When Grace and Philip Wharton found that they had pleased the world with
their "Queens of Society," they very sensibly resolved to follow up
their success with a companion work. Their first book had been all about
women; the second book should be all about men. Accordingly they set to
work selecting certain types that pleased them; they wrote a fresh
collection of pleasant essays and presented the reading public with
"Wits and Beaux of Society". The one book is as good as the other; there
is not a pin to choose between them. There is the same bright easy,
gossiping style, the same pleasing rapidity. There is nothing tedious,
nothing dull anywhere. They do not profess to have anything to do with
the graver processes of history--these entertaining volumes; they seek
rather to amuse than to instruct, and they fulfil their purpose
excellently. There is instruction in them, but it comes in by the way;
one is conscious of being entertained, and it is only after the
entertainment is over that one finds that a fair amount of information
has been thrown in to boot. The Whartons have but old tales to tell, but
they tell them very well, and that is the first part of their business.
Looking over these articles is like looking over the list of a good
club. Men are companionable creatures; they love to get together and
gossip. It is maintained, and with reason, that they are fonder of their
own society than women are. Men delight to breakfast together, to take
luncheon together, to dine together, to sup together. They rejoice in
clubs devoted exclusively to their service, as much taboo to women as a
trappist monastery. Women are not quite so clannish. There are not very
many women's clubs in the world; it is not certain that those which do
exist are very brilliant or very entertaining. Women seldom give supper
parties, "all by themselves they" after the fashion of that "grande dame
de par le monde" of whom we have spoken elsewhere. A woman's
dinner-party may succeed now and then by way of a joke, but it is a joke
that is not often repeated. Have we not lately seen how an institution
with a graceful English name, started in London for women and women
only, has just so far relaxed its rigid rule as to allow men upon its
premises between certain hours, and this relaxation we are told has been
conceded in consequence of the demand of numerous ladies. Well, well, if
men can on the whole get on better without the society of women than
women can without the society of men it is no doubt because they are
rougher creatures, moulded of a coarser clay, and are more entertained
by eating and drinking, smoking and the telling of tales than women are.
If all the men whom the Whartons labelled as wits and beaux of society
could be gathered together they would make a most excellent club in the
sense in which a club was understood in the last century. Johnson
thought that he had praised a man highly when he called him a clubbable
man, and so he had for those days which dreamed not of vast caravanserai
calling themselves clubs and having thousands of members on their roll,
the majority of whom do not know more than perhaps ten of their fellow
members from Adam. In the sense that Dr. Johnson meant, all these wits
and beaux whom our Whartons have gathered together were eminently
clubbable. If some such necromancer could come to us as he who in
Tourguenieff's story conjures up the shade of Julius Cæsar; and if in an
obliging way he could make these wits and beaux greet us: if such a
spiritualistic society as that described by Mr. Stockton in one of his
diverting stories could materialise them all for our benefit: then one
might count with confidence upon some very delightful company and some
very delightful talk. For the people whom the Whartons have been good
enough to group together are people of the most fascinating variety.
They have wit in common and goodfellowship, they were famous
entertainers in their time; they add to the gaiety of nations still. The
Whartons have given what would in America be called a "Stag Party". If
we join it we shall find much entertainment thereat.
Do people read Theodore Hook much nowadays? Does the generation which
loves to follow the trail with Allan Quatermain, and to ride with a
Splendid Spur, does it call at all for the humours of the days of the
Regency? Do those who have laughed over "The Wrong Box," ever laugh over
Jack Brag? Do the students of Mr. Rudyard Kipling know anything of
"Gilbert Gurney?" Somebody started the theory some time ago, that this
was not a laughter-loving generation, that it lacked high spirits. It
has been maintained that if a writer appeared now, with the rollicking
good spirits, and reckless abandon of a Lever, he would scarcely win a
warm welcome. We may be permitted to doubt this conclusion; we are as
fond of laughter as ever, as ready to laugh if somebody will set us
going. Mr. Stevenson prefers of late to be thought grim in his fiction,
but he has set the sides shaking, both over that "Wrong Box" which we
spoke of, and in earlier days. We are ready to laugh with Stockton from
overseas, with our own Anstey, with anybody who has the heart to be
merry, and the wit to make his mirth communicable. But, it may be
doubted if we read our Lever quite as much as a wise doctor, who
happened also to be a wise man of letters, would recommend. And we may
well fancy that such a doctor dealing with a patient for whom laughter
was salutary--as for whom is it not salutary--would exhibit Theodore
Hook in rather large doses.
Undoubtedly the fun is a little old fashioned, but it is none the worse
for that. Those who share Mr. Hardcastle's tastes for old wine and old
books will not like Theodore Hook any the less, because he does not
happen to be at all "Fin de Siècle". He is like Berowne in the comedy,
the merriest man--perhaps not always within the limits of becoming
mirth--to spend an hour's talk withal. There is no better key to the age
in which Hook glittered, than Hook's own stories. The London of that
day--the London which is as dead and gone as Nineveh or Karnak or
Troy--lives with extraordinary freshness in Theodore Hook's pages. And
how entertaining those pages are. It is not always the greatest writers
who are the most mirth provoking, but how much we owe to them. The man
must have no mirth in him if he fail to be tickled by the best of
Labiche's comedies, aye and the worst too, if such a term can be
applied to any of the enchanting series; if he refuse to unbend over "A
Day's Journey and a Life's Romance," if he cannot let himself go and
enjoy himself over Gilbert Gurney's river adventure. If the revival of
the Whartons' book were to serve no other purpose than to send some
laughter loving souls to the heady well-spring of Theodore Hook's
merriment, it would have done the mirthful a good turn and deserved well
of its country.
There is scarcely a queerer, or scarcely a more pathetic figure in the
world than that of Beau Brummell. He seems to belong to ancient history,
he and his titanic foppishness and his smart clothes and his smart
sayings. Yet is it but a little while since the last of his adorers, the
most devoted of his disciples passed away from the earth. Over in Paris
there lingered till the past year a certain man of letters who was very
brilliant and very poor and very eccentric. So long as people study
French literature, and care to investigate the amount of high artistic
workmanship which goes into even its minor productions, so long the name
of Barbey D'Aurevilly will have its niche--not a very large one, it is
true--in the temple. The author of that strange and beautiful story "Le
Chevalier des Touches," was a great devotee of Brummell's. He was
himself the "last of the dandies". All the money he had--and he had very
little of it--he spent in dandification. But he never moved with the
times. His foppishness was the foppishness of his youth, and to the last
he wandered through Paris clad in the splendour of the days when young
men were "lions," and when the quarrel between classicism and
romanticism was vital. He wrote a book about Beau Brummell and a very
curious little book it is, with its odd earnest defence of dandyism,
with its courageous championship of the arts which men of letters so
largely affect to despise.
Poor Beau Brummell. After having played his small part on life's stage,
his thin shade still occasionally wanders across the boards of the
theatre. Blanchard Jerrold wrote a play upon him, which was acted at the
Lyceum Theatre in 1859, when Emery played the title role. Jerrold's
play, which has for sub-title "The King of Calais," treats of that
period in Brummell's life in which he had retired across the channel to
live upon black-mail and to drift into that Consulship at Caen which he
so queerly resigned, to end a poor madman, trying to shave his own
peruke. Jerrold's is a grim play; either it or a version on the same
lines of Brummell's fall is being played across the Atlantic at this
very hour by Mr. Mansfield whose study of the final decay and idiotcy of
the famous beau is said to rival the impressiveness of his Mr. Hyde.
Beau Brummell is never likely to be quite forgotten. Folly often brings
with it a kind of immortality. The fool who fired the Temple of Ephesus
has secured his place in history with Aristides and Themistocles; the
fop who gave a kind of epic dignity to neck-clothes, and who asked the
famous "Who's your fat friend?" question, is remembered as a figure of
that age which includes the name of Sheridan and the name of Burke.
Another and a no less famous Beau steps to salute us from the pages of
the Whartons. Beau Nash is an old friend of ours in fiction, an old
friend in the drama. Our dear old Harrison Ainsworth wrote a novel about
him yesterday; to-day he figures in the pages of one of the most
attractive of Mr. Lewis Wingfield's attractive stories. He found his
way on to the stage under the care of Douglas Jerrold whose comedy of
manners was acted at the Haymarket in the midsummer of 1834. There is a
charm about these Beaux, these odd blossoms of last century
civilisation, the Brummells and the Nashes and the Fieldings, so "high
fantastical" in their bearing, such living examples of the eternal
verities contained in the clothes' philosophy of Herr Diogenes
Teufelsdröckh of Weissnichtwo. Their wigs were more important than their
wit; the pattern of their waistcoats more important than the composition
of their hearts; all morals, all philosophy are absorbed for them in the
engrossing question of the fit of their breeches. D'Artois is of their
kin, French d'Artois who helped to ruin the Old Order and failed to
re-create it as Charles the Tenth, d'Artois whom Mercier describes as
being poured into his faultlessly fitting breeches by the careful and
united efforts of no less than four valets de chambre. But the English
dandies were better than the Frenchman, for they did harm only to
themselves, while he helped to ruin his cause, his party, and his king.
As we turn the pages, we come to one name which immediately if
whimsically suggests poetry. The man was, like Touchstone's Audrey, not
poetical and yet a great poet has been pleased to address him, very much
as Pindar might have addressed the Ancestral Hero of some mighty tyrant.
Ah, George Bubb Dodington Lord Melcombe--no,
Yours was the wrong way!--always understand,
Supposing that permissibly you planned
How statesmanship--your trade--in outward show
Might figure as inspired by simple zeal
For serving country, king, and commonweal,
(Though service tire to death the body, teaze
The soul from out an o'ertasked patriot-drudge)
And yet should prove zeal's outward show agrees
In all respects--right reason being judge--
With inward care that while the statesman spends
Body and soul thus freely for the sake
Of public good, his private welfare take
No harm by such devotedness.
Thus Robert Browning in Robert Browning's penultimate book, that
"Parleyings with certain people of importance in their day" which fell
somewhat coldly upon all save Browning fanatics, and which, when it
seemed to show that the poet's hand had palsied, served only as the
discordant prelude to the swan song of "Asolando," the last and almost
the greatest of his glories. Perhaps only Browning would ever have
thought of undertaking a poetical parley with Bubb Dodington. Dodington
is now largely, and not undeservedly forgotten. His dinners and his
dresses, his poems and his pamphlets, his plays and his passions--the
wind has carried them all away. If Pope had not nicknamed him Bubo, if
Foote had not caricatured him in "The Patron," if Churchill had not
lampooned him in "The Rosciad," he would scarcely have earned in his own
day the notoriety which the publication of his "Diary" had in a manner
preserved to later days. If he was hardly worth a corner in the
Whartons' picture-gallery he was certainly scarcely deserving of the
attention of Browning. Even his ineptitude was hardly important enough
to have twenty pages of Browning's genius wasted upon it, twenty pages
ending with the sting about
The scoff
That greets your very name: folks see but one
Fool more, as well as knave, in Dodington.
Dodington has been occasionally classed with Lord Hervey but the
classification is scarcely fair. With all his faults--and he had them in
abundance--Lord Hervey was a better creature than Bubb Dodington. If he
was effeminate, he had convictions and could stand by them. If Pope
sneered at him as Sporus and called him a curd of asses' milk, he has
left behind him some of the most brilliant memoirs ever penned. If he
had some faults in common with Dodington he was endowed with virtues of
which Dodington never dreamed.
The name of Lord Chesterfield is in the air just now. Within the last
few months the curiosity of the world has been stimulated and satisfied
by the publication of some hitherto unknown letters by Lord
Chesterfield. The pleasure which the student of history has taken in
this new find is just dimmed at this moment by the death of Lord
Carnarvon, whose care and scholarship gave them to the worlds. They are
indeed a precious possession. A very eminent French critic, M.
Brunetière, has inveighed lately with much justice against the passion
for raking together and bringing out all manner of unpublished writings.
He complains, and complains with justice, that while the existing
classics of literature are left imperfectly edited, if not ignored, the
activity of students is devoted to burrowing out all manner of
unimportant material, anything, everything, so long as it has not been
known beforehand to the world. The French critic protests against the
class of scholars who go into ecstacies over a newly discovered washing
list of Pascal or a bill from Racine's perruquier. The complaint tells
against us as well on our side of the Channel. We hear a great deal
about newly discovered fragments by this great writer and that great
writer, which are of no value whatever, except that they happen to be
new. But no such stricture applies to the letters of Lord Chesterfield
which the late Lord Carnarvon so recently gave to the world. They are a
valuable addition to our knowledge of the last century, a valuable
addition to our knowledge of the man who wrote them. And knowledge about
Lord Chesterfield is always welcome. Few of the famous figures of the
last century have been more misunderstood than he. The world is too
ready to remember Johnson's biting letter; too ready to remember the
cruel caricatures of Lord Hervey. Even the famous letters have been
taken too much at Johnson's estimate, and Johnson's estimate was
one-sided and unfair. A man would not learn the highest life from the
Chesterfield letters; they have little in common with the ethics of an A
Kempis, a Jean Paul Richter, or a John Stuart Mill. But they have their
value in their way, and if they contain some utterances so unutterably
foolish as those in which Lord Chesterfield expressed himself upon Greek
literature, they contain some very excellent maxims for the management
of social life. Nobody could become a penny the worse for the study of
Chesterfield; many might become the better. They are not a whit more
cynical than, indeed they are not so cynical as, those letters of
Thackeray's to young Brown, which with all their cleverness make us
understand what Mr. Henley means when in his "Views and Reviews" he
describes him as a "writer of genius who was innately and irredeemably a
Philistine". The letters of Lord Chesterfield would not do much to make
a man a hero, but there is little in literature more unheroic than the
letters to Mr. Thomas Brown the younger.
It is curious to contrast the comparative enthusiasm with which the
Whartons write about Horace Walpole with the invective of Lord Macaulay.
To the great historian Walpole was the most eccentric, the most
artificial, the most capricious of men, who played innumerable parts and
over-acted them all, a creature to whom whatever was little seemed great
and whatever was great seemed little. To Macaulay he was a
gentleman-usher at heart, a Republican whose Republicanism like the
courage of a bully or the love of a fribble was only strong and ardent
when there was no occasion for it, a man who blended the faults of Grub
Street with the faults of St. James's Street, and who united to the
vanity, the jealousy and the irritability of a man of letters, the
affected superciliousness and apathy of a man of ton. The Whartons
over-praise Walpole where Lord Macaulay under-rates him; the truth lies
between the two. He was not in the least an estimable or an admirable
figure, but he wrote admirable, indeed incomparable letters to which the
world is indebted beyond expression. If we can almost say that we know
the London of the last century as well as the London of to-day it is
largely to Horace Walpole's letters that our knowledge is due. They can
hardly be over-praised, they can hardly be too often read by the lover
of last century London. Horace Walpole affected to despise men of
letters. It is his punishment that his fame depends upon his letters,
those letters which, though their writer was all unaware of it, are
genuine literature, and almost of the best.
We could linger over almost every page of the Whartons' volumes, for
every page is full of pleasant suggestions. The name of George Villiers,
second Duke of Buckingham brings up at once a picture of perhaps the
brilliantest and basest period in English history. It brings up too
memories of a fiction that is even dearer than history, of that
wonderful romance of Dumas the Elder's, which Mr. Louis Stevenson has
placed among the half-dozen books that are dearest to his heart, the
"Vicomte de Bragelonne". Who that has ever followed, breathless and
enraptured, the final fortunes of that gallant quadrilateral of
musketeers will forget the part which is played by George Villiers, Duke
of Buckingham, in that magnificent prose epic? There is little to be
said for the real Villiers; he was a profligate and a scoundrel, and he
did not show very heroically in his quarrel with the fiery young Ossory.
It was one thing to practically murder Lord Shrewsbury; it was quite
another thing to risk the wrath and the determined right hand of the
Duke of Ormond's son. But the Villiers of Dumas' fancy is a fairer
figure and a finer lover, and it is pleasant after reading the pages in
which the authors of these essays trace the career of Dryden's epitome
to turn to those volumes of the great Frenchman, to read the account of
the duel with de Wardes and invoke a new blessing on the muse of
fiction.
In some earlier volumes of the same great series we meet with yet
another figure who has his image in the Wharton picture gallery. In that
"crowded and sunny field of life"--the words are Mr. Stevenson's, and
they apply to the whole musketeer epic--that "place busy as a city,
bright as a theatre, thronged with memorable faces, and sounding with
delightful speech," the Abbé Scarron plays his part. It was here that
many of us met Scarron for the first time, and if we have got to know
him better since, we still remember with a thrill of pleasure that first
encounter when in the society of the matchless Count de la Fere and the
marvellous Aramis we made our bow in company with the young Raoul to the
crippled wit and his illustrious companions. The Whartons write brightly
about Scarron, but their best merit to my mind is that they at once
prompt a desire to go to that corner of the bookshelf where the eleven
volumes of the adventures of the immortal musketeers repose, and taking
down the first volume of "Vingt Ans Après" seek for the twenty-third
chapter, where Scarron receives society in his residence in the Rue des
Tournelles. There Scudery twirls his moustaches and trails his enormous
rapier and the Coadjutor exhibits his silken "Fronde". There the velvet
eyes of Mademoiselle d'Aubigné smile and the beauty of Madame de
Chevreuse delights, and all the company make fun of Mazarin and recite
the verses of Voiture.
There are others of these wits and beaux with whom we might like to
linger; but our space is running short; it is time to say good-bye.
Congreve the dramatist and gentleman, Rochefoucault the wit, Saint-Simon
the king of memoir-writers, Rochester and St. Evremond and de Grammont,
Selwyn and Sydney Smith and Sheridan each in turn appeals to us to tarry
a little longer. But it is time to say good-bye to these shadows of the
past with whom we have spent some pleasant hours. It is their duty now
to offer some pleasant hours to others.