The next decade of my outer life is so uninteresting, even to myself,
that I will hurry through it as fast as I can. It will prove dull
reading, I fear.
[Illustration:]
My Uncle Ibbetson (as I now called him) took to me and arranged to
educate and start me in life, and make "a gentleman" of me--an "English
gentleman." But I had to change my name and adopt his; for some reason I
did not know, he seemed to hate my father's very name. Perhaps it was
because he had injured my father through life in many ways, and my
father had always forgiven him; a very good reason! Perhaps it was
because he had proposed to my mother three times when she was a girl,
and had been thrice refused! (After the third time, he went to India for
seven years, and just before his departure my father and mother were
married, and a year after that I was born.)
So Pierre Pasquier de la Marière, _alias_ Monsieur Gogo, became Master
Peter Ibbetson, and went to Bluefriars, the gray-coat school, where he
spent six years--an important slice out of a man's life, especially
at that age.
I hated the garb, I hated the surroundings--the big hospital at the
back, and that reek of cruelty, drunkenness, and filth, the
cattle-market--where every other building was either a slaughter-house,
a gin-palace, or a pawnbroker's shop, more than all I hated the gloomy
jail opposite, where they sometimes hanged a man in public on a Monday
morning. This dismal prison haunted my dreams when I wanted to dream of
Passy, of my dear dead father and mother and Madame Seraskier.
For the first term or two they were ever in my thoughts, and I was
always trying to draw their profiles on desks and slates and copybooks,
till at last all resemblance seemed to fade out of them; and then I drew
M. le Major till his side face became quite demoralized and impossible,
and ceased to be like anything in life. Then I fell back on others: le
Père François, with his eternal _bonnet de colon_ and sabots stuffed
with straw; the dog Médor, the rocking-horse, and all the rest of the
menagerie; the diligence that brought me away from Paris; the heavily
jack-booted couriers in shiny hats and pigtails, and white breeches, and
short-tailed blue coats covered with silver buttons, who used to ride
through Passy, on their way to and fro between the Tuileries and St.
Cloud, on little, neighing, gray stallions with bells round their necks
and tucked-up tails, and beautiful heads like the horses' heads in the
Elgin Marbles.
In my sketches they always looked and walked and trotted the same way:
to the left, or westward as it would be on the map. M. le Major, Madame
Seraskier, Médor, the diligences and couriers, were all bound westward
by common consent--all going to London, I suppose, to look after me, who
was so dotingly fond of them.
Some of the boys used to admire these sketches and preserve them--some
of the bigger boys would value my idealized (!) profiles of Madame
Seraskier, with eyelashes quite an inch in length, and an eye three
times the size of her mouth; and thus I made myself an artistic
reputation for a while. But it did not last long, for my vein was
limited; and soon another boy came to the school, who surpassed me in
variety and interest of subject, and could draw profiles looking either
way with equal ease; he is now a famous Academician, and seems to have
preserved much of his old facility.[A]
[Footnote A: _Note_.--I have here omitted several pages, containing a
description in detail of my cousin's life "at Bluefriars"; and also the
portraits (not always flattering) which he has written of masters and
boys, many of whom are still alive, and some of whom have risen to
distinction; but these sketches would be without special interest unless
the names were given as well, and that would be unadvisable for many
reasons. Moreover, there is not much in what I have left out that has
any bearing on his subsequent life, or the development of his character.
MADGE PLUNKET.]
* * * * *
Thus, on the whole, my school career was neither happy nor unhappy, nor
did I distinguish myself in any way, nor (though I think I was rather
liked than otherwise) make any great or lasting friendships; on the
other hand. I did not in any way disgrace myself, nor make a single
enemy that I knew of. Except that I grew our of the common tall and
very strong, a more commonplace boy than I must have seemed (after my
artistic vein gad run itself dry) never went to a public school. So much
for my outer life at Bluefriars.
[Illustration: A DREAM OF CHIVALRY]
But I had an inner world of my own, whose capital was Passy, whose fauna
and flora were not to be surpassed by anything in Regent's Park or the
Zoological Gardens.
It was good to think of it by day, to dream of it by night, _although I
had not yet learned how to dream!_
There were soon other and less exclusive regions, however, which I
shared with other boys of that bygone day. Regions of freedom and
delight, where I heard the ominous crack of Deerslayer's rifle, and was
friends with Chingachgook and his noble son--the last, alas! of the
Mohicans: where Robin Hood and Friar Tuck made merry, and exchanged
buffets with Lion-hearted Richard under the green-wood tree: where
Quentin Durward, happy squire of dames, rode midnightly by their side
through the gibbet-and-gipsy-haunted forests of Touraine.... Ah! I had
my dream of chivalry!
Happy times and climes! One must be a gray-coated school-boy, in the
heart of foggy London, to know that nostalgia.
Not, indeed, but what London has its merits. Sam Weller lived there, and
Charley Bates, and the irresistible Artful Dodger--and Dick Swiveller,
and his adorable Marchioness, who divided my allegiance with Rebecca of
York and sweet Diana Vernon.
It was good to be an English boy in those days, and care for such
friends as these! But it was good to be a French boy also; to have known
Paris, to possess the true French feel of things--and the language.
Indeed, bilingual boys--boys double-tongued from their very birth
(especially in French and English)--enjoy certain rare privileges. It is
not a bad thing for a school-boy (since a school-boy he must be) to hail
from two mother-countries if he can, and revel now and then in the
sweets of homesickness for that of his two mother-countries in which he
does not happen to be; and read _Les Trois Mousquetaires_ in the
cloisters of Bluefriars, or _Ivanhoe_ in the dull, dusty prison-yard
that serves for a playground in so many a French _lycée_!
Without listening, he hears all round him the stodgy language of every
day, and the blatant shouts of his school-fellows, in the voices he
knows so painfully well--those shrill trebles, those cracked barytones
and frog-like early basses! There they go, bleating and croaking and
yelling; Dick, Tom, and Harry, or Jules, Hector, and Alphonse! How
vaguely tiresome and trivial and commonplace they are--those too
familiar sounds; yet what an additional charm they lend to that so
utterly different but equally familiar word-stream that comes silently
flowing into his consciousness through his rapt eyes! The luxurious
sense of mental exclusiveness and self-sequestration is made doubly
complete by the contrast!
And for this strange enchantment to be well and thoroughly felt, both
his languages must be native; not acquired, however perfectly. Every
single word must have its roots deep down in a personal past so remote
for him as to be almost unremembered; the very sound and printed aspect
of each must be rich in childish memories of home; in all the countless,
nameless, priceless associations that make it sweet and fresh and
strong, and racy of the soil.
Oh! Porthos, Athos, and D'Artagnan--how I loved you, and your immortal
squires, Planchet, Grimaud, Mousqueton! How well and wittily you spoke
the language I adored--better even than good Monsieur Lallemand, the
French master at Bluefriars, who could wield the most irregular
subjunctives as if they had been mere feathers--trifles light as air.
Then came the Count of Monte-Cristo, who taught me (only too well) his
terrible lesson of hatred and revenge; and _Les Mystères de Paris, Le
Juif Errant_, and others.
But no words that I can think of in either mother-tongue can express
what I felt when first, through these tear-dimmed eyes of mine, and deep
into my harrowed soul, came silently flowing the never-to-be-forgotten
history of poor Esmeralda,[A] my first love! whose cruel fate filled
with pity, sorrow, and indignation the last term of my life at school.
It was the most important, the most solemn, the most epoch-making event
of my school life. I read it, reread it, and read it again. I have not
been able to read it since; it is rather long! but how well I remember
it, and how short it seemed then! and oh! how short those
well-spent hours!
[Footnote A: Notre Dame de Paris, par Victor Hugo.]
That mystic word [Greek: Anagkae]! I wrote it on the flyleaf of all my
books. I carved it on my desk. I intoned it in the echoing cloisters! I
vowed I would make a pilgrimage to Notre Dame some day, that I might
hunt for it in every hole and corner there, and read it with my own
eyes, and feel it with my own forefinger.
And then that terrible prophetic song the old hag sings in the dark
slum--how it haunted me, too! I could not shake it out of my troubled
consciousness for months:
_Grouille, grève, grève, grouille,
File, File, ma quenouille:_
_File sa corde au bourreau
Qui siffle dans le préau.
[Greek:"'Anagkae!'Anagkae!'Anagkae_!"]
Yes; it was worth while having been a little French boy just for a few
years.
I especially found it so during the holidays, which I regularly spent at
Bluefriars; for there was a French circulating library in Holborn, close
by--a paradise. It was kept by a delightful old French lady who had seen
better days, and was very kind to me, and did not lend me all the books
I asked for!
Thus irresistibly beguiled by these light wizards of our degenerate age,
I dreamed away most of my school life, utterly deaf to the voices of the
older enchanters--Homer, Horace, Virgil--whom I was sent to school on
purpose to make friends with; a deafness I lived to deplore, like other
dunces, when it was too late.
* * * * *
And I was not only given to dream by day--I dreamed by night; my sleep
was full of dreams--terrible nightmares, exquisite visions, strange
scenes full of inexplicable reminiscence; all vague and incoherent, like
all men's dreams that have hitherto been; _for I had not yet learned how
to dream_.
A vast world, a dread and beautiful chaos, an ever-changing kaleidoscope
of life, too shadowy and dim to leave any lasting impression on the
busy, waking mind; with here and there more vivid images of terror or
delight, that one remembered for a few hours with a strange wonder and
questioning, as Coleridge remembered his Abyssinian maid who played
upon the dulcimer (a charming and most original combination).
The whole cosmos is in a man's brains--as much of it, at least, as a
man's brains will hold; perhaps it is nowhere else. And when sleep
relaxes the will, and there are no earthly surroundings to distract
attention--no duty, pain, or pleasure to compel it--riderless Fancy
takes the bit in its teeth, and the whole cosmos goes mad and has its
wild will of us.
[Illustration: "NOTRE DAME DE PARIS."]
Ineffable false joys, unspeakable false terror and distress, strange
phantoms only seen as in a glass darkly, chase each other without rhyme
or reason, and play hide-and-seek across the twilit field and through
the dark recesses of our clouded and imperfect consciousness.
And the false terrors and distress, however unspeakable, are no worse
than such real terrors and distress as are only too often the waking lot
of man, or even so bad; but the ineffable false joys transcend all
possible human felicity while they last, and a little while it is! We
wake, and wonder, and recall the slight foundation on which such
ultra-human bliss has seemed to rest. What matters the foundation if but
the bliss be there, and the brain has nerves to feel it?
Poor human nature, so richly endowed with nerves of anguish, so
splendidly organized for pain and sorrow, is but slenderly equipped
for joy.
What hells have we not invented for the afterlife! Indeed, what hells we
have often made of this, both for ourselves and others, and at really
such a very small cost of ingenuity, after all!
Perhaps the biggest and most benighted fools have been the best
hell-makers.
Whereas the best of our heavens is but a poor perfunctory conception,
for all that the highest and cleverest among us have done their very
utmost to decorate and embellish it, and make life there seem worth
living. So impossible it is to imagine or invent beyond the sphere of
our experience.
Now, these dreams of mine (common to many) of the false but ineffable
joys, are they not a proof that there exist in the human brain hidden
capacities, dormant potentialities of bliss, unsuspected hitherto, to
be developed some day, perhaps, and placed within the reach of all,
wakers and sleepers alike?
A sense of ineffable joy, attainable at will, and equal in intensity and
duration to (let us say) an attack of sciatica, would go far to equalize
the sorrowful, one-sided conditions under which we live.
* * * * *
But there is one thing which, as a school-boy, I never dreamed--namely,
that I, and one other holding a torch, should one day, by common
consent, find our happiness in exploring these mysterious caverns of the
brain; and should lay the foundations of order where only misrule had
been before: and out of all those unreal, waste, and transitory realms
of illusion, evolve a real, stable, and habitable world, which all who
run may reach.
* * * * *
At last I left school for good, and paid a visit to my Uncle Ibbetson in
Hopshire, where he was building himself a lordly new pleasure-house on
his own land, as the old one he had inherited a year or two ago was no
longer good enough for him.
It was an uninteresting coast on the German Ocean, without a rock, or a
cliff, or a pier, or a tree; even without cold gray stones for the sea
to break on--nothing but sand!--a bourgeois kind of sea, charmless in
its best moods, and not very terrible in its wrath, except to a few
stray fishermen whom it employed, and did not seem to reward very
munificently.
Inland it was much the same. One always thought of the country as gray,
until one looked and found that it was green; and then, if one were old
and wise, one thought no more about it, and turned one's gaze inward.
Moreover, it seemed to rain incessantly.
But it was the country and the sea, after Bluefriars and the
cloisters--after Newgate, St. Bartholomew, and Smithfield.
And one could fish and bathe in the sea after all, and ride in the
country, and even follow the hounds, a little later; which would have
been a joy beyond compare if one had not been blessed with an uncle who
thought one rode like a French tailor, and told one so, and mimicked
one, in the presence of charming young ladies who rode in perfection.
In fact, it was heaven itself by comparison, and would have remained so
longer but for Colonel Ibbetson's efforts to make a gentleman of me--an
English gentleman.
What is a gentleman? It is a grand old name; but what does it mean?
At one time, to say of a man that he is a gentleman, is to confer on him
the highest title of distinction we can think of; even if we are
speaking of a prince.
At another, to say of a man that he is _not_ a gentleman is almost to
stigmatize him as a social outcast, unfit for the company of his
kind--even if it is only one haberdasher speaking of another.
_Who_ is a gentleman, and yet who _is not_?
The Prince of Darkness was one, and so was Mr. John Halifax, if we are
to believe those who knew them best; and so was one "Pelham," according
to the late Sir Edward Bulwer, Earl of Lytton, etc.; and it certainly
seemed as if _he_ ought to know.
And I was to be another, according to Roger Ibbetson, Esquire, of
Ibbetson Hall, late Colonel of the--, and it certainly seemed as if
he ought to know too! The word was as constantly on his lips (when
talking to _me_) as though, instead of having borne her Majesty's
commission, he were a hairdresser's assistant who had just come into an
independent fortune.
This course of tuition began pleasantly enough, before I left London, by
his sending me to his tailors, who made me several beautiful suits;
especially an evening suit, which has lasted me for life, alas; and
these, after the uniform of the gray-coat school, were like an
initiation to the splendors of freedom and manhood.
Colonel Ibbetson--or Uncle Ibbetson, as I used to call him--was my
mother's first cousin; my grandmother, Mrs. Biddulph, was the sister of
his father, the late Archdeacon Ibbetson, a very pious, learned, and
exemplary divine, of good family.
But his mother (the Archdeacon's second wife) had been the only child
and heiress of an immensely rich pawnbroker, by name Mendoza; a
Portuguese Jew, with a dash of colored blood in his veins besides, it
was said; and, indeed, this remote African strain still showed itself in
Uncle Ibbetson's thick lips, wide open nostrils, and big black eyes with
yellow whites--and especially in his long, splay, lark-heeled feet,
which gave both himself and the best bootmaker in London a great deal
of trouble.
Otherwise, and in spite of his ugly face, he was not without a certain
soldier-like air of distinction, being very tall and powerfully built.
He wore stays, and an excellent wig, for he was prematurely bald; and he
carried his hat on one side, which (in my untutored eyes) made him look
very much like a "_swell_," but not quite like a _gentleman_.
To wear your hat jauntily cocked over one eye, and yet "look like a
gentleman!"
It can be done, I am told; and has been, and is even still! It is not,
perhaps, a very lofty achievement--but such as it is, it requires a
somewhat rare combination of social and physical gifts in the wearer;
and the possession of either Semitic or African blood does not seem to
be one of these.
[Illustration: "PORTRAIT CHARMANT, PORTRAIT DE MON AMIE ..."]
Colonel Ibbetson could do a little of everything--sketch (especially a
steam-boat on a smooth sea, with beautiful thick smoke reflected in the
water), play the guitar, sing chansonnettes and canzonets, write society
verses, quote De Musset--
_"Avez-vous vu dans Barcelone
Une Andalouse au sein bruni?"_
He would speak French whenever he could, even to an English ostler, and
then recollect himself suddenly, and apologize for his thoughtlessness;
and even when he spoke English, he would embroider it with little
two-penny French tags and idioms: "Pour tout potage"; "Nous avons changé
tout cela"; "Que diable allait-il faire dans cette galère?" etc.; or
Italian, "Chi lo sa?" "Pazienza!" "Ahimè!" or even Latin, "Eheu
fugaces," and "Vidi tantum!" for he had been an Eton boy. It must have
been very cheap Latin, for I could always understand it myself! He drew
the line at German and Greek; fortunately, for so do I. He was a
bachelor, and his domestic arrangements had been irregular, and I will
not dwell upon them; but his house, as far as it went, seemed to promise
better things.
His architect, Mr. Lintot, an extraordinary little man, full of genius
and quite self-made, became my friend and taught me to smoke, and drink
gin and water.
He did his work well; but of an evening he used to drink more than was
good for him, and rave about Shelley, his only poet. He would recite
"The Skylark" (his only poem) with uncertain _h_'s, and a rather
cockney accent--
"'_Ail to thee blythe sperrit!
Bird thou never wert,
That from 'eaven, or near it
Po'rest thy full 'eart
In profuse strains of hunpremeditated hart_."
As the evening wore on his recitations became "low comic," and quite
admirable for accent and humour. He could imitate all the actors in
London (none of which I had seen) so well as to transport me with
delight and wonder; and all this with nobody but me for an audience, as
we sat smoking and drinking together in his room at the "Ibbetson Arms."