It has happened to the writer that two, or three, or ten, or twenty
gentlewomen have asked him--and asked in various notes of wonder,
pity, and reproof -
"What could have made you think of Mrs. Caudle?
"How could such a thing have entered any man's mind?"
There are subjects that seem like rain drops to fall upon a man's
head, the head itself having nothing to do with the matter. The
result of no train of thought, there is the picture, the statue, the
book, wafted, like the smallest seed, into the brain to feed upon the
soil, such as it may be, and grow there. And this was, no doubt, the
accidental cause of the literary sowing and expansion--unfolding like
a night-flower--of MRS. CAUDLE.
But let a jury of gentlewomen decide.
It was a thick, black wintry afternoon, when the writer stopt in the
front of the playground of a suburban school. The ground swarmed
with boys full of the Saturday's holiday. The earth seemed roofed
with the oldest lead, and the wind came, sharp as Shylock's knife,
from the Minories. But those happy boys ran and jumped, and hopped,
and shouted, and--unconscious men in miniature!--in their own world
of frolic, had no thought of the full-length men they would some day
become; drawn out into grave citizenship; formal, respectable,
responsible. To them the sky was of any or all colours; and for that
keen east wind--if it was called the east wind--cutting the shoulder-
blades of old, old men of forty {1}--they in their immortality of
boyhood had the redder faces, and the nimbler blood for it.
And the writer, looking dreamily into that playground, still mused on
the robust jollity of those little fellows, to whom the tax-gatherer
was as yet a rarer animal than baby hippopotamus. Heroic boyhood, so
ignorant of the future in the knowing enjoyment of the present! And
the writer still dreaming and musing, and still following no distinct
line of thought, there struck upon him, like notes of sudden
household music, these words--CURTAIN LECTURES.
One moment there was no living object save those racing, shouting
boys; and the next, as though a white dove had alighted on the pen
hand of the writer, there was--MRS. CAUDLE.
Ladies of the jury, are there not then some subjects of letters that
mysteriously assert an effect without any discoverable cause?
Otherwise, wherefore should the thought of CURTAIN LECTURES grow from
a school ground--wherefore, among a crowd of holiday school-boys,
should appear MRS. CAUDLE?
For the LECTURES themselves, it is feared they must be given up as a
farcical desecration of a solemn time-honoured privilege; it may be,
exercised once in a life time,--and that once having the effect of a
hundred repetitions, as Job lectured his wife. And Job's wife, a
certain Mohammedan writer delivers, having committed a fault in her
love to her husband, he swore that on his recovery he would deal her
a hundred stripes. Job got well, and his heart was touched and
taught by the tenderness to keep his vow, and still to chastise his
help-mate; for he smote her once with a palm-branch having a hundred
leaves.