Captain, though it be true that all your life you swore like a pagan,
smoked like a beadle, and drank like a bell-ringer, be your memory
nevertheless honoured--not merely because you were a brave soldier, but
also because you revealed to your little nephew in petticoats the
sentiment of heroism! Pride and laziness had made you almost
insupportable, O my Uncle Victor!--but a great heart used to beat under
those frogs upon your coat. You always used to wear, I now remember, a
rose in your button-hole. That rose which you allowed, as I now have
reason to believe, the shop-girls to pluck for you--that, large,
open-hearted flower, scattering its petals to all the winds, was the
symbol of your glorious youth. You despised neither absinthe nor
tobacco; but you despised life. Neither delicacy nor common sense could
have been learned from you, captain; but you taught me, even at an age
when my nurse had to wipe my nose, a lesson of honour and
self-abnegation that I will never forget.
THOUGHTS ON VARIOUS SUBJECTS
[Sidenote: _Dean Swift_]
We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us
love one another.
* * * * *
The latter part of a wise man's life is taken up in curing the follies,
prejudices, and false opinions he had contracted in the former.
* * * * *
When a true genius appeareth in the world you may know him by this
infallible sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.
* * * * *
Although men are accused of not knowing their own weakness, yet perhaps
as few know their own strength. It is in men as in soils, where
sometimes there is a vein of gold, which the owner knows not of.
* * * * *
If a man would register all his opinions upon love, politics, religion,
learning, etc., beginning from his youth, and so go on to old age, what
a bundle of inconsistencies and contradictions would appear at last!
* * * * *
The reason why so few marriages are happy is because young ladies spend
their time in making nets, not in making cages.
* * * * *
"He who does not provide for his own house," St. Paul says, "is worse
than an infidel." And I think, he who provides only for his own house is
just equal with an infidel.
* * * * *
An idle reason lessens the value of the good ones you gave before.
* * * * *
When I am reading a book, whether wise or silly, it seems to me to be
alive and talking to me.
* * * * *
Very few men, properly speaking, _live_ at present, but are providing to
live another time.
* * * * *
If the men of wit and genius would resolve never to complain in their
works of critics and detractors, the next age would not know that they
ever had any.
* * * * *
As universal a practice as lying is, and as easy a one as it seems, I do
not remember to have heard three good lies in all my conversation, even
from those who were most celebrated in that faculty.
GOETHE IN HIS OLD AGE
[Sidenote: _W.M. Thackeray_]
In 1831, though he had retired from the world, Goethe would nevertheless
very kindly receive strangers. His daughter-in-law's tea-table was
always spread for us. We passed hour after hour there, and night after
night, with the pleasantest talk and music. We read over endless novels
and poems in French, English, and German. My delight in those days was
to make caricatures for children. I was touched to find (in 1855) that
they were remembered and some even kept to the present time; and very
proud to be told, as a lad, that the great Goethe had looked at some of
them.
He remained in his private apartments, where only a very few privileged
persons were admitted; but he liked to know all that was happening, and
interested himself about all strangers. Whenever a countenance took his
fancy there was an artist settled in Weimar who made a portrait of it.
Goethe had quite a gallery of heads, in black and white, taken by this
painter. His house was all over pictures, drawings, casts, statues and
medals.
Of course, I remember very well the perturbation of spirit with which,
as a lad of nineteen, I received the long-expected intimation that the
Herr Geheimrath would see me on such a morning. This notable audience
took place in a little antechamber of his private apartments, covered
all round with antique carts and bas-reliefs. He was habited in a long
grey or drab redingote, with a white neckcloth and a red ribbon in his
button-hole. He kept his hands behind his back just as in Rauch's
statuette. His complexion was very clear, bright, and rosy. His eyes
extraordinarily dark, piercing, and brilliant. I felt quite afraid
before them, and remember comparing them to the eyes of the hero of a
certain romance called "Melmoth the Wanderer," which used to alarm us
boys thirty years ago; eyes of an individual who had made a bargain with
a Certain Person, and at an extreme old age retained these eyes in their
awful splendour. I fancy Goethe must have been still more handsome as an
old man than even in the days of his youth. His voice was very rich and
sweet. He asked me questions about myself, which I answered as best I
could. I recollect I was at first astonished, and then somewhat
relieved, when I found he spoke French with not a good accent.
_Vidi tantum._ I saw him but three times. Once walking in the garden of
his house in the _Frauenplan_; once going to step into his chariot on a
sunshiny day, wearing a cap and a cloak with a red collar. He was
caressing at the time a beautiful little golden-haired granddaughter,
over whose sweet fair face the earth has long since closed, too.
Any of us who had books or magazines from England sent them to him, and
he examined them eagerly. _Fraser's Magazine_ had recently come out, and
I remember he was interested in those admirable outline portraits which
appeared for a while in its pages. But there was one, a very ghastly
caricature of Mr. Rogers, which, as Madame de Goethe told me, he shut up
and put away from him angrily. "They would make me look like that," he
said; though, in truth, I can fancy nothing more serene, majestic, and
_healthy_-looking than the grand old Goethe.
Though his sun was setting, the sky round about was calm and bright, and
that little Weimar illumined by it. In every one of those kind salons
the talk was still of Art and Letters. The theatre, though possessing no
extraordinary actors, was still connected with a noble intelligence and
order. The actors read books and were men of letters and gentlemen,
holding a not unkindly relationship with the _Adel_. At Court the
conversation was exceedingly friendly, simple, and polished.... In the
respect paid by this court to the Patriarch of Letters, there was
something ennobling, I think, alike to the subject and the sovereign.
With a five-and-twenty years' experience since those happy days of which
I write, and an acquaintance with an immense variety of human kind, I
think I have never seen a society more simple, charitable, courteous,
gentlemanlike, than that of the dear little Saxon city where the good
Schiller and the great Goethe lived and lie buried.
LITTLE BILLEE
[Sidenote: _W.M. Thackeray_]