart than Fanny and the dawn were delightful.
Miss Fanny of the Bath road, strictly speaking, lived at a mile's distance
from that road, but came so continually to meet the mail, that I on my
frequent transits rarely missed her, and naturally connected her name
with the great thoroughfare where I saw her; I do not exactly know, but I
believe with some burthen of commissions to be executed in Bath, her own
residence being probably the centre to which these commissions gathered.
The mail coachman, who wore the royal livery, being one amongst the
privileged few,[6] happened to be Fanny's grandfather. A good man he
was, that loved his beautiful granddaughter; and, loving her wisely, was
vigilant over her deportment in any case where young Oxford might happen
to be concerned. Was I then vain enough to imagine that I myself,
individually, could fall within the line of his terrors? Certainly not,
as regarded any physical pretensions that I could plead; for Fanny (as a
chance passenger from her own neighborhood once told me) counted in her
train a hundred and ninety-nine professed admirers, if not open aspirants
to her favor; and probably not one of the whole brigade but excelled myself
in personal advantages. Ulysses even, with the unfair advantage of his
accursed bow, could hardly have undertaken that amount of suitors. So
the danger might have seemed slight--only that woman is universally
aristocratic; it is amongst her nobilities of heart that she _is_ so. Now,
the aristocratic distinctions in my favor might easily with Miss Fanny have
compensated my physical deficiencies. Did I then make love to Fanny? Why,
yes; _mais oui donc_; as much love as one _can_ make whilst the mail is
changing horses, a process which ten years later did not occupy above
eighty seconds; but _then_, viz., about Waterloo, it occupied five times
eighty. Now, four hundred seconds offer a field quite ample enough for
whispering into a young woman's ear a great deal of truth; and (by way of
parenthesis) some trifle of falsehood. Grandpapa did right, therefore, to
watch me. And yet, as happens too often to the grandpapas of earth, in
a contest with the admirers of granddaughters, how vainly would he have
watched me had I meditated any evil whispers to Fanny! She, it is my
belief, would have protected herself against any man's evil suggestions.
But he, as the result showed, could not have intercepted the opportunities
for such suggestions. Yet he was still active; he was still blooming.
Blooming he was as Fanny herself.
"Say, all our praises why should lords--"
No, that's not the line.
"Say, all our roses why should girls engross?"
The coachman showed rosy blossoms on his face deeper even than his
granddaughter's,--_his_ being drawn from the ale cask, Fanny's from youth
and innocence, and from the fountains of the dawn. But, in spite of his
blooming face, some infirmities he had; and one particularly (I am very
sure, no _more_ than one,) in which he too much resembled a crocodile. This
lay in a monstrous inaptitude for turning round. The crocodile, I presume,
owes that inaptitude to the absurd _length_ of his back; but in our
grandpapa it arose rather from the absurd _breadth_ of his back, combined,
probably, with some growing stiffness in his legs. Now upon this crocodile
infirmity of his I planted an easy opportunity for tendering my homage to
Miss Fanny. In defiance of all his honorable vigilance, no sooner had he
presented to us his mighty Jovian back (what a field for displaying to
mankind his royal scarlet!) whilst inspecting professionally the buckles,
the straps, and the silver turrets of his harness, than I raised Miss
Fanny's hand to my lips, and, by the mixed tenderness and respectfulness of
my manner, caused her easily to understand how happy it would have made
me to rank upon her list as No. 10 or 12, in which case a few casualties
amongst her lovers (and observe--they _hanged_ liberally in those days)
might have promoted me speedily to the top of the tree; as, on the other
hand, with how much loyalty of submission I acquiesced in her allotment,
supposing that she had seen reason to plant me in the very rearward of her
favor, as No. 199+1. It must not be supposed that I allowed any trace
of jest, or even of playfulness, to mingle with these expressions of my
admiration; that would have been insulting to her, and would have been
false as regarded my own feelings. In fact, the utter shadowyness of our
relations to each other, even after our meetings through seven or eight
years had been very numerous, but of necessity had been very brief, being
entirely on mail-coach allowance--timid, in reality, by the General
Post-Office--and watched by a crocodile belonging to the antepenultimate
generation, left it easy for me to do a thing which few people ever _can_
have done--viz., to make love for seven years, at the same time to be
as sincere as ever creature was, and yet never to compromise myself by
overtures that might have been foolish as regarded my own interests,
or misleading as regarded hers. Most truly I loved this beautiful and
ingenuous girl; and had it not been for the Bath and Bristol mail, heaven
only knows what might have come of it. People talk of being over head and
ears in love--now, the mail was the cause that I sank only over ears in
love, which, you know, still left a trifle of brain to overlook the whole
conduct of the affair. I have mentioned the case at all for the sake of
a dreadful result from it in after years of dreaming. But it seems, _ex
abundanti_, to yield this moral--viz., that as, in England, the idiot and
the half-wit are held to be under the guardianship of chancery, so the man
making love, who is often but a variety of the same imbecile class, ought
to be made a ward of the General Post-Office, whose severe course of
_timing_ and periodical interruption might intercept many a foolish
declaration, such as lays a solid foundation for fifty years' repentance.
Ah, reader! when I look back upon those days, it seems to me that all
things change or perish. Even thunder and lightning, it pains me to say,
are not the thunder and lightning which I seem to remember about the
time of Waterloo. Roses, I fear, are degenerating, and, without a Red
revolution, must come to the dust. The Fannies of our island--though this
I say with reluctance--are not improving; and the Bath road is notoriously
superannuated. Mr. Waterton tells me that the crocodile does _not_
change--that a cayman, in fact, or an alligator, is just as good for riding
upon as he was in the time of the Pharaohs. _That_ may be; but the reason
is, that the crocodile does not live fast--he is a slow coach. I believe
it is generally understood amongst naturalists, that the crocodile is a
blockhead. It is my own impression that the Pharaohs were also blockheads.
Now, as the Pharaohs and the crocodile domineered over Egyptian society,
this accounts for a singular mistake that prevailed on the Nile. The
crocodile made the ridiculous blunder of supposing man to be meant chiefly
for his own eating. Man, taking a different view of the subject, naturally
met that mistake by another; he viewed the crocodile as a thing sometimes
to worship, but always to run away from. And this continued until Mr.
Waterton changed the relations between the animals. The mode of escaping
from the reptile he showed to be, not by running away, but by leaping on
its back, booted and spurred. The two animals had misunderstood each other.
The use of the crocodile has now been cleared up--it is to be ridden; and
the use of man is, that he may improve the health of the crocodile by
riding him a fox-hunting before breakfast. And it is pretty certain that
any crocodile, who has been regularly hunted through the season, and is
master of the weight he carries, will take a six-barred gate now as well as
ever he would have done in the infancy of the pyramids.
Perhaps, therefore, the crocodile does _not_ change, but all things else
_do_: even the shadow of the pyramids grows less. And often the restoration
in vision of Fanny and the Bath road, makes me too pathetically sensible of
that truth. Out of the darkness, if I happen to call up the image of Fanny
from thirty-five years back, arises suddenly a rose in June; or, if I think
for an instant of the rose in June, up rises the heavenly face of Fanny.
One after the other, like the antiphonies in the choral service, rises
Fanny and the rose in June, then back again the rose in June and Fanny.
Then come both together, as in a chorus; roses and Fannies, Fannies and
roses, without end--thick as blossoms in paradise. Then comes a venerable
crocodile, in a royal livery of scarlet and gold, or in a coat with sixteen
capes; and the crocodile is driving four-in-hand from the box of the
Bath mail. And suddenly we upon the mail are pulled up by a mighty dial,
sculptured with the hours, and with the dreadful legend of TOO LATE. Then
all at once we are arrived at Marlborough forest, amongst the lovely
households[7] of the roe-deer: these retire into the dewy thickets; the
thickets are rich with roses; the roses call up (as ever) the sweet
countenance of Fanny, who, being the granddaughter of a crocodile, awakens
a dreadful host of wild semi-legendary animals,--griffins, dragons,
basilisks, sphinxes,--till at length the whole vision of fighting images
crowds into one towering armorial shield, a vast emblazonry of human
charities and human loveliness that have perished, but quartered
heraldically with unutterable horrors of monstrous and demoniac natures,
whilst over all rises, as a surmounting crest, one fair female hand, with
the fore-finger pointing, in sweet, sorrowful admonition, upwards to
heaven, and having power (which, without experience, I never could have
believed) to awaken the pathos that kills in the very bosom of the horrors
that madden the grief that gnaws at the heart, together with the monstrous
creations of darkness that shock the belief, and make dizzy the reason of
man. This is the peculiarity that I wish the reader to notice, as having
first been made known to me for a possibility by this early vision of
Fanny on the Bath road. The peculiarity consisted in the confluence of two
different keys, though apparently repelling each other, into the music
and governing principles of the same dream; horror, such as possesses the
maniac, and yet, by momentary transitions, grief, such as may be supposed
to possess the dying mother when leaving her infant children to the mercies
of the cruel. Usually, and perhaps always, in an unshaken nervous system,
these two modes of misery exclude each other--here first they met in horrid
reconciliation. There was also a separate peculiarity in the quality of the
horror. This was afterwards developed into far more revolting complexities
of misery and incomprehensible darkness; and perhaps I am wrong in
ascribing any value as a _causative_ agency to this particular case on the
Bath road--possibly it furnished merely an _occasion_ that accidentally
introduced a mode of horrors certain, to any rate, to have grown up,
with or without the Bath road, from more advanced stages of the nervous
derangement. Yet, as the cubs of tigers or leopards, when domesticated,
have been observed to suffer a sudden development of their latent ferocity
under too eager an appeal to their playfulness--the gaieties of sport in
_them_ being too closely connected with the fiery brightness of their
murderous instincts--so I have remarked that the caprices, the gay
arabesques, and the lovely floral luxuriations of dreams, betray a shocking
tendency to pass into finer maniacal splendors. That gaiety, for instance
(for such as first it was,) in the dreaming faculty, by which one principal
point of resemblance to a crocodile in the mail-coachman was soon made to
clothe him with the form of a crocodile, and yet was blended with accessory
circumstances derived from his _human_ functions, passed rapidly into a
further development, no longer gay or playful, but terrific, the most
terrific that besieges dreams, viz--the horrid inoculation upon each other
of incompatible natures. This horror has always been secretly felt by
man; it was felt even under pagan forms of religion, which offered a very
feeble, and also a very limited gamut for giving expression to the human
capacities of sublimity or of horror. We read it in the fearful composition
of the sphinx. The dragon, again, is the snake inoculated upon the
scorpion. The basilisk unites the mysterious malice of the evil eye,
unintentional on the part of the unhappy agent, with the intentional venom
of some other malignant natures. But these horrid complexities of evil
agency are but _objectively_ horrid; they inflict the horror suitable to
their compound nature; but there is no insinuation that they _feel_ that
horror. Heraldry is so full of these fantastic creatures, that, in some
zoologies, we find a separate chapter or a supplement dedicated to what is
denominated heraldic zoology. And why not? For these hideous creatures,
however visionary[8], have a real traditionary ground in medieval
belief--sincere and partly reasonable, though adulterating with mendacity,
blundering, credulity, and intense superstition. But the dream-horror
which I speak of is far more frightful. The dreamer finds housed
within himself--occupying, as it were, some separate chamber in his
brain--holding, perhaps, from that station a secret and detestable commerce
with his own heart--some horrid alien nature. What if it were his own
nature repeated,--still, if the duality were distinctly perceptible, even
_that_--even this mere numerical double of his own consciousness--might
be a curse too mighty to be sustained. But how, if the alien nature
contradicts his own, fights with it, perplexes, and confounds it? How,
again, if not one alien nature, but two, but three, but four, but five, are
introduced within what once he thought the inviolable sanctuary of himself?
These, however, are horrors from the kingdoms of anarchy and darkness,
which, by their very intensity, challenge the sanctity of concealment, and
gloomily retire from exposition. Yet it was necessary to mention them,
because the first introduction to such appearances (whether causal,
or merely casual) lay in the heraldic monsters, (which monsters were
themselves introduced though playfully,) by the transfigured coachman of
the Bath mail.
GOING DOWN WITH VICTORY.
But the grandest chapter of our experience, within the whole mail-coach
service, was on those occasions when we went down from London with the
news of victory. A period of about ten years stretched from Trafalgar to
Waterloo: the second and third years of which period (1806 and 1807)
were comparatively sterile; but the rest, from 1805 to 1815 inclusively,
furnished a long succession of victories; the least of which, in a contest
of that portentous nature, had an inappreciable value of position--partly
for its absolute interference with the plans of our enemy, but still
more from its keeping alive in central Europe the sense of a deep-seated
vulnerability in France. Even to tease the coasts of our enemy, to mortify
them by continual blockades, to insult them by capturing if it were but a
baubling schooner under the eyes of their arrogant armies, repeated from
time to time a sullen proclamation of power lodged in a quarter to which
the hopes of Christendom turned in secret. How much more loudly must this
proclamation have spoken in the audacity[9] of having bearded the _elite_
of their troops, and having beaten them in pitched battles! Five years of
life it was worth paying down for the privilege of an outside place on a
mail-coach, when carrying down the first tidings of any such event. And it
is to be noted that, from our insular situation, and the multitude of our
frigates disposable for the rapid transmission of intelligence, rarely
did any unauthorized rumor steal away a prelibation from the aroma of the
regular dispatches. The government official news was generally the first
news.