How is it, will any one tell me, that all foreign Clubs are so ineffably stupid? I do not suspect that we English are pre-eminent for social gifts; and yet we are the only nation that furnishes clubable men. Frenchmen are wittier, Germans profounder, Russians—externally at least—more courteous and accommodating; and yet their Clubs are meretripots—gambling establishments; and, except play, no other feature of Club-life is to be found in them.
To give a Club its peculiar “cachetâ€â€”its, so to say, trade-mark—you require a class of men who make the Club their home, and whose interest it is that all the internal arrangements should be as perfect, as well ordered, and frictionless as may be. Good furniture, good servants, good lighting, good cookery, well-adjusted temperature, and a well-chosen cellar, are all essentials. In a word, the Club is to be the realisation of what we all think so much of—comfort. Now, how very few foreigners either understand or care for this! Every one who has travelled abroad has seen the “Cercle,†or “L’Union,†or whatever its name be, where men of the highest station—ministers, ambassadors, generals, and suchlike—met to smoke and play whist, with a sanded floor, a dirty attendance, and yet no one ever complained. They drank detestable beer, and inhaled a pestilent atmosphere, and sat in draughts, without a thought that there was anything to be remedied, or that human skill could or need contrive anything better for their accommodation.
When these establishments were succeeded by the modern Club, with its carpeted floor, silk hangings, ormolu lamps, and velvet couches, the change was made in a pure spirit of Anglomanie; somebody had been over to London, and come back full of the splendours of Pall-Mall. The work of imitation, so far as decoration went, was not difficult. Indeed, in some respects, in this they went beyond us, but there ended the success. The Club abroad is a room where men gamble and talk of gambling, but no more; it is not a Club.
For the working of the Club, as for that of constitutional government, a special class are required. It, is the great masses of the middle ranks in England, varied enough in fortune, education, habits, and tastes, but still one in some great condition of a status, that supply the materials for the work of a parliamentary government; and it is through the supply of a large community of similar people that Clubs are maintained in their excellence with us.
For the success of a Club you need a number of men perfectly incapable of all life save such as the Club supplies; who repair to the Club, not alone to dine and smoke and sup, and read their paper, but to interchange thought in that blended half-confidence that the Club imparts; to hear the gossip of the day told in the spirit of men of their own leanings; to ascertain what judgments are passed on public events and public characters by the people they like to agree with;—in fact, to give a sort of familiar domestic tone to intercourse, suggesting the notion that the Club is a species of sanctuary where men can talk at their ease. The men who furnish this category with us are neither young nor old, they are the middle-aged, retaining some of the spring and elasticity of youth, but far more inclining to the solidity of riper years. If they frequent the Opera, it is to a stall, not to thecoulisses, they go. They are more critical than they used to be about their dinners, and they have a tendency to mix seltzer with their champagne. They have reached that bourne in which egotism has become an institution; and by the transference of its working to the Club, they accomplish that marvellous creation by which each man sees himself and his ways and his wants and his instincts reflected in a thousand varied shapes.
Now, there are two things no nation of the Continent possesses—Spring, and middle-aged people. You may be young for a good long spell—some have been known, by the judicious appliances of art, to keep on for sixty years or so; but when you do pass the limit, there is no neutral territory—nomezzo termine. Fall out of the Young Guard, and you must serve as a Veteran. The levity and frivolity, the absence of all serious interest in life, which mark the leisure classes abroad, follow men sometimes even to extreme old age. The successive changes of temperament and taste which we mark at home have no correlatives abroad. The foreigner inhabits at sixty the same sort of world he did at six-and-twenty: he does not dance so much, but he lingers in the ballroom, and he is just as keenly alive to all the little naughty talk that amused him forty years ago, and folly as much interested to hear that the world is just as false and as wicked as it used to be when he was better able to contribute to its frailty and wickedness.
Not one of these men, with their padded pectorals and dyed whiskers, will admit that they are of an age to require comfort. They are ardent youths all of them, turning night into day as of old, and no more sensible of fatigue from late hours, hot rooms, and dissipation, than they were a quarter of a century back.
Can you fancy anything less clubable than a set of men like this? You might as well set before me the stale bon-bons and sugar-plums of a dessert for a dinner, as ask me to take such people for associates and companions. The tone of everlasting trifling disgraces even idleness; and these men contrive in their lives to reverse the laws of physics, since it is by their very levity that they fall.
The humoristic temperament is the soul of Club-life. It is the keen appreciation of others in all their varied moods and shades of feeling that imparts the highest enjoyment to that strange democracy, the Club; and foreigners are immensely deficient in this element. They are infinitely readier, smarter, and wittier than Englishmen. They will hit in an epigram what we would take an hour to embrace in an argument; but for the racy pleasure of seeing how such a man will listen to this, what such another will say to that, how far individuality, in fact, will mould and fashion the news of the day, and assimilate its mental food to its own digestive powers, there is nothing like the Englishman—and especially the Englishman of the Club.
There is nothing like Major Pendennis to be found from Trolhatten to Messina, and yet Pendennis is a class with us; and it is in the nicely-blended selfishness and complaisance, the egotism and obligingness, that we find the purest element of Club-life.
The Parisian are the best—far and away the best—of all foreign Clubs; best in their style of “get-up,†decoration, and arrangement, and best also in tone and social manner. The St Petersburg Club is the most gorgeous, the habits the most costly, the play the highest. It is not very long since that a young Russian noble lost in one evening a sum equal to a hundred thousand pounds. The Vienna Club is good in its own stiff German way; but, generally speaking, German Clubs are very ill arranged, dirty, and comfortless. The Italian are better. Turin, Naples, and Florence have reasonably good Clubs. Home has nothing but the thing called the English Club, a poorly-got-up establishment of small whist-players and low “points.â€
It is a very common remark, that costume has a great influence over people’s conduct, and that the man in his shooting-jacket will occasionally give way to impulsive outbursts that he had never thought of yielding to in his white-cravat moments. Whether this be strictly true or not, there is little doubt that the style and character of the room a man sits in insensibly affects his manner and his bearing, and that the habits which would not be deemed strange in the low-ceilinged chamber, with the sanded floor and the “mutton lights,†would be totally indecorous in the richly-carpeted room, a blaze of wax-light, and glittering with decoration. Now this alternating between Club andCaféspoils men utterly. It engenders the worst possible style—a double manner. The over-stiffness here and the over-ease there are alike faulty.
The great, the fatal defect of all foreign Clubs is, the existence of some one, perhaps two tyrants, who, by loud talk, swagger, an air of presumed superiority and affectation of “knowing the whole thing,†browbeat and ride rough-shod over all their fellows. It is in the want of that wholesome corrective, public opinion, that this pestilence is possible. Of public opinion the Continent knows next to nothing in any shape; and yet it is by the unwritten judgments of such a tribunal that society is guided in England, and the same law that discourages the bully supports and encourages the timid, without either the one or the other having the slightest power to corrupt the court, or coerce its decrees. Club-life is, in a way, the normal school for parliamentary demeanour; and until foreigners understand the Club, they will never comprehend the etiquette of the “Chamber.â€
I have frequently heard medical men declare that no test of a candidate’s fitness to be admitted as a physician was equal to a brief examination at the bedside of a sick man. To be able to say, “There is a patient; tell us his malady, and what you will do for it,†was infinitely better than long hours spent in exploring questions of minute anatomy and theoretical physic. In fact, for all practical purposes, it was more than likely he would be the best who would make the least brilliant figure in an examination; and the man whose studies had familiarised him with everything from Galen to John Hunter, would cut just as sorry a figure if called on to treat a case of actual malady.
It cannot possibly be otherwise. All that mere examination can effect, is to investigate whether an individual has duly prepared himself for the discharge of certain functions; but it never can presume to ascertain whether the person is one fitted by nature, by habit, by taste, or inclination, for the duties before him. Why, the student who may answer the most abstruse questions in anatomy, may himself have nerves so weak as to faint at the sight of blood. The physician who has Paracelsus by heart, may be so deficient in that tact of eye, or ear, or touch, as to render his learning good for nothing. Half an hour in an hospital would, however, test these qualities. You would at once see whether the candidate was a mere mass of book-learning, or whether he was one skilled in the aspect of disease, trained to observe and note all the indications of malady, and able even instantaneously to pronounce upon the gravity of a case before him. This is exactly what you want. No examination of a man’s biceps and deltoid, the breadth of his chest or the strength of his legs, would tell you whether he was a good swimmer—five minutes in deep water would, however, decide the matter.
Now, I shall not multiply arguments to prove my position. I desire to be practical in these “O’Dowdiana,†and I strive not to be prosy. What I would like, then, is to introduce this system of—let us call it—Test-examination, into the Civil Service.
I have the highest respect for the pedagogues of Burlington House. I think highly of Ollendorff and I believe Colenso’s Arithmetic a great institution. I venerate the men who invent the impossible questions; but I own I have the humblest opinion of those who answer them. I’d as soon take a circus-horse, trained to fire a pistol and sit down like a dog, to carry me across a stiff country, as I’d select one of these fellows for an employ which required energy, activity, or ready-wittedness. There is no such inefficiency as self-sufficiency; and this is the very quality instilled by the whole system. Ask the veterans of the Admiralty, the War Office, the Board of Trade, and the Customs, and you will get but the same report, that for thorough incompetency and inordinate conceit there is nothing like the prize candidate of a Civil Service examination. Take my word for it, you could not find a worse pointer than the poodle which would pick you out all the letters of the alphabet.
What I should therefore suggest is, to introduce into the Civil Service something analogous to this clinical examination; something that might test the practical fitness of the candidate, and show, not whether the man has been well prepared by a “grinder,†but whether he be a heaven-born tide-waiter, one of Nature’s own gaugers or vice-consuls.
I know it is not easy to do this in all cases. There are employments, too, wherein it is not called for. Mere clerkship, for instance, is an occupation of such uniformity that a man is just like a sewing-machine, and where, the work being adjusted to him, he performs it as a matter of routine. There are, however, stations which are more or less provocative of tact and ready-wittedness, and which require those qualities which schoolmasters cannot give nor Civil Service examiners take away; such as tact, promptitude, quickness in emergency, good-natured ease, patience, and pluck above all. These, I say, are great gifts, and it would be well if we knew how to find them. Let us take, by way of illustration, the Messenger Service. These Foreign Office Mercuries, who travel the whole globe at a pace only short of the telegraph, are wonderful fellows, and must of necessity be very variously endowed. What capital sleepers, and yet how easily awakened! What a deal of bumping must their heads be equal to! What an indifference must they be endowed with to bad roads and bad dinners, bad servants and bad smells! How patient they must be here—how peremptory there! How they must train their stomach to long fastings, and their skins to little soap! What can Civil Service examination discover of all or any of these aptitudes? Is it written in Ollendorf, think you, how many hours a man can sit in a caleche? Will decimal fractions support his back or strengthen his lumbar vertebrae? What system of inquiry will declare whether the weary traveller will not oversleep himself, or smash the head of his postilion for not awaking him at a frontier? How will you test readiness, endurance, politeness, familiarity with ‘Bradshaw’ and Continental moneys?
I think I have hit on a plan for this, suggested to me, I frankly own, by analogy with the clinical system. I would lay out the Green Park—it is convenient to Downing Street, and well suited to the purpose—as a map of Europe, marking out the boundaries of each country, and stationing posts to represent capital cities. At certain frontiers I would station representatives of the different nations as distinctly marked as I could procure them: that is to say, I’d have a very polite Frenchman, a very rude and insolent Prussian, a sulky Belgian, a roguish Italian, and an extremely dirty Russian. Leicester Square could supply all. It being all duly prepared, I’d start my candidate, with a heavy bag filled with its usual contents of, let us say, a large box of cigars, a set of fire-irons, twenty pots of preserved meats, a case of stuffed birds, four cricket-balls, and a photograph machine, some blue-books, and a dozen of blacking. I’d start him with this, saying simply, “Vienna, calling at Stuttgart and Turin;†not a word more; and then I’d watch my man—how he’d cross the Channel—how he’d cajole Moossoo—and whether he’d make straight for the Rhine or get entangled in Belgian railroads. I’d soon see how he dealt with the embarrassments of the roads and relished the bad diet; and not alone would I test him by hardships and hunger, fatigue and occasional upsets; but I’d try his powers of self-resistance by surrounding him with dissolute youngattachésgiven to blind hookey and lansquenet. I’d have him invited to ravishing orgies, and tempted in as many ways as St Anthony; and all these after long privations. Then, I’d have him kept waiting either under a blazing sun or a deep snow, or both alternately, to test his cerebral organisation; and I’d try him with impure drinking water and damp sheets; and, last of all, on his return, I’d make him pass his accounts before some old monster of official savagery, who would repeatedly impugn his honesty, call out for vouchers, and d—n his eyes. The man “who came out strong†after all these difficulties I would accept as fully equal to his responsibilities, for it would not be alone in intellectuals he had been tested: the man’s temper, his patience, his powers of endurance, his physical strength, his resources in emergency, his readiness to meet difficulty, and, last of all, his self-devotion in matters of official discipline, enabling him to combine with all the noble qualities of a man the submissive attractions of a spaniel.
“Are you sure,†asks some one, “that all these graces and accomplishments can be had for £500 per annum?†Not a doubt of it. It is a cheap age we live in; and if you wanted a shipload of clever fellows for a new colony, I’d engage to supply you on easier terms than with the same number of gardeners or strong-boned housemaids.
Last of all, this scheme might be made no small attraction in this economical era—what is called self-supporting; for the public might be admitted to paid seats, whence they could learn European geography by a new and easy method. “Families admitted at a reduced rate—Schools and Seminaries half-price.â€
Whenever the Budget comes on for discussion there are some three or four speakers, of whom Mr Williams of Lambeth is sure to be one, ready to suggest certain obvious economies by the suppression of some foreign missions, such as Dresden, Hanover, Stuttgart, &c. They have not, it is true, anything forcible or pungent to say on the subject; but as they say the same thing every year, the chances are that, on the drip-drip principle, they will at last succeed either in abolishing these appointments, or reducing the salaries of those who hold them.
Ministers of course defend them, and Opposition leaders, who hope one day to be Ministers, will also blandly say a word or two in their favour. For my own part, I don’t think the country cares much about the matter, or interests itself more deeply who drones away life at Hanover than who occupies an apartment at Hampton Court. In each case it is a sort of dowager asylum, where antiquated respectability may rest and be thankful.
The occupants of these snug berths, however far from England—at least in so far as regards any knowledge of public opinion—are sure to be greatly alarmed at these suggestions for their suppression. Poor pigeons! if you only knew what a sorry sportsman it is who fires at you, you’d never flutter a wing. Be of good heart, I say. Even if Williams’s gun go off at all, the recoil may hurt himself, but it will never damage you. Take my word for it, “the smooth-Bore of Lambeth never hit anything yet.†This assurance of mine—I have given it scores of times personally—never gives the comfort that it ought; for these timid souls, bullied by long dealings with the Office—tormented, as Mr Carlyle would say, with much First Clerk—grow to be easily panic-stricken, and have gloomy nightmares of a time when there shall be no more life-certificates nor any quarter-days.
I cannot enter into their feelings, but I suppose they are reasonable. I conclude that one would like to have a salary, and to be paid it punctually. Self-preservation is a law that we all recognise; and some of these officials may possibly feel that there is no other line of life open to them, and that, if you take away from them their mission, they will be poor indeed. You will think me perhaps as absurd as Mrs Nickleby, who connected roast-pork and canaries, if I confess to you that it is an old mastiff that my father had when I was a boy that brought these people very forcibly to my mind. Poor old Turco!—I can’t know how old he was, but he was nearly blind, exceedingly feeble, intensely stupid, and much given to sleep. Still, whenever any one of the family—he didn’t mind the servants—would go out to the stableyard, he’d rouse himself up, and, affecting to believe it was an intruder, he’d give a fierce bark or two, when, discovering his error, he’d wag his tail and go back to his den—all this being evidently done to show that he was as vigilant as ever—a sort of protest, that said, “Don’t believe one word about my being blind and toothless, still less flatter yourself that the place is secure. It requires all my activity and watchfulness to protect; but go back in peace, I’m ready for them.â€
Now, this is exactly what Turco is doing at Munich and Dresden. Whenever Williams comes out with a hint that he is not wanted, Turco makes a furious noise, rushes here and there after a turkey-cock if he can find one, and thoroughly satisfies the family that he is an invaluable beast, and could not be dispensed with.
Like Turco, too, who always barked, or tried to bark, whenever he heard any noise or commotion going on outside, these people are sure to make an uproar if there be any excitement in their neighbourhood. No sooner did Schleswig-Holstein begin to trouble the world, than despatches began to pour in from places that a few weeks before even the messengers scarcely knew on the map. They related interviews with unknown princes and unheard-of ministers, and spoke of hopes, fears, wishes, and anxieties of people who had not, to our appreciation, a more palpable existence than the creatures of the heathen mythology! Much grumbling, and sore of ear, Williams goes back to his kennel.
“What! suppress the mission at Hohen-Schwein-stadt, when I hold here,†exclaims the Minister, “the admirable report of our diplomatic agent on the state of public feeling in that important capital? Will the honourable gentleman, to whose long experience of foreign politics I am ready to bow, inform me how the relations of England with the Continent are to be carried on unless through the intervention of such appointments? Can the honourable member for ———†(a shipowner, perhaps) “carry on his great and important business without agencies? Can the honourable gentleman himself†(a brewer) “be certain that the invigorating and admirable produce of his manufacture will attain the celebrity that it merits, or become the daily beverage of countless thousands in the tropics, unassisted by those aids which to commerce or diplomacy are alike indispensable?†This is very like the Premier’s eloquence. I almost think I am listening to him, and even see the smile of triumph with which he appeals at the peroration to his friends to cheer him. Turco is safe this time; and, better still, he need never bark again till next Easter and another Budget.
It is a very curious thing—it opens a whole realm of speculation—how small and few are the devices of humanity. We fancy we are progressing simply because we change. We give up alchemy, and we believe in medicine; we scout witchcraft, and we take to spirit-rapping; and instead of monasteries and monks, we have missions and plenipotentiaries. If it be a fine thing to die for one’s country, it’s a pleasant one to live for it; to know that you inhabit an impenetrable retreat, which no “Own Correspondents†ever invade, and where, if it was not for Williams, no sense of fear or alarm could come to disturb the tranquil surface of a stagnant existence.
It is astonishing, too, what a wholesome dread and apprehension of England and English power is maintained through the means of these small legations in secluded spots of the Continent, in remote little duchies, without trade or commerce, far away from the sea, where no one ever heard of imports or exports, and the name of Gladstone had never been spoken. In such places as these, a meddlesome old envoy, with plenty of spare time on hand, often gets us thoroughly hated, always referring to England as a sort of court of last appeal on every question, social, moral, religious, or political, and dimly alluding to Lord Palmerston as a kind of Rhadamanthus, whose judgments fall heavily on ill-doers.
The helpless hopeless condition of small states in all such conflicts was actually pitiable. The poor little trembling King Charles dog in the cage of the lion, and who felt that he only lived on sufferance, was the type of them. I remember an incident which occurred some years ago at the Bagni di Lucca, which will illustrate what I mean. An English stranger at one of the hotels, after washing his hands, threw his basinful of soap-and-water out of the window just as the Grand-duke was passing, deluging his imperial highness from head to foot. The stranger hurried at once to the street, and, throwing himself before the dripping sovereign, made the most humble and apologetic excuses for his act; but the Grand-duke stopped him short at once, saying, “There, there! say no more of it: don’t mention the matter to any one, or I shall get into a correspondence with Palmerston, and be compelled to pay a round sum to you for damages!â€
After all, one could say for these small posts in diplomacy what, I think it was Croker said for certain rotten boroughs in former days, “If you had not had such posts, you would have lost the services of a number of able and instructive men, who, entering public life by the small door, are sure to leave it by the grand entrance.â€
These small missions are very often charming centres of society in places one would scarcely hope for it; and from these little-known legations, every now and then, issue men whom it would not be safe for Williams to bark at, and whom, even if he were rabid, he would not bite.
What a number of ingenious reasons have been latterly given for the decline of the Drama, and the decrease of interest now felt for the stage. Some aver that people are nowadays too cultivated, too highly educated, to take pleasure in a play; others opine that the novel has supplanted the drama; others again declare that it is the prevalence of a religious sentiment on the subject that has damaged theatrical representation. For my own part, I take a totally different view of the subject. My notion is this: the world will never pay a high price for an inferior article, if it can obtain a first-rate one for nothing; in other words, people are come to the conclusion that the best actors are not to be found on the boards of the Haymarket or the Adelphi, but in the world at large—at the Exchange, in the parks, on railroads or river-steamers, at the soirées of learned societies, in Parliament, at Civic dinners or Episcopal visitations.
Why has the masquerade ceased to interest and amuse? Simply because no travestie of costume, no change of condition, is so strikingly ludicrous as what we see on every side of us. The illiterate man with the revenue of a prince; the millionaire who cannot write his name, and whom yesterday we saw as a navvy; the Emperor who, a few years back, lodged over the bootmaker’s; the out-at-elbow followers of imperial fortune, now raised to the highest splendour, and dispensing hospitalities more than regal in magnificence;—these are the spectacles which make the masquerade a tiresome mockery; and it is exactly because we get the veritable article for nothing that we neither seek playhouse nor ballroom, but go out into the streets and highways for our drama, and take our Kembles and Macreadys as we find them at taverns, at railway-stations, on the grassy slopes of Malvern, or the breezy cliffs of Brighton. Once admit that the wild-flower plucked at random has more true delicacy of tint and elegance of form, and there is no going back to the tasteless mockery of artificial wax and wire. The broad boards of real life are the true stage; and he who cannot find matter of interest or amusement in the piece performed, may rely upon it that the cause is in himself, and not in the drama. Some will say, The world is just what it always was. People are no more fictitious now than at any other time. There was always, and there will be always, a certain amount of false pretension in life which you may, if you like, call acting. And to this I demurin toto, and assert that as every age has its peculiar stamp of military glory, or money-seeking, or religious fervour, or dissipation, or scientific discovery, or unprofitable trifling, so the mark of our own time will be found to be its thorough unreality. Every one is in travestie. Selfishness is got up to play philanthropy, apathy to perform zeal, intense self-seeking goes in for love of country; and, to crown all, one of the most ordinary and vulgar minds of all Europe now directs and disposes of the fate and fortunes of all Christendom.
Daily habit familiarises us with the acting of the barrister. His generous trustfulness, his love of all that is good, his scorn for Vice, his noble pity, and the withering sarcasm with which he scathes the ill-doer, we know, can be had, in common cases, for ten pounds ten shillings; and five times as much will enlist in our service the same qualities in a less diluted form; while, by quadrupling the latter sum, we arrive at a self-devotion before which brotherly love pales, and old friendships seem a cold and selfish indifferentism. We had contracted for this man’s acuteness, his subtlety, his quick perception, and his ready-wittedness; but he gives, besides these, his hearty trustfulness, his faith in our honour, his conviction in our integrity: he knows our motives; he has been inside our bosom, and comes out to declare that all is pure and spotless there; and he does this with a trembling lip and a swelling throat, the sweat on his brow and the tear in his eye, it being all the while a matter of mere accident that he had not been engaged on the opposite side, and all the love he bears us been “briefed†for the defendant.
Look at the physician, too. Who is it, then, enters the sick-room with the footfall of a cat, and draws our curtain as gently as a zephyr might stir a rose-leaf, whose tender accents fall softly on our ear, and who asks with the fondest anxiety how we have passed the night? Who is it that cheers, consoles, encourages, and supports us? Who associates himself with our sufferings, and winces under our pain, and as suddenly rallies as we grow better, and joins in our little sickbed drolleries? Who does all these?—a consummate actor, who takes from thirty to forty daily “benefits,†and whose performances are paid at a guinea a scene!
The candidate on the hustings, the Government commissioner on his tour of inspection, the vicar-general of my lord bishop, the admiral on his station, the minister at the grand-ducal Court, are all good specimens of common acting—parts which can be filled with very ordinary capacities, and not above the powers of everyday artists. They conjugate but one verb, and on its moods and tenses they trade to the end of the chapter. These men never soar into the heroic regions of the drama; they infuse no imagination into their parts. They are as unpoetical as a lord-in-waiting. There are but two stops on their organ. They are bland, or they are overbearing; they are either beautifully gentle, or they are terrible in their wrath.
It is a strange feature of our age that the highest walk of the real-life drama should be given up to the men of money, and that Finance should be the most suggestive of all that is creative, fanciful, and imaginative. What a commentary on our era! It is no paradox I pronounce here. The greatest actor I ever saw, the most consummate artist, was a railroad contractor; that is, he had more persuasiveness, more of that magnetic captivation which subordinates reason to mere hope, than any one I ever listened to. He scorned the pictorial, he despised all landscape effects, he summoned to his aid no assistance from gorge or mountain, no deep-bosomed wood or bright eddying river; he was a man of culverts and cuttings, of quartz and limestone and flint; with a glance he could estimate traffic, and with the speed of the lightning-flash tell you what dividend could come of the shares.
It was, however, in results that he was grandiose. Hear him on the theme of a completed line, a newly-opened tunnel, or a finished viaduct—it was a Poem! Such a picture of gushing beatitude as he could paint! It was the golden age—prosperity, happiness, and peace on every side; the song of the husbandman at his plough mingling with the hum of the village school; the thousand forms of civilisation, from cheap sugar to penny serials, that would permeate the land; the peasant studying social science over his tea, and the railway-guard supping his “cheap Gladstone†as he speculated on the Antiquity of Man. Never was such an Eden on earth, and all to be accomplished at the cost of a mere million or two, with a “limited liability.â€
With what a grand contempt this great man talked of the people who busied themselves in the visionary pursuits of politics or literature, or who devoted themselves to the Arts or Field-sports! With him earthworks were the grandest achievements of humanity, and there was no such civiliser as a parliamentary train. Had he been simply an enthusiast, that fatal false logic thatwilltrack enthusiasm—however it be guided—would have betrayed him: but the man was not an enthusiast—he was a great actor; and while to capitalists and speculators he appealed by all the seductive inducements of profits, premiums, and preference shares, to the outer and unmoneyed world he made his approaches by a beautiful and touching philanthropy.
Did he believe in all this? Heaven knows. He talked and acted as if he did; and though, when I last saw him, he had smashed his banker, ruined his company, and beggared the shareholders, he was high-hearted, hopeful, and buoyant as ever. It was a general who had lost a battle, but he meant to recruit another army. It was some accidental rumour of a war—some stupid disturbance on the Danube or the Black Sea—that had frightened capital and made “money tight.†The scheme itself was a glorious project—an unrivalled investment. Never was there such a paying line—innumerable towns, filled with a most migratory population, ever on the move, and only needing to learn the use of certain luxuries to be constantly in demand of them.
With a good harvest, however, and money easy, if Lord Russell could only be commonly civil to the Continental Cabinets, all would go well yet. The bounties of Providence would be diffused over the earth—food would be cheap, taxation reduced, labour plenty, and “then, sir, these worthy people shall have their line, if I die for it.â€
I find it very hard to believe in Borneo’s love or Othello’s jealousy. I cannot, let me do all that I will, accept them as real, even in their most impassioned moments, and yet this other man holds me captive. If I had a hundred pounds in the world, I’d put it into his scheme, and I really feel that, in not borrowing the money to make a venture, I am a poor-spirited creature that has not the courage to win his way to fortune.
And yet these fellows have no aid from dress or make-up. They are not surrounded with all the appliances that aid a deception. They come to us in their everyday apparel, and, mayhap, at inopportune moments, when we are weary, or busy, or out of sorts, to talk of what we are not interested in, and have no relish for. With their marvellous tact they conquer apathy and overcome repugnance; they gain a hearing, and they obtain at least time for more. There is much in what they say that we feel no interest in; but now and then theydotouch a chord that vibrates within us; and when they do so, it is like magic the instinct with which they know it. It was that Roman camp, that lead-mine, that trout-stream, or that paper-mill, did the thing; and the rogue saw it as plainly as if he had a peep into our brain, and could read our thoughts like a printed book. These then, I say, are the truly great actors, who walk the boards of life with unwritten parts, who are the masters of our emotions, even to the extent of taking away our money, and who demand our trustfulness as a right not to be denied them.
Now, what a poor piece of mockery, of false tinsel and fringe and folly and pretence, is your stage-player beside one of these fellows! Who is going to sit three weary hours at the Haymarket, bored by the assumed plausibility of the actor, when the real, the actual, the positive thing that he so poorly simulates is to be met on the railroad, at the station, in the club, on the chain-pier, or the penny steamer? Is there any one, I ask, who will pay to see the plaster-cast when he can behold the marble original for nothing? You say, “Are you going to the masquerade?†and I answer, “I am at it.â€Circumspice!Look at the mock royalties hunting (Louis XIV. fashion) in the deep woods of Fontainebleau. Look at haughty lords and ladies—the haughtiest the earth has ever seen—vying in public testimonies of homage—as we saw a few days ago—to the very qualities that, if they mean anything, mean the subversion of their order. Look at the wasteful abundance of a prison dietary, and the laudable economy which half-starves the workhouse. Look at the famished curate, with little beyond Greek roots to support him, and see the millionaire, who can but write his name, with a princely fortune; and do you want Webster or Buckstone to give these “characters†more point?
Will you take a box for the ‘Comedy of Errors,’ when you can walk into the Chancery Court for nothing? Will you pay for ‘Much Ado about Nothing,’ when a friendly order can admit you to the House? And as for a ‘New Way to Pay Old Debts,’ commend me to Commissioner Goulburn in Bankruptcy; while ‘Love’s Last Shift’ is daily performed at the Court of Probate, under the distinguished patronage of Judge Wills. Is there any need to puzzle one’s head over the decline of the drama, then? You might as well ask if a moderate smoker will pay exorbitantly for dried cabbage-leaves, when he can have prime Cubans for the trouble of taking them!
I do not remember ever to have read more pompons nonsense than was talked a few days ago in Parliament on the subject of pensions for retired colonial governors.
On all ordinary occasions the strongest case a man can have with the British public is to be an ill-used man—that is to say, if you be a man of mark, or note, or station. To be ill-used, as one poor, friendless, and ignoble, is no more than the complement of your condition. It is in the fitness of things that pauperism, which we English have declared to be illegal, should neither be fondled nor caressed. To be ill-used profitably there must be something pictorial in your case; it must have its reliefs of light as well as shade. There must be little touches, a bright “has been,†sunny spots of a happy past Without the force of these contrasts, there is no possibility of establishing the grand grievance which is embodied in ill-usage.
Now, Mr B. C. who brought on this motion was a sorry artist, and the whole sum and substance of his case was, that as we secured the services of eminent and able men, we ought to pay them “properly.†Why, in that one word “properly†lay the whole question. What constitutes proper payment? Every career in life carries with it some circumstance either of advantage or the reverse, which either compensates for the loss of a material benefit, or is requited by some addition of a tangible profit. The educated man who accepts three hundred a-year in the Church is not recompensed, or considered to be recompensed, by this miserable pittance. It is in the respect, the influence, the power, and the reverence that attach to his calling he is rewarded. Place a layman in the parish beside him with that income, and mark the difference of their stations! The same of the soldier. Why or how does seven-and-sixpence diurnally represent one the equal of the best in any society of the land? Simply by a conventional treaty, by which we admit that a man, at the loss of so much hard cash, may enjoy a station which bears no imaginable proportion to his means.
On the other hand, there are large communities who, addressing themselves to acquire wealth and riches, care very little for the adventitious advantages of social state. As it is told of Theodore Hook, at a Lord Mayor’s feast, that he laid down his knife and fork at the fifth course, and declared “he would take the rest out in money;†so there are scores of people who “go in†for the actual and the real. They have no sympathy with those who “take out†their social status partly in condition partly in cash, as is the case with the curate and the captain.
Almost every man, at his outset in life, makes some computation of how much his career can pay him in money, how much in the advantages of rank and station. The bailiff on the estate makes very often a far better income than the village doctor; but do you believe that Æsculapius would change places with him for all that? Is not the unbought deference to his opinion, the respect to his acquirements, the obedience to his counsel, something in the contract he makes with the world? Does he not recognise, every day of his life, that he is not measured by the dimensions of the small house he resides in, or the humble qualities of the hack he rides, but that he has an acceptance in society totally removed from every question of his fortune?
In the great lottery we call life, the prizes differ in many things besides degree. If the man of high ambition determine to strain every nerve to attain a station of eminence and power, it may be that his intellectual equal, fonder of ease, more disposed to tranquillity, will settle down with a career that at the very best will only remove him a step above poverty; and shall we dare to say that either is wrong? My brother the Lord Chancellor is a great man, no doubt. The mace is a splendid club, and the woolsack a most luxurious sofa; but as I walk my village rounds of a summer’s morning, inhaling perfume of earth and plant, following with my eye the ever-mounting lark, have I not a lighter heart, a freer step, a less wearied head? Have I not risen refreshed from sleep? not nightmared by the cutting sarcasms of some noble earl on my fresh-gilt coronet, some slighting allusion to my “newness in that place� Depend upon it, the grand law of compensation which we recognise throughout universal nature extends to the artificial conditions of daily life, and regulates the action and adjusts the inequalities of our social state.
What is a viceroy or a colonial governor? A man of eminence and ability, doubtless, but who is satisfied to estrange himself from home and country, and occupy himself with cares and interests totally new and strange to him, for some five or fifteen thousand pounds a-year, plus a great variety of other things, which to certain minds unquestionably represent high value—the—station, the power, the prestige of a great position, with all its surroundings of deference and homage. Large as his salary is, it is the least distinctive feature of his high office. In every attribute of rank the man is a king. In his presence the wisest and the most gifted do no more than insinuate the words of their wisdom, and beauty retires curtsying, after a few commonplaces from his lips. Why, through all the employments of life, who ever attains to the like of this? His presence is an honour, his notice is fame. To be his guest is a distinction for a day; to be his host is to be illustrious for a lifetime. Are these things nothing? Ask the noble earl as he sits in his howdah; ask my lord marquis as he rides forth with a glittering staff.
Did any one, even Mr B. C. himself, ever imagine that Mr Macready ought to be pensioned after he had played Cardinal Wolsey? Was it ever proposed, even in Parliament, that Mr Kean should have a retiring allowance when he had taken off his robes as Henry IV.? These eminent men were, however, just as real, just as actual, during their brief hour on the stage, as His Excellency the Viceroy or the “Lord High.†They were there under a precisely similar compact. They had to represent a state which had no permanence, and a power that had no stability. They were to utter words which would be ridiculous from their lips to-morrow, and to assume a port and bearing that must be abandoned when they retired to change their clothes.
It is one of my very oldest memories as a boy that I dined in company with Charles Kemble. There was a good deal of talking, and a fair share of wine-drinking. In the course of the former came the question of the French Revolution of ‘30, and the conduct of the French King on that occasion. Kemble took no part in the discussion; he listened, or seemed to listen, filled his glass and emptied it, but never spoke. At last, when each speaker appeared to have said his say, and the subject approached exhaustion, the great actor, with the solemnity of a judge in a charge, and with a grand resonance of voice, said: “I’ll tell you how it is, sirs; Charles X. has forfeited a—a—a right good engagement!†And that was exactly the measure that he and all his tribe took, and are now taking, of kings and rulers—and let us profit by it. The colonial king has his “engagement;†it is defined exactly like the actor’s. He is to play certain parts, and for so many nights; he is to strut his hour in the very finest of properties, and is sure, which the actor is not always, of a certain amount of applause. No living creature believes seriously in him, far less he himself, except, perhaps, in some impassioned moment or other like that in which I once knew Othello so far carried away that he flung Iago into the orchestra.
Pension Carlisle, pension Storks, if you will; but be just as well as generous, and take care that you provide for Paul Bedford and Buckstone.
In Archbishop Whately’s ‘Historic Doubts,’ we find that the existence of the first emperor can be disproven by the very train of argument employed to deny the apostles. Let me suggest the converse of this mode of reasoning, and ask, Is there a word you can say for the Viceroy you cannot equally say for the actor? Have you an argument for him who governs St Helena that will not equally apply to him who struts his hour at the Haymarket?
I perceive that the writer of a letter to the ‘Times’ advocates the claims of the ex-Governors, on the plausible plea that it is exactly the very men who best represent the dignity of the station—best reflect the splendour of the Sovereign—who come back poor and penniless from the high office: while the penurious Governor, who has given dissatisfaction everywhere, made the colony half rebellious by his narrow economies, and degraded his station by contemptible savings, comes back wealthy and affluent—self-pensioned, in fact, and independent.
To meet this end, the writer suggests that the Crown, as advised thereon, should have a discretionary power of rewarding the well-doer and refusing the claim of the unmeriting, which would distinctly separate the case of the worthy servant of the Sovereign from that of him who only employed his office to enrich himself.
There is a certain shallow—it is a very shallow—plausibility about this that attracts at first sight; and there would unquestionably be some force in it, if dinner-giving and hospitalities generally were the first requisites of a colonial ruler; but I cannot admit this. I cannot believe that the man who administers India or Canada, or even Jamaica or Barbadoes, is only an expatriated Lord Mayor. I will not willingly consent to accept it as qualification for a high trust that a man has a good cook and an admirable cellar, and an ostentatious tendency to display the merits of both. Mind, I am no ascetic who say this: I like good dinners; I like occasionally—only occasionally though—very good dinners. I feel with a clever countryman who said he liked being asked out to dine, “it was flattering, and it was nourishing;†but with all this I should never think of “elevating my host†to the dignity of high statesmanship on the mere plea of his hospitality.
We have had some able men in our dependencies who were not in the least given to social enjoyments, who neither understood them for themselves nor thought of them for others—Sir Charles Napier, for instance. And who, let me ask, would have lost the services of such a man to the State, because he had not the tastes of a Sir William Curtis, nor could add a “Cubitt†to his stature?
All discretionary powers are, besides, abuses. They are the snares and pitfalls of official jobbery; and there would be no end of bickering and complaining on the merits of this and the shortcomings of that man. Not to say that such a system as this writer recommends would place a Government in the false position of rewarding extravagance and offering a premium for profusion, and holding up for an example to our colonial fellow-subjects the very habits and tastes which are the bane and destruction of young communities.
Can any one imagine a Cabinet Council sitting to determine whether the ex-Governor of St Helena had or had not entertained the officers of the 509th Foot on their return from India, or whether he of Heligoland had really fed his family on molluscs during all the time of his administration, and sold the shells as magnesia? There could be but one undeniable test of an ex-Governor’s due claim to a pension, since on the question of a man’s hospitalities evidence would vary to eternity. There are those whose buttermilk is better than their neighbours’ bordeaux. I repeat, there could be but one test as to the claim; and as we read in a police sheet, as a sufficient ground for arrest, the two words, “Drunk and Disorderly,†so should any commission on pensions accept as valid grounds for a pension, “Insolvent and a Bankrupt.â€
To talk of these men as ill-used, or their case as a hard one, is simply nonsense! You might as well say that the man you asked to dinner to-day has a legitimate ground of complaint against you because you have not invited him to breakfast to-morrow.