Memorials and Other Papers
by
Thomas de Quincey
Part 1 out of 9
Anne Soulard, Charles Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
MEMORIALS, AND OTHER PAPERS, VOL. I.
BY THOMAS DE QUINCEY
FROM THE AUTHOR, TO THE AMERICAN EDITOR OF HIS WORKS.
These papers I am anxious to put into the hands of your house, and, so
far as regards the U.S., of your house exclusively; not with any view
to further emolument, but as an acknowledgment of the services which
you have already rendered me; namely, first, in having brought together
so widely scattered a collection--a difficulty which in my own hands by
too painful an experience I had found from nervous depression to be
absolutely insurmountable; secondly, in having made me a participator
in the pecuniary profits of the American edition, without solicitation
or the shadow of any expectation on my part, without any legal claim
that I could plead, or equitable warrant in established usage, solely
and merely upon your own spontaneous motion. Some of these new papers,
I hope, will not be without their value in the eyes of those who have
taken an interest in the original series. But at all events, good or
bad, they are now tendered to the appropriation of your individual
house, the Messrs. TICKNOR & FIELDS, according to the amplest extent of
any power to make such a transfer that I may be found to possess by law
or custom in America.
I wish this transfer were likely to be of more value. But the veriest
trifle, interpreted by the spirit in which I offer it, may express my
sense of the liberality manifested throughout this transaction by your
honorable house.
Ever believe me, my dear sir,
Your faithful and obliged,
THOMAS DE QUINCEY.
CONTENTS OF VOLUME I.
EXPLANATORY NOTICES
THE ORPHAN HEIRESS.
VISIT TO LAXTON
THE PRIORY
OXFORD
THE PAGAN ORACLES
THE REVOLUTION OF GREECE
EXPLANATORY NOTICES.
Many of the papers in my collected works were originally written under
one set of disadvantages, and are now revised under another. They were
written generally under great pressure as to time, in order to catch
the critical periods of monthly journals; written oftentimes at a
distance from the press (so as to have no opportunity for correction);
and always written at a distance from libraries, so that very many
statements, references, and citations, were made on the authority of my
unassisted memory. Under such circumstances were most of the papers
composed; and they are now reissued in a corrected form, sometimes even
partially recast, under the distraction of a nervous misery which
embarrasses my efforts in a mode and in a degree inexpressible by
words. Such, indeed, is the distress produced by this malady, that, if
the present act of republication had in any respect worn the character
of an experiment, I should have shrunk from it in despondency. But the
experiment, so far as there was any, had been already tried for me
vicariously amongst the Americans; a people so nearly repeating our own
in style of intellect, and in the composition of their reading class,
that a success amongst them counts for a success amongst ourselves. For
some few of the separate papers in these volumes I make pretensions of
a higher cast. These pretensions I will explain hereafter. All the rest
I resign to the reader's unbiased judgment, adding here, with respect
to four of them, a few prefatory words--not of propitiation or
deprecation, but simply in explanation as to points that would
otherwise be open to misconstruction.
1. The paper on "Murder as one of the Fine Arts" [Footnote: Published
in the "Miscellaneous Essays."] seemed to exact from me some account of
Williams, the dreadful London murderer of the last generation; not
only because the amateurs had so much insisted on his merit as the
supreme of artists for grandeur of design and breadth of style; and
because, apart from this momentary connection with my paper, the man
himself merited a record for his matchless audacity, combined with so
much of snaky subtlety, and even insinuating amiableness, in his
demeanor; but also because, apart from the man himself, the works of
the man (those two of them especially which so profoundly impressed the
nation in 1812) were in themselves, for dramatic effect, the most
impressive on record. Southey pronounced their preeminence when he said
to me that they ranked amongst the few domestic events which, by the
depth and the expansion of horror attending them, had risen to the
dignity of a _national_ interest. I may add that this interest
benefited also by the mystery which invested the murders; mystery as to
various points but especially as respected one important question, Had
the murderer any accomplice? [Footnote: Upon a large overbalance of
probabilities, it was, however, definitively agreed amongst amateurs
that Williams must have been alone in these atrocities. Meantime,
amongst the colorable presumptions on the other side was this:--Some
hours after the last murder, a man was apprehended at Barnet (the first
stage from London on a principal north road), encumbered with a
quantity of plate. How he came by it, or whither he was going, he
steadfastly refused to say. In the daily journals, which he was allowed
to see, he read with eagerness the police examinations of Williams; and
on the same day which announced the catastrophe of Williams, he also
committed suicide in his cell.] There was, therefore, reason enough,
both in the man's hellish character, and in the mystery which
surrounded him, for a Postscript [Footnote: Published in the "Note
Book."] to the original paper; since, in a lapse of forty-two years,
both the man and his deeds had faded away from the knowledge of the
present generation; but still I am sensible that my record is far too
diffuse. Feeling this at the very time of writing, I was yet unable to
correct it; so little self-control was I able to exercise under the
afflicting agitations and the unconquerable impatience of my nervous
malady.
2. "War." [Footnote: Published in "Narrative and Miscellaneous
Essays."]--In this paper, from having faultily adjusted its proportions
in the original outline, I find that I have dwelt too briefly and too
feebly upon the capital interest at stake. To apply a correction to
some popular misreadings of history, to show that the criminal (because
trivial) occasions of war are not always its trifle causes, or to
suggest that war (if resigned to its own natural movement of
progress) is cleansing itself and ennobling itself constantly and
inevitably, were it only through its connection with science ever more
and more exquisite, and through its augmented costliness,--all this may
have its use in offering some restraint upon the levity of action or of
declamation in Peace Societies. But all this is below the occasion. I
feel that far grander interests are at stake in this contest. The Peace
Societies are falsely appreciated, when they are described as merely
deaf to the lessons of experience, and as too "_romantic_" in
their expectations. The very opposite is, to _my_ thinking, their
criminal reproach. He that is romantic errs usually by too much
elevation. He violates the standard of reasonable expectation, by
drawing too violently upon the nobilities of human nature. But, on the
contrary, the Peace Societies would, if their power kept pace with
their guilty purposes, work degradation for man by drawing upon his
most effeminate and luxurious cravings for ease. Most heartily, and
with my profoundest sympathy, do I go along with Wordsworth in his
grand lyrical proclamation of a truth not less divine than it is
mysterious, not less triumphant than it is sorrowful, namely, that
amongst God's holiest instruments for the elevation of human nature is
"mutual slaughter" amongst men; yes, that "Carnage is God's daughter."
Not deriving my own views in this matter from Wordsworth,--not knowing
even whether I hold them on the same grounds, since Wordsworth has left
_his_ grounds unexplained,--nevertheless I cite them in honor, as
capable of the holiest justification. The instruments rise in grandeur,
carnage and mutual slaughter rise in holiness, exactly as the motives
and the interests rise on behalf of which such awful powers are
invoked. Fighting for truth in its last recesses of sanctity, for human
dignity systematically outraged, or for human rights mercilessly
trodden under foot--champions of such interests, men first of all
descry, as from a summit suddenly revealed, the possible grandeur of
bloodshed suffered or inflicted. Judas and Simon Maccabæus in days of
old, Gustavus Adolphus [Footnote: The Thirty Years' War, from 1618 to
the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, was notoriously the last and the
decisive conflict between Popery and Protestantism; the result of that
war it was which finally enlightened all the Popish princes of
Christendom as to the impossibility of ever suppressing the antagonist
party by mere force of arms. I am not meaning, however, to utter any
opinion whatever on the religious position of the two great parties. It
is sufficient for entire sympathy with the royal Swede, that he fought
for the freedom of conscience. Many an enlightened Roman Catholic,
supposing only that he were not a Papist, would have given his hopes
and his confidence to the Protestant king.] in modern days, fighting
for the violated rights of conscience against perfidious despots and
murdering oppressors, exhibit to us the incarnations of Wordsworth's
principle. Such wars are of rare occurrence. Fortunately they are so;
since, under the possible contingencies of human strength and weakness,
it might else happen that the grandeur of the principle should suffer
dishonor through the incommensurate means for maintaining it. But such
cases, though emerging rarely, are always to be reserved in men's minds
as ultimate appeals to what is most divine in man. Happy it is for
human welfare that the blind heart of man is a thousand times wiser
than his understanding. An _arrière pensée_ should lie hidden in
all minds--a holy reserve as to cases which _may_ arise similar to
such as HAVE arisen, where a merciful bloodshed [Footnote: "_Merciful
bloodshed_"--In reading either the later religious wars of the
Jewish people under the Maccabees, or the earlier under Joshua, every
philosophic reader will have felt the true and transcendent spirit of
mercy which resides virtually in such wars, as maintaining the unity of
God against Polytheism and, by trampling on cruel idolatries, as
indirectly opening the channels for benign principles of morality
through endless generations of men. Here especially he will have read
one justification of Wordsworth's bold doctrine upon war. Thus far he
will destroy a wisdom working from afar, but, as regards the immediate
present, he will be apt to adopt the ordinary view, namely, that in the
Old Testament severity prevails approaching to cruelty. Yet, on
consideration, he will be disposed to qualify this opinion. He will
have observed many indications of a relenting kindness and a tenderness
of love in the Mosaical ordinances. And recently there has been
suggested another argument tending to the same conclusion. In the last
work of Mr. Layard ('Discoveries in the Ruins of Nineveh and Babylon,
1853') are published some atrocious monuments of the Assyrian cruelty
in the treatment of military captives. In one of the plates of Chap
xx., at page 456, is exhibited some unknown torture applied to the
head, and in another, at page 458, is exhibited the abominable process,
applied to two captives, of flaying them alive. One such case had been
previously recorded in human literature, and illustrated by a plate. It
occurs in a Dutch voyage to the islands of the East. The subject of the
torment in that case as a woman who had been charged with some act of
infidelity to her husband. And the local government, being indignantly
summoned to interfere by some Christian strangers, had declined to do
so, on the plea that the man was master within his own house. But the
Assyrian case was worse. This torture was there applied, not upon a
sudden vindictive impulse, but in cold blood, to a simple case
apparently of civil disobedience or revolt. Now, when we consider how
intimate, and how ancient, was the connection between Assyria and
Palestine, how many things (in war especially) were transferred
mediately through the intervening tribes (all habitually cruel), from
the people on the Tigris to those on the Jordan, I feel convinced that
Moses must have interfered most peremptorily and determinately, and not
merely by verbal ordinances, but by establishing counter usages against
this spirit of barbarity, otherwise it would have increased
contagiously, whereas we meet with no such hellish atrocities amongst
the children of Israel. In the case of one memorable outrage by a
Hebrew tribe, the national vengeance which overtook it was complete and
tearful beyond all that history has recorded] has been authorized by
the express voice of God. Such a reserve cannot be dispensed with. It
belongs to the principle of progress in man that he should forever keep
open a secret commerce in the last resort with the spirit of martyrdom
on behalf of man's most saintly interests. In proportion as the
instruments for upholding or retrieving such saintly interests should
come to be dishonored or less honored, would the inference be valid
that those interests were shaking in their foundations. And any
confederation or compact of nations for abolishing war would be the
inauguration of a downward path for man.
A battle is by possibility the grandest, and also the meanest, of human
exploits. It is the grandest when it is fought for godlike truth, for
human dignity, or for human rights; it is the meanest when it is fought
for petty advantages (as, by way of example, for accession of territory
which adds nothing to the security of a frontier), and still more when
it is fought simply as a gladiator's trial of national prowess. This is
the principle upon which, very naturally, our British school-boys value
a battle. Painful it is to add, that this is the principle upon which
our adult neighbors the French seem to value a battle.
To any man who, like myself, admires the high-toned, martial gallantry
of the French, and pays a cheerful tribute of respect to their many
intellectual triumphs, it is painful to witness the childish state of
feeling which the French people manifest on every possible question
that connects itself at any point with martial pretensions. A battle is
valued by them on the same principles, not better and not worse, as
govern our own schoolboys. Every battle is viewed by the boys as a test
applied to the personal prowess of each individual soldier; and,
naturally amongst boys, it would be the merest hypocrisy to take any
higher ground. But amongst adults, arrived at the power of reflecting
and comparing, we look for something nobler. We English estimate
Waterloo, not by its amount of killed and wounded, but as the battle
which terminated a series of battles, having one common object, namely,
the overthrow of a frightful tyranny. A great sepulchral shadow rolled
away from the face of Christendom as that day's sun went down to his
rest; for, had the success been less absolute, an opportunity would
have offered for negotiation, and consequently for an infinity of
intrigues through the feuds always gathering upon national jealousies
amongst allied armies. The dragon would soon have healed his wounds;
after which the prosperity of the despotism would have been greater
than before. But, without reference to Waterloo in particular,
_we_, on _our_ part, find it impossible to contemplate any memorable
battle otherwise than according to its tendency towards some
commensurate object. To the French this must be impossible, seeing that
no lofty (that is, no disinterested) purpose has ever been so much as
counterfeited for a French war, nor therefore for a French battle.
Aggression, cloaked at the very utmost in the garb of retaliation for
counter aggressions on the part of the enemy, stands forward uniformly
in the van of such motives as it is thought worth while to plead. But
in French casuistry it is not held necessary to plead _any_thing;
war justifies itself. To fight for the experimental purpose of trying
the proportions of martial merit, but (to speak frankly) for the
purpose of publishing and renewing to Europe the proclamation of French
superiority--_that_ is the object of French wars. Like the Spartan
of old, the Frenchman would hold that a state of peace, and not a state
of war, is the state which calls for apology; and that already from the
first such an apology must wear a very suspicious aspect of paradox.
3. "The English Mail-Coach." [Footnote: Published in the "Miscellaneous
Essays."]--This little paper, according to my original intention,
formed part of the "Suspiria de Profundis," from which, for a momentary
purpose, I did not scruple to detach it, and to publish it apart, as
sufficiently intelligible even when dislocated from its place in a
larger whole. To my surprise, however, one or two critics, not
carelessly in conversation, but deliberately in print, professed their
inability to apprehend the meaning of the whole, or to follow the links
of the connection between its several parts. I am myself as little able
to understand where the difficulty lies, or to detect any lurking
obscurity, as those critics found themselves to unravel my logic.
Possibly I may not be an indifferent and neutral judge in such a case.
I will therefore sketch a brief abstract of the little paper according
to my own original design, and then leave the reader to judge how far
this design is kept in sight through the actual execution.
Thirty-seven years ago, or rather more, accident made me, in the dead
of night, and of a night memorably solemn, the solitary witness to an
appalling scene, which threatened instant death, in a shape the most
terrific, to two young people, whom I had no means of assisting, except
in so far as I was able to give them a most hurried warning of their
danger; but even _that_ not until they stood within the very
shadow of the catastrophe, being divided from the most frightful of
deaths by scarcely more, if more at all, than seventy seconds.
Such was the scene, such in its outline, from which the whole of this
paper radiates as a natural expansion. The scene is circumstantially
narrated in Section the Second, entitled, "The Vision of Sudden Death."
But a movement of horror and of spontaneous recoil from this dreadful
scene naturally carried the whole of that scene, raised and idealised,
into my dreams, and very soon into a rolling succession of dreams. The
actual scene, as looked down upon from the box of the mail, was
transformed into a dream, as tumultuous and changing as a musical
fugue. This troubled Dream is circumstantially reported in Section the
Third, entitled, "Dream-Fugue upon the Theme of Sudden Death." What I
had beheld from my seat upon the mail,--the scenical strife of action
and passion, of anguish and fear, as I had there witnessed them moving
in ghostly silence; this duel between life and death narrowing itself
to a point of such exquisite evanescence as the collision neared,--all
these elements of the scene blended, under the law of association, with
the previous and permanent features of distinction investing the mail
itself, which features at that time lay--1st, in velocity
unprecedented; 2dly, in the power and beauty of the horses: 3dly, in
the official connection with the government of a great nation; and,
4thly, in the function, almost a consecrated function, of publishing
and diffusing through the land the great political events, and
especially the great battles during a conflict of unparalleled
grandeur. These honorary distinctions are all described
circumstantially in the FIRST or introductory section ("The Glory of
Motion"). The three first were distinctions maintained at all times;
but the fourth and grandest belonged exclusively to the war with
Napoleon; and this it was which most naturally introduced Waterloo into
the dream. Waterloo, I understood, was the particular feature of the
"Dream-Fugue" which my censors were least able to account for. Yet
surely Waterloo, which, in common with every other great battle, it had
been our special privilege to publish over all the land, most naturally
entered the Dream under the license of our privilege. If not--if there
be anything amiss--let the Dream be responsible. The Dream is a law to
itself; and as well quarrel with a rainbow for showing, or for
_not_ showing, a secondary arch. So far as I know, every element
in the shifting movements of the Dream derived itself either primarily
from the incidents of the actual scene, or from secondary features
associated with the mail. For example, the cathedral aisle derived
itself from the mimic combination of features which grouped themselves
together at the point of approaching collision, namely, an arrow-like
section of the road, six hundred yards long, under the solemn lights
described, with lofty trees meeting overhead in arches. The guard's
horn, again--a humble instrument in itself--was yet glorified as the
organ of publication for so many great national events. And the
incident of the Dying Trumpeter, who rises from a marble bas-relief,
and carries a marble trumpet to his marble lips for the purpose of
warning the female infant, was doubtless secretly suggested by my own
imperfect effort to seize the guard's horn, and to blow a warning
blast. But the Dream knows best; and the Dream, I say again, is the
responsible party.
4. "The Spanish Nun." [Footnote: Published in "Narrative and
Miscellaneous Essays."]--There are some narratives, which, though pure
fictions from first to last, counterfeit so vividly the air of grave
realities, that, if deliberately offered for such, they would for a
time impose upon everybody. In the opposite scale there are other
narratives, which, whilst rigorously true, move amongst characters and
scenes so remote from our ordinary experience, and through, a state of
society so favorable to an adventurous cast of incidents, that they
would everywhere pass for romances, if severed from the documents which
attest their fidelity to facts. In the former class stand the admirable
novels of De Foe; and, on a lower range, within the same category, the
inimitable "Vicar of Wakefield;" upon which last novel, without at all
designing it, I once became the author of the following instructive
experiment. I had given a copy of this little novel to a beautiful girl
of seventeen, the daughter of a statesman in Westmoreland, not
designing any deception (nor so much as any concealment) with respect
to the fictitious character of the incidents and of the actors in that
famous tale. Mere accident it was that had intercepted those
explanations as to the extent of fiction in these points which in this
case it would have been so natural to make. Indeed, considering the
exquisite verisimilitude of the work meeting with such absolute
inexperience in the reader, it was almost a duty to have made them.
This duty, however, something had caused me to forget; and when next I
saw the young mountaineer, I forgot that I _had_ forgotten it.
Consequently, at first I was perplexed by the unfaltering gravity with
which my fair young friend spoke of Dr. Primrose, of Sophia and her
sister, of Squire Thornhill, &c., as real and probably living
personages, who could sue and be sued. It appeared that this artless
young rustic, who had never heard of novels and romances as a bare
possibility amongst all the shameless devices of London swindlers, had
read with religious fidelity every word of this tale, so thoroughly
life-like, surrendering her perfect faith and her loving sympathy to
the different persons in the tale, and the natural distresses in which
they are involved, without suspecting, for a moment, that by so much as
a breathing of exaggeration or of embellishment the pure gospel truth
of the narrative could have been sullied. She listened, in a kind of
breathless stupor, to my frank explanation--that not part only, but the
whole, of this natural tale was a pure invention. Scorn and indignation
flashed from her eyes. She regarded herself as one who had been hoaxed
and swindled; begged me to take back the book; and never again, to the
end of her life, could endure to look into the book, or to be reminded
of that criminal imposture which Dr. Oliver Goldsmith had practised
upon her youthful credulity.
In that case, a book altogether fabulous, and not meaning to offer
itself for anything else, had been read as genuine history. Here, on
the other hand, the adventures of the Spanish Nun, which in every
detail of time and place have since been sifted and authenticated,
stood a good chance at one period of being classed as the most lawless
of romances. It is, indeed, undeniable, and this arises as a natural
result from the bold, adventurous character of the heroine, and from
the unsettled state of society at that period in Spanish America, that
a reader the most credulous would at times be startled with doubts upon
what seems so unvarying a tenor of danger and lawless violence. But, on
the other hand, it is also undeniable that a reader the most
obstinately sceptical would be equally startled in the very opposite
direction, on remarking that the incidents are far from being such as a
romance-writer would have been likely to invent; since, if striking,
tragic, and even appalling, they are at times repulsive. And it seems
evident that, once putting himself to the cost of a wholesale fiction,
the writer would have used his privilege more freely for his own
advantage. Whereas the author of these memoirs clearly writes under the
coercion and restraint of a _notorious reality_, that would not
suffer him to ignore or to modify the leading facts. Then, as to the
objection that few people or none have an experience presenting such
uniformity of perilous adventure, a little closer attention shows that
the experience in this case is _not_ uniform; and so far otherwise,
that a period of several years in Kate's South American life is
confessedly suppressed; and on no other ground whatever than that
this long parenthesis is _not_ adventurous, not essentially
differing from the monotonous character of ordinary Spanish life.
Suppose the case, therefore, that Kate's memoirs had been thrown upon
the world with no vouchers for their authenticity beyond such internal
presumptions as would have occurred to thoughtful readers, when
reviewing the entire succession of incidents, I am of opinion that the
person best qualified by legal experience to judge of evidence would
finally have pronounced a favorable award; since it is easy to
understand that in a world so vast as the Peru, the Mexico, the Chili,
of Spaniards during the first quarter of the seventeenth century, and
under the slender modification of Indian manners as yet effected by the
Papal Christianization of those countries, and in the neighborhood of a
river-system so awful, of a mountain-system so unheard-of in Europe,
there would probably, by blind, unconscious sympathy, grow up a
tendency to lawless and gigantesque ideals of adventurous life; under
which, united with the duelling code of Europe, many things would
become trivial and commonplace experiences that to us home-bred English
("_qui musas colimus severiores_") seem monstrous and revolting.
Left, therefore, to itself, _my_ belief is, that the story of the
Military Nun would have prevailed finally against the demurs of the
sceptics. However, in the mean time, all such demurs were suddenly and
_officially_ silenced forever. Soon after the publication of Kate's
memoirs, in what you may call an early stage of her _literary_
career, though two centuries after her _personal_ career had closed, a
regular controversy arose upon the degree of credit due to these
extraordinary confessions (such they may be called) of the poor
conscience-haunted nun. Whether these in Kate's original MS.
were entitled "Autobiographic Sketches," or "Selections Grave and
Gay," from the military experiences of a Nun, or possibly "The
Confessions of a Biscayan Fire-Eater," is more than I know. No matter:
confessions they were; and confessions that, when at length published,
were absolutely mobbed and hustled by a gang of misbelieving (that is,
_miscreant_) critics. And this fact is most remarkable, that the
person who originally headed the incredulous party, namely, Senor de
Ferrer, a learned Castilian, was the very same who finally
authenticated, by _documentary_ evidence, the extraordinary
narrative in those parts which had most of all invited scepticism. The
progress of the dispute threw the decision at length upon the archives
of the Spanish Marine. Those for the southern ports of Spain had been
transferred, I believe, from Cadiz and St. Lucar to Seville; chiefly,
perhaps, through the confusions incident to the two French invasions of
Spain in our own day [1st, that under Napoleon; 2dly, that under the
Due d'Angoulême]. Amongst these archives, subsequently amongst those of
Cuzco, in South America; 3dly, amongst the records of some royal courts
in Madrid; 4thly, by collateral proof from the Papal Chancery; 5thly,
from Barcelona--have been drawn together ample attestations of all the
incidents recorded by Kate. The elopement from St. Sebastian's, the
doubling of Cape Horn, the shipwreck on the coast of Peru, the rescue
of the royal banner from the Indians of Chili, the fatal duel in the
dark, the astonishing passage of the Andes, the tragical scenes at
Tucuman and Cuzco, the return to Spain in obedience to a royal and a
papal summons, the visit to Rome and the interview with the Pope--
finally, the return to South America, and the mysterious disappearance
at Vera Cruz, upon which no light was ever thrown--all these capital
heads of the narrative have been established beyond the reach of
scepticism: and, in consequence, the story was soon after adopted as
historically established, and was reported at length by journals of the
highest credit in Spain and Germany, and by a Parisian journal so
cautious and so distinguished for its ability as the _Revue des Deux
Mondes_.
I must not leave the impression upon my readers that this complex body
of documentary evidences has been searched and appraised by myself.
Frankly I acknowledge that, on the sole occasion when any opportunity
offered itself for such a labor, I shrank from it as too fatiguing--and
also as superfluous; since, if the proofs had satisfied the compatriots
of Catalina, who came to the investigation with hostile feelings of
partisanship, and not dissembling their incredulity,--armed also (and
in Mr. de Ferrer's case conspicuously armed) with the appropriate
learning for giving effect to this incredulity,--it could not become a
stranger to suppose himself qualified for disturbing a judgment that
had been so deliberately delivered. Such a tribunal of native Spaniards
being satisfied, there was no further opening for demur. The
ratification of poor Kate's memoirs is now therefore to be understood
as absolute, and without reserve.
This being stated,--namely, such an attestation from competent
authorities to the truth of Kate's narrative as may save all readers
from my fair Westmoreland friend's disaster,--it remains to give such
an answer, as without further research _can_ be given, to a
question pretty sure of arising in all reflective readers' thoughts--
namely, does there anywhere survive a portrait of Kate? I answer--and
it would be both mortifying and perplexing if I could _not_--
_Yes_. One such portrait there is confessedly; and seven years ago
this was to be found at Aix-la-Chapelle, in the collection of Herr
Sempeller. The name of the artist I am not able to report; neither can
I say whether Herr Sempeller's collection still remains intact, and
remains at Aix-la-Chapelle.
But inevitably to most readers who review the circumstances of a case
so extraordinary, it will occur that beyond a doubt _many_ portraits
of the adventurous nun must have been executed. To have affronted
the wrath of the Inquisition, and to have survived such an audacity,
would of itself be enough to found a title for the martial nun
to a national interest. It is true that Kate had not taken the
veil; she had stopped short of the deadliest crime known to the
Inquisition; but still her transgressions were such as to require a
special indulgence; and this indulgence was granted by a Pope to the
intercession of a king--the greatest then reigning. It was a favor that
could not have been asked by any greater man in this world, nor granted
by any less. Had no other distinction settled upon Kate, this would
have been enough to fix the gaze of her own nation. But her whole life
constituted Kate's supreme distinction. There can be no doubt,
therefore, that, from the year 1624 (that is, the last year of our
James I.), she became the object of an admiration in her own country
that was almost idolatrous. And this admiration was not of a kind that
rested upon any partisan-schism amongst her countrymen. So long as it
was kept alive by her bodily presence amongst them, it was an
admiration equally aristocratic and popular,--shared alike by the rich
and the poor, by the lofty and the humble. Great, therefore, would be
the demand for her portrait. There is a tradition that Velasquez, who
had in 1623 executed a portrait of Charles I. (then Prince of Wales),
was amongst those who in the three or four following years ministered
to this demand. It is believed, also, that, in travelling from Genoa
and Florence to Rome, she sat to various artists, in order to meet the
interest about herself already rising amongst the cardinals and other
dignitaries of the Romish church. It is probable, therefore, that
numerous pictures of Kate are yet lurking both in Spain and Italy, but
not known as such. For, as the public consideration granted to her had
grown out of merits and qualities purely personal, and was kept alive
by no local or family memorials rooted in the land, or surviving
herself, it was inevitable that, as soon as she herself died, all
identification of her portraits would perish: and the portraits would
thenceforwards be confounded with the similar memorials, past all
numbering, which every year accumulates as the wrecks from household
remembrances of generations that are passing or passed, that are fading
or faded, that are dying or buried. It is well, therefore, amongst so
many irrecoverable ruins, that, in the portrait at Aix-la-Chapelle, we
still possess one undoubted representation (and therefore in some
degree a means for identifying _other_ representations) of a
female so memorably adorned by nature; gifted with capacities so
unparalleled both of doing and suffering; who lived a life so stormy,
and perished by a fate so unsearchably mysterious.
THE ORPHAN HEIRESS
I.
VISIT TO LAXTON.
My route, after parting from Lord Westport at Birmingham, lay, as I
have mentioned in the "Autobiographic Sketches," through Stamford to
Laxton, the Northamptonshire seat of Lord Carbery. From Stamford, which
I had reached by some intolerable old coach, such as in those days too
commonly abused the patience and long-suffering of Young England, I
took a post-chaise to Laxton. The distance was but nine miles, and the
postilion drove well, so that I could not really have been long upon
the road; and yet, from gloomy rumination upon the unhappy destination
which I believed myself approaching within three or four months, never
had I weathered a journey that seemed to me so long and dreary. As I
alighted on the steps at Laxton, the first dinner-bell rang; and I was
hurrying to my toilet, when my sister Mary, who had met me in the
portico, begged me first of all to come into Lady Carbery's [Footnote:
Lady Carbery.--"To me, individually, she was the one sole friend that
ever I could regard as entirely fulfilling the offices of an honest
friendship. She had known me from infancy; when I was in my first year
of life, she, an orphan and a great heiress, was in her tenth or
eleventh."--See closing pages of "_Autobiographic Sketches_."]
dressing-room, her ladyship having something special to communicate,
which related (as I understood her) to one Simon. "What Simon? Simon
Peter?"--O, no, you irreverend boy, no Simon at all with an S, but
Cymon with a C,--Dryden's Cymon,--
"That whistled as he went for want of thought.'"
This one indication was a key to the whole explanation that followed.
The sole visitors, it seemed, at that time to Laxton, beside my sister
and myself, were Lord and Lady Massey. They were understood to be
domesticated at Laxton for a very long stay. In reality, my own private
construction of the case (though unauthorized by anything ever hinted
to me by Lady Carbery) was, that Lord Massey might probably be under
some cloud of pecuniary embarrassments, such as suggested prudentially
an absence from Ireland. Meantime, what was it that made him an object
of peculiar interest to Lady Carbery? It was the singular revolution
which, in one whom all his friends looked upon as sold to
constitutional torpor, suddenly, and beyond all hope, had kindled a new
and nobler life. Occupied originally by no shadow of any earthly
interest, killed by _ennui_, all at once Lord Massey had fallen
passionately in love with a fair young countrywoman, well connected,
but bringing him no fortune (I report only from hearsay), and endowing
him simply with the priceless blessing of her own womanly charms, her
delightful society, and her sweet, Irish style of innocent gayety. No
transformation that ever legends or romances had reported was more
memorable. Lapse of time (for Lord Massey had now been married three or
four years), and deep seclusion from general society, had done nothing,
apparently, to lower the tone of his happiness. The expression of this
happiness was noiseless and unobtrusive; no marks were there of vulgar
uxoriousness--nothing that could provoke the sneer of the worldling;
but not the less so entirely had the society of his young wife created
a new principle of life within him, and evoked some nature hitherto
slumbering, and which, no doubt, would else have continued to slumber
till his death, that, at moments when he believed himself unobserved,
he still wore the aspect of an impassioned lover.
"He beheld
A vision, and adored the thing he saw.
Arabian fiction never filled the world
With half the wonders that were wrought for _him_.
Earth breathed in one great presence of the spring
Her chamber window did surpass in glory
The portals of the dawn."
And in no case was it more literally realized, as daily almost I
witnessed, that
"All Paradise
Could, by the simple opening of a door,
Let itself in upon him."
[Footnote: Wordsworth's "Vandracour and Julia."]
For never did the drawing-room door open, and suddenly disclose the
beautiful figure of Lady Massey, than a mighty cloud seemed to roll
away from the young Irishman's brow. At this time it happened, and
indeed it often happened, that Lord Carbery was absent in Ireland. It
was probable, therefore, that during the long couple of hours through
which the custom of those times bound a man to the dinner-table after
the disappearance of the ladies, his time would hang heavily on his
hands. To me, therefore, Lady Carbery looked, having first put me in
possession of the case, for assistance to her hospitality, under the
difficulties I have stated. She thoroughly loved Lady Massey, as,
indeed, nobody could help doing; and for _her_ sake, had there
been no separate interest surrounding the young lord, it would have
been most painful to her that through Lord Carbery's absence a periodic
tedium should oppress her guest at that precise season of the day which
traditionally dedicated itself to genial enjoyment. Glad, therefore,
was she that an ally had come at last to Laxton, who might arm her
purposes of hospitality with some powers of self-fulfilment. And yet,
for a service of that nature, could she reasonably rely upon me? Odious
is the hobble-de-hoy to the mature young man. Generally speaking, that
cannot be denied. But in me, though naturally the shyest of human
beings, intense commerce with men of every rank, from the highest to
the lowest, had availed to dissipate all arrears of _mauvaise
honte_; I could talk upon innumerable subjects; and, as the readiest
means of entering immediately upon business, I was fresh from Ireland,
knew multitudes of those whom Lord Massey either knew or felt an
interest in, and, at that happy period of life, found it easy, with
three or four glasses of wine, to call back the golden spirits which
were now so often deserting me. Renovated, meantime, by a hot bath, I
was ready at the second summons of the dinner-bell, and descended a new
creature to the drawing-room. Here I was presented to the noble lord
and his wife. Lord Massey was in figure shortish, but broad and stout,
and wore an amiable expression of face. That I could execute Lady
Carbery's commission, I felt satisfied at once. And, accordingly, when
the ladies had retired from the dining-room, I found an easy opening,
in various circumstances connected with the Laxton stables, for
introducing naturally a picturesque and contrasting sketch of the stud
and the stables at Westport. The stables and everything connected with
the stables at Laxton were magnificent; in fact, far out of symmetry
with the house, which, at that time, was elegant and comfortable, but
not splendid. As usual in English establishments, all the appointments
were complete, and carried to the same point of exquisite finish. The
stud of hunters was first-rate and extensive; and the whole scene, at
closing the stables for the night, was so splendidly arranged and
illuminated, that Lady Carbery would take all her visitors once or
twice a week to admire it. On the other hand, at Westport you might
fancy yourself overlooking the establishment of some Albanian Pacha.
Crowds of irregular helpers and grooms, many of them totally
unrecognized by Lord Altamont, some half countenanced by this or that
upper servant, some doubtfully tolerated, some _not_ tolerated,
but nevertheless slipping in by postern doors when the enemy had
withdrawn, made up a strange mob as regarded the human element in this
establishment. And Dean Browne regularly asserted that five out of six
amongst these helpers he himself could swear to as active boys from
Vinegar Hill. Trivial enough, meantime, in our eyes, was any little
matter of rebellion that they might have upon their consciences. High
treason we willingly winked at. But what we could _not_ wink at
was the systematic treason which they committed against our comfort,
namely, by teaching our horses all imaginable tricks, and training them
up in the way along which they should _not_ go, so that when they
were old they were very little likely to depart from it. Such a set of
restive, hard-mouthed wretches as Lord Westport and I daily had to
bestride, no tongue could describe. There was a cousin of Lord
Westport's, subsequently created Lord Oranmore, distinguished for his
horsemanship, and always splendidly mounted from his father's stables
at Castle M'Garret, to whom our stormy contests with ruined tempers and
vicious habits yielded a regular comedy of fun; and, in order to
improve it, he would sometimes bribe Lord Westport's treacherous groom
into misleading us, when floundering amongst bogs, into the interior
labyrinths of these morasses. Deep, however, as the morass, was this
man's remorse when, on leaving Westport, I gave him the heavy golden
perquisite, which my mother (unaware of the tricks he had practised
upon me) had by letter instructed me to give. He was a mere savage boy
from the central bogs of Connaught, and, to the great amusement of Lord
Westport, he persisted in calling me "your majesty" for the rest of
that day; and by all other means open to him he expressed his
penitence. But the dean insisted that, no matter for his penitence in
the matter of the bogs, he had certainly carried a pike at Vinegar
Hill; and probably had stolen a pair of boots at Furnes, when he kindly
made a call at the Deanery, in passing through that place to the field
of battle. It is always a pleasure to see the engineer of mischief
"hoist with his own petard;" [Footnote: "Hamlet," but also "Ovid:"--
"Lex nec justior ulla est, **Quam necis artifices arte perire sua."]
and it happened that the horses assigned to draw a post-chariot
carrying Lord Westport, myself, and the dean, on our return journey to
Dublin, were a pair utterly ruined by a certain under-postilion, named
Moran. This particular ruin did Mr. Moran boast to have contributed as
his separate contribution to the general ruinations of the stables. And
the particular object was, that _his_ horses, and consequently
himself, might be left in genial laziness. But, as Nemesis would have
it, Mr. Moran was the charioteer specially appointed to this particular
service. We were to return by easy journeys of twenty-five miles a day,
or even less; since every such interval brought us to the house of some
hospitable family, connected by friendship or by blood with Lord
Altamont. Fervently had Lord Westport pleaded with his father for an
allowance of four horses; not at all with any foolish view to fleeting
aristocratic splendor, but simply to the luxury of rapid motion. But
Lord Altamont was firm in resisting this petition at that time. The
remote consequence was, that by way of redressing the violated
equilibrium to our feelings, we subscribed throughout Wales to extort
six horses from the astonished innkeepers, most of whom declined the
requisition, and would furnish only four, on the plea that the leaders
would only embarrass the other horses; but one at Bangor, from whom we
coolly requested eight, recoiled from our demand as from a sort of
miniature treason. How so? Because in this island he had always
understood eight horses to be consecrated to royal use. Not at all, we
assured him; Pickford, the great carrier, always horsed his wagons with
eight. And the law knew of no distinction between wagon and post-
chaise, coach-horse or cart-horse. However, we could not compass this
point of the eight horses, the double _quadriga_, in one single
instance; but the true reason we surmised to be, not the pretended
puritanism of loyalty to the house of Guelph, but the running short of
the innkeeper's funds. If he had to meet a daily average call for
twenty-four horses, then it might well happen that our draft upon him
for eight horses at one pull would bankrupt him for a whole day.
But I am anticipating. Returning to Ireland and Mr. Moran, the vicious
driver of vicious horses, the immediate consequence to _him_ of
this unexpected limitation to a pair of horses was, that all his
knavery in one hour recoiled upon himself. The horses whom he had
himself trained to vice and restiveness, in the hope that thus his own
services and theirs might be less in request, now became the very curse
of his life. Every morning, duly as an attempt was made to put them in
motion, they began to back, and no arts, gentle or harsh, would for a
moment avail to coax or to coërce them into the counter direction.
Could retrogression by any metaphysics have been translated into
progress, we excelled in that; it was our _forte_; we could have
backed to the North Pole. That might be the way to glory, or at least
to distinction--_sic itur ad astra_; unfortunately, it was not the
way to Dublin. Consequently, on _every_ day of our journey--and
the days were ten--not once, but always, we had the same deadly
conflict to repeat; and this being always unavailing, found its
solution uniformly in the following ultimate resource. Two large-boned
horses, usually taken from the plough, were harnessed on as leaders. By
main force they hauled our wicked wheelers into the right direction,
and forced them, by pure physical superiority, into working. We
furnished a joyous and comic spectacle to every town and village
through which we passed. The whole community, men and children, came
out to assist at our departure; and all alike were diverted, but not
the less irritated, by the demoniac obstinacy of the brutes, who seemed
under the immediate inspiration of the fiend. Everybody was anxious to
share in the scourging which was administered to them right and left;
and once propelled into a gallop (or such a gallop as our Brobdignagian
leaders could accomplish), they were forced into keeping it up. But,
without rehearsing all the details of the case, it may be readily
conceived that the amount of trouble distributed amongst our whole
party was enormous. Once or twice the friends at whose houses we slept
were able to assist us. But generally they either had no horses, or
none of the commanding power demanded. Often, again, it happened, as
our route was very circuitous, that no inns lay in our neighborhood;
or, if there _were_ inns, the horses proved to be of too slight a
build. At Ballinasloe, and again at Athlone, half the town came out to
help us; and, having no suitable horses, thirty or forty men, with
shouts of laughter, pulled at ropes fastened to our pole and splinter-
bar, and compelled the snorting demons into a flying gallop. But,
naturally, a couple of miles saw this resource exhausted. Then came the
necessity of "drawing the covers," as the dean called it; that is,
hunting amongst the adjacent farmers for powerful cattle. This labor
(O, Jupiter, thanks be for _that_!) fell upon Mr. Moran. And
sometimes it would happen that the horses, which it had cost him three
or four hours to find, could be spared only for four or five miles.
Such a journey can rarely have been accomplished. Our zigzag course had
prolonged it into from two hundred and thirty to two hundred and fifty
miles; and it is literally true that, of this entire distance from
Westport House to Sackville-street, Dublin, not one furlong had been
performed under the spontaneous impulse of our own horses. Their
diabolic resistance continued to the last. And one may venture to hope
that the sense of final subjugation to man must have proved penally
bitter to the horses. But, meantime, it vexes one that such wretches
should be fed with good old hay and oats; as well littered down also in
their stalls as a prebendary; and by many a stranger, ignorant of their
true character, should have been patted and caressed. Let us hope that
a fate, to which more than once they were nearly forcing _us_,
namely, regress over a precipice, may ultimately have been their own.
Once I saw such another case dramatically carried through to its
natural crisis in the Liverpool Mail. It was on the stage leading into
Lichfield; there was no conspiracy, as in our Irish case; one horse
only out of the four was the criminal; and, according to the queen's
bench (Denman, C. J.), there is no conspiracy competent to one agent;
but he was even more signally under a demoniac possession of mutinous
resistance to man. The case was really a memorable one. If ever there
was a distinct proclamation of rebellion against man, it was made by
that brutal horse; and I, therefore, being a passenger on the box, took
a note of the case; and on a proper occasion I may be induced to
publish it, unless some Houynhm should whinny against me a chancery
injunction.
From these wild, Tartar-like stables of Connaught, how vast was the
transition to that perfection of elegance, and of adaptation between
means and ends, that reigned from centre to circumference through the
stables at Laxton! _I_, as it happened, could report to Lord Massey
their earlier condition; he to me could report their immediate
changes. I won him easily to an interest in my own Irish experiences,
so fresh, and in parts so grotesque, wilder also by much in Connaught
than in Lord Massey's county of Limerick; whilst he (without affecting
any delight in the hunting systems of Northamptonshire and
Leicestershire) yet took pleasure in explaining to me those
characteristic features of the English midland hunting as centralized
at Melton, which even then gave to it the supreme rank for brilliancy
and unity of effect amongst all varieties of the chase. [Footnote: If
mere names were allowed to dazzle the judgment, how magnificent to a
gallant young Englishman of twenty seems at first the _tiger-
hunting_ of India, which yet (when examined searchingly) turns out
the meanest and most _cowardly_ mode of hunting known to human
experience. _Buffalo-hunting_ is much more dignified as regards
the courageous exposure of the hunter; but, from all accounts, its
excitement is too momentary and evanescent; one rifle-shot, and the
crisis is past. Besides that, the generous and honest character of the
buffalo disturbs the cordiality of the sport. The very opposite reason
disturbs the interest of _lion-hunting, especially at the Cape. The
lion is everywhere a cowardly wretch, unless when sublimed into courage
by famine; but, in southern Africa, he is the most currish of enemies.
Those who fancied so much adventurousness in the lion conflicts of Mr.
Gordon Cumming appear never to have read the missionary travels of Mr.
Moffat. The poor missionary, without any arms whatever, came to think
lightly of half a dozen lions seen drinking through the twilight at the
very same pond or river as himself. Nobody can have any wish to
undervalue the adventurous gallantry of Mr. G. Cumming. But, in the
single case of the Cape lion, there is an unintentional advantage taken
from the traditional name of lion, as though the Cape lion were such as
that which ranges the torrid zone.]
Horses had formed the natural and introductory topic of conversation
between us. What we severally knew of Ireland, though in different
quarters,--what we both knew of Laxton, the barbaric splendor, and the
civilized splendor,--had naturally an interest for us both in their
contrasts (at one time so picturesque, at another so grotesque), which
illuminated our separate recollections. But my quick instinct soon made
me aware that a jealousy was gathering in Lord Massey's mind around
such a topic, as though too ostentatiously levelled to his particular
knowledge, or to his _animal_ condition of taste. But easily I
slipped off into another key. At Laxton, it happened that the library
was excellent. Founded by whom, I never heard; but certainly, when used
by a systematic reader, it showed itself to have been systematically
collected; it stretched pretty equably through two centuries,--namely,
from about 1600 to 1800,--and might, perhaps, amount to seventeen
thousand volumes. Lord Massey was far from illiterate; and his interest
in books was unaffected, if limited, and too often interrupted, by
defective knowledge. The library was dispersed through six or seven
small rooms, lying between the drawing-room in one wing, and the
dining-room in the opposite wing. This dispersion, however, already
furnished the ground of a rude classification. In some one of these
rooms was Lord Massey always to be found, from the forenoon to the
evening. And was it any fault of _his_ that his daughter, little
Grace, about two years old, pursued him down from her nursery every
morning, and insisted upon seeing innumerable pictures, lurking (as she
had discovered) in many different recesses of the library? More and
more from this quarter it was that we drew the materials of our daily
after-dinner conversation. One great discouragement arises commonly to
the student, where the particular library in which he reads has been so
disordinately collected that he cannot _pursue_ a subject once
started. Now, at Laxton, the books had been so judiciously brought
together, so many hooks and eyes connected them, that the whole library
formed what one might call a series of _strata_, naturally allied,
through which you might quarry your way consecutively for many months.
On rainy days, and often enough one had occasion to say through rainy
weeks, what a delightful resource did this library prove to both of us!
And one day it occurred to us, that, whereas the stables and the
library were both jewels of attraction, the latter had been by much the
least costly. Pretty often I have found, when any opening has existed
for making the computation, that, in a library containing a fair
proportion of books illustrated with plates, about ten shillings a
volume might be taken as expressing, upon a sufficiently large number
of volumes, small and great, the fair average cost of the whole. On
this basis, the library at Laxton would have cost less than nine
thousand pounds. On the other hand, thirty-live horses (hunters,
racers, roadsters, carriage-horses, etc.) might have cost about eight
thousand pounds, or a little more. But the library entailed no
permanent cost beyond the annual loss of interest; the books did not
eat, and required no aid from veterinary [Footnote: "_Veterinary_."--By
the way, whence comes this odd-looking word? The word _veterana_ I
have met with in monkish writers, to express _domesticated quadrupeds_;
and evidently from that word must have originated the word _veterinary_.
But the question is still but one step removed; for, how came _veterana_
by that acceptation in rural economy?] surgeons; whereas, for the
horses, not only such ministrations were intermittingly required,
but a costly permanent establishment of grooms and helpers. Lord
Carbery, who had received an elaborate Etonian education, was even
more earnestly a student than his friend Lord Massey, who had probably
been educated at home under a private tutor. He read everything
connected with general politics (meaning by _general_ not personal
politics) and with social philosophy. At Laxton, indeed; it was that
I first saw Godwin's "Political Justice;" not the second and emasculated
edition in _octavo_, but the original _quarto_ edition, with all its virus
as yet undiluted of raw anti-social Jacobinism.
At Laxton it was that I first saw the entire aggregate labors,
brigaded, as it were, and paraded as if for martial review, of that
most industrious benefactor to the early stages of our English
historical literature, Thomas Hearne. Three hundred guineas, I believe,
had been the price paid cheerfully at one time for a complete set of
Hearne. At Laxton, also, it was that first I saw the total array of
works edited by Dr. Birch. It was a complete _armilustrium_, a
_recognitio_, or mustering, as it were, not of pompous Praetorian
cohorts, or unique guardsmen, but of the yeomanry, the militia, or
what, under the old form of expression, you might regard as the
_trained bands_ of our literature--the fund from which ultimately,
or in the last resort, students look for the materials of our vast and
myriad-faced literature. A French author of eminence, fifty years back,
having occasion to speak of our English literature collectively, in
reference to the one point of its _variety_, being also a man of
honor, and disdaining that sort of patriotism which sacrifices the
truth to nationality, speaks of our pretensions in these words: _Les
Anglois qui ont une littérature infiniment plus variée que la
nôtre_. This fact is a feature in our national pretensions that
could ever have been regarded doubtfully merely through insufficient
knowledge. Dr. Johnson, indeed, made it the distinguishing merit of the
French, that they "have a book upon every subject." But Dr. Johnson was
not only capricious as regards temper and variable humors, but as
regards the inequality of his knowledge. Incoherent and unsystematic
was Dr. Johnson's information in most cases. Hence his extravagant
misappraisement of Knolles, the Turkish historian, which is exposed so
severely by Spittler, the German, who, again, is himself miserably
superficial in his analysis of English history. Hence the feeble
credulity which Dr. Johnson showed with respect to the forgery of De
Foe (under the masque of Captain Carleton) upon the Catalonian campaign
of Lord Peterborough. But it is singular that a literature, so
unrivalled as ours in its compass and variety, should not have produced
any, even the shallowest, manual of itself. And thus it happens, for
example, that writers so laborious and serviceable as Birch are in any
popular sense scarcely known. I showed to Lord Massey, among others of
his works, that which relates to Lord Worcester's (that is, Lord
Glamorgan's) negotiations with the Papal nuncio in Ireland, about the
year 1644, &c. Connected with these negotiations were many names
amongst Lord Massey's own ancestors; so that here he suddenly alighted
upon a fund of archæologic memorabilia, connecting what interested him
as an Irishman in general with what most interested him as the head of
a particular family. It is remarkable, also, as an indication of the
_general_ nobility and elevation which had accompanied the revolution
in his life, that concurrently with the constitutional torpor
previously besetting him, had melted away the intellectual torpor
under which he had found books until recently of little practical
value. Lady Carbery had herself told me that the two revolutions
went on simultaneously. He began to take an interest in literature
when life itself unfolded a new interest, under the companionship
of his youthful wife. And here, by the way, as subsequently
in scores of other instances, I saw broad evidences of the credulity
with which we have adopted into our grave political faith the
rash and malicious sketches of our novelists. With Fielding commenced
the practice of systematically traducing our order of country
gentlemen. His picture of Squire Western is not only a malicious, but
also an incongruous libel. The squire's ordinary language is
impossible, being alternately bookish and absurdly rustic. In reality,
the conventional dialect ascribed to the rustic order in general--to
peasants even more than to gentlemen--in our English plays and novels,
is a childish and fantastic babble, belonging to no form of real
breathing life; nowhere intelligible; not in _any_ province;
whilst, at the same time, all provinces--Somersetshire, Devonshire,
Hampshire--are confounded with our midland counties; and positively the
diction of Parricombe and Charricombe from Exmoor Forest is mixed up
with the pure Icelandic forms of the English lakes, of North Yorkshire,
and of Northumberland. In Scotland, it needs but a slight intercourse
with the peasantry to distinguish various dialects--the Aberdonian and
Fifeshire, for instance, how easily distinguished, even by an English
alien, from the western dialects of Ayrshire, &c.! And I have heard it
said, by Scottish purists in this matter, that even Sir Walter Scott is
chargeable with considerable licentiousness in the management of his
colloquial Scotch. Yet, generally speaking, it bears the strongest
impress of truthfulness. But, on the other hand, how false and
powerless does this same Sir Walter become, when the necessities of his
tale oblige him at any time to come amongst the English peasantry! His
magic wand is instantaneously broken; and he moves along by a babble of
impossible forms, as fantastic as any that our London theatres have
traditionally ascribed to English rustics, to English sailors, and to
Irishmen universally. Fielding is open to the same stern criticism, as
a deliberate falsehood-monger; and from the same cause--want of energy
to face the difficulty of mastering a real living idiom. This defect in
language, however, I cite only as one feature in the complex falsehood
which disfigures Fielding's portrait of the English country gentleman.
Meantime the question arises, Did he mean his Squire Western for a
_representative_ portrait? Possibly not. He might design it expressly
as a sketch of an individual, and by no means of a class. And
the fault may be, after all, not in _him_, the writer, but in
_us_, the falsely interpreting readers. But, be that as it may,
and figure to ourselves as we may the rustic squire of a hundred to a
hundred and fifty years back (though manifestly at utter war, in the
portraitures of our novelists, with the realities handed down to us by
our Parliamentary annals), on that _arena_ we are dealing with
objects of pure speculative curiosity. Far different is the same
question, when practically treated for purposes of present legislation
or philosophic inference. One hundred years ago, such was the
difficulty of social intercourse, simply from the difficulty of
locomotion (though even then this difficulty was much lowered to the
English, as beyond comparison the most equestrian of nations), that it
is possible to imagine a shade of difference as still distinguishing
the town-bred man from the rustic; though, considering the multiplied
distribution of our assize towns, our cathedral towns, our sea-ports,
and our universities, all so many recurring centres of civility, it is
not very easy to imagine such a thing in an island no larger than ours.
But can any human indulgence be extended to the credulity which assumes
the same possibility as existing for us in the very middle of the
nineteenth century? At a time when every week sees the town banker
drawn from our rural gentry; railway directors in every quarter
transferring themselves indifferently from town to country, from
country to town; lawyers, clergymen, medical men, magistrates, local
judges, &c., all shifting in and out between town and country; rural
families all intermarrying on terms of the widest freedom with town
families; all again, in the persons of their children, meeting for
study at the same schools, colleges, military academies, &c.; by what
furious forgetfulness of the realities belonging to the case, has it
been possible for writers in public journals to persist in arguing
national questions upon the assumption of a bisection in our
population--a double current, on the one side steeped to the lips in
town prejudices, on the other side traditionally sold to rustic views
and doctrines? Such double currents, like the Rhone flowing through the
Lake of Geneva, and yet refusing to intermingle, probably _did_
exist, and had an important significance in the Low Countries of the
fifteenth century, or between the privileged cities and the
unprivileged country of Germany down to the Thirty Years' War; but, for
us, they are in the last degree fabulous distinctions, pure fairy
tales; and the social economist or the historian who builds on such
phantoms as that of a rustic aristocracy still retaining any
substantial grounds of distinction from the town aristocracies,
proclaims the hollowness of any and all his doctrines that depend upon
such assumptions. Lord Carbery was a thorough fox-hunter. The fox-
hunting of the adjacent county of Leicestershire was not then what it
is now. The state of the land was radically different for the foot of
the horse, the nature and distribution of the fences was different; so
that a class of horses thoroughly different was then required. But
then, as now, it offered the finest exhibition of the fox-chase that is
known in Europe; and then, as now, this is the best adapted among all
known varieties of hunting to the exhibition of adventurous and skilful
riding, and generally, perhaps, to the development of manly and
athletic qualities. Lord Carbery, during the season, might be
immoderately addicted to this mode of sporting, having naturally a
pleasurable feeling connected with his own reputation as a skilful and
fearless horseman. But, though the chases were in those days longer
than they are at present, small was the amount of time really
abstracted from that which he had disposable for general purposes;
amongst which purposes ranked foremost his literary pursuits. And,
however much he transcended the prevailing conception of his order, as
sketched by satiric and often ignorant novelists, he might be regarded,
in all that concerned the liberalization of his views, as pretty fairly
representing that order. Thus, through every _real_ experience,
the crazy notion of a rural aristocracy flowing apart from the urban
aristocracy, and standing on a different level of culture as to
intellect, of polish as to manners, and of interests as to social
objects, a notion at all times false as a fact, now at length became
with all thoughtful men monstrous as a possibility.
Meantime Lord Massey was reached by reports, both through Lady Carbery
and myself, of something which interested him more profoundly than all
earthly records of horsemanship, or any conceivable questions connected
with books. Lady Carbery, with a view to the amusement of Lady Massey
and my sister, for both of whom youth and previous seclusion had
created a natural interest in all such scenes, accepted two or three
times in every week dinner invitations to all the families on her
visiting list, and lying within her winter circle, which was measured,
by a radius of about seventeen miles. For, dreadful as were the roads
in those days, when the Bath, the Bristol, or the Dover mail was
equally perplexed oftentimes to accomplish Mr. Palmer's rate of seven
miles an hour, a distance of seventeen was yet easily accomplished in
one hundred minutes by the powerful Laxton horses. Magnificent was the
Laxton turn-out; and in the roomy travelling coach of Lady Carbery,
made large enough to receive upon occasion even a bed, it would have
been an idle scruple to fear the crowding a party which mustered only
three besides myself. For Lord Massey uniformly declined joining us; in
which I believe that he was right. A schoolboy like myself had
fortunately no dignity to lose. But Lord Massey, a needy Irish peer
(or, strictly speaking, since the Union no peer at all, though still an
hereditary lord), was bound to be trebly vigilant over his surviving
honors. This he owed to his country as well as to his family. He
recoiled from what he figured to himself (but too often falsely
figured) as the haughty and disdainful English nobility---all so rich,
all so polished in manner, all so punctiliously correct in the ritual
of _bienséance_. Lord Carbery might face them gayly and boldly:
for _he_ was rich, and, although possessing Irish estates and an
Irish mansion, was a thorough Englishman by education and early
association. "But I," said Lord Massey, "had a careless Irish
education, and am never quite sure that I may not be trespassing on
some mysterious law of English good-breeding." In vain I suggested to
him that most of what passed amongst foreigners and amongst Irishmen
for English _hauteur_ was pure reserve, which, among all people
that were bound over by the inevitable restraints of their rank
(imposing, it must be remembered, jealous duties as well as
privileges), was sure to become the operative feeling. I contended that
in the English situation there was no escaping this English reserve,
except by great impudence and defective sensibility; and that, if
examined, reserve was the truest expression of respect towards those
who were its objects. In vain did Lady Carbery back me in this
representation. He stood firm, and never once accompanied us to any
dinner-party. Northamptonshire, I know not why, is (or then was) more
thickly sown with aristocratic families than any in the kingdom. Many
elegant and pretty women there naturally were in these parties; but
undoubtedly our two Laxton baronesses shone advantageously amongst
them. A boy like myself could lay no restraint upon the after-dinner
feelings of the gentlemen; and almost uniformly I heard such verdicts
passed upon the personal attractions of both, but especially Lady
Massey, as tended greatly to soothe the feelings of Lord Massey. It is
singular that Lady Massey universally carried off the palm of unlimited
homage. Lady Carbery was a regular beauty, and publicly known for such;
both were fine figures, and apparently not older than twenty-six; but
in her Irish friend people felt something more thoroughly artless and
feminine--for the masculine understanding of Lady Carbery in some way
communicated its commanding expression to her deportment. I reported to
Lord Massey, in terms of unexceptionable decorum, those flattering
expressions of homage, which sometimes from the lips of young men,
partially under the influence of wine, had taken a form somewhat too
enthusiastic for a literal repetition to a chivalrous and adoring
husband.
Meantime, the reader has been kept long enough at Laxton to warrant me
in presuming some curiosity or interest to have gathered within his
mind about the mistress of the mansion. Who was Lady Carbery? what was
her present position, and what had been her original position, in
society? All readers of Bishop Jeremy Taylor [Footnote: The Life of
Jeremy Taylor, by Reginald Heber, Bishop of Calcutta, is most
elaborately incorrect. From want of research, and a chronology in some
places thoroughly erroneous, various important facts are utterly
misstated; and what is most to be regretted, in a matter deeply
affecting the bishop's candor and Christian charity, namely, a
controversial correspondence with a Somersetshire Dissenting clergyman,
the wildest misconception has vitiated the entire result. That
fractional and splintered condition, into which some person had cut up
the controversy with a view to his own more convenient study of its
chief elements, Heber had misconceived as the actual form in which
these parts had been originally exchanged between the disputants--a
blunder of the worst consequence, and having the effect of translating
general expressions (such as recorded a moral indignation against
ancient fallacies or evasions connected with the dispute) into direct
ebullitions of scorn or displeasure personally against his immediate
antagonist. And the charge of intolerance and defective charity becomes
thus very much stronger against the poor bishop, because it takes the
shape of a confession extorted by mere force of truth from an else
reluctant apologist, that would most gladly have denied everything that
he _could_ deny. The Life needs more than ever to be accurately
written, since it has been thus chaotically mis-narrated by a prelate
of so much undeniable talent. I once began a very elaborate life
myself, and in these words: "Jeremy Taylor, the most eloquent and the
subtlest of Christian philosophers, was the son of a barber, and the
son-in-law of a king,"--alluding to the tradition (imperfectly
verified, I believe) that he married an illegitimate daughter of
Charles I. But this sketch was begun more than thirty years ago; and I
retired from the labor as too overwhelmingly exacting in all that
related to the philosophy and theology of that man 80 "myriad-minded,"
and of that century so anarchical.] must be aware of that religious
Lady Carbery, who was the munificent (and, for her kindness, one might
say the filial) patroness of the all-eloquent and subtle divine. She
died before the Restoration, and, consequently, before her spiritual
director could have ascended the Episcopal throne. The title of Carbery
was at that time an earldom; the earl married again, arid his second
countess was also a devout patroness of Taylor. Having no peerage at
hand, I do not know by what mode of derivation the modern title of the
nineteenth century had descended from the old one of the seventeenth. I
presume that some collateral branch of the original family had
succeeded to the barony when the limitations of the original settlement
had extinguished the earldom. But to me, who saw revived another
religious Lady Carbery, distinguished for her beauty and
accomplishments, it was interesting to read of the two successive
ladies who had borne that title one hundred and sixty years before, and
whom no reader of Jeremy Taylor is ever allowed to forget, since almost
all his books are dedicated to one or other of the pious family that
had protected him. Once more there was a religious Lady Carbery,
supporting locally the Church of England, patronizing schools,
diffusing the most extensive relief to every mode of indigence or
distress. A century and a half ago such a Lady Carbery was in South
Wales, at the "Golden Grove;" now such another Lady Carbery was in
central England, at Laxton. The two cases, divided by six generations,
interchanged a reciprocal interest, since in both cases it was young
ladies, under the age of thirty, that originated the movement, and in
both cases these ladies bore the same title; and I will therefore
retrace rapidly the outline of that contemporary case so familiarly
known to myself.
Colonel Watson and General Smith had been amongst the earliest friends
of my mother's family. Both served for many years in India: the first
in the Company's army, the other upon the staff of the king's forces in
that country. Each, about the same time, made a visit to England, and
each of them, I believe, with the same principal purpose of providing
for the education of his daughter; for each happened to have one sole
child, which child, in each case, was a girl of singular beauty; and
both of these little ladies were entitled to very large fortunes. The
colonel and the general, being on brotherly terms of intimacy, resolved
to combine their plans for the welfare of their daughters. What they
wanted was, not a lady that could teach them any special arts or
accomplishments--all these could be purchased;--but the two
qualifications indispensable for the difficult situation of lady-
superintendent over two children so singularly separated from all
relatives whatever, were, in the first place, knowledge of the world,
and integrity for keeping at a distance all showy adventurers that
might else offer themselves, with unusual advantages, as suitors for
the favor of two great heiresses; and, secondly, manners exquisitely
polished. Looking to that last requisition, it seems romantic to
mention, that the lady selected for the post, with the fullest
approbation of both officers, was one who began life as the daughter of
a little Lincolnshire farmer. What her maiden name had been, I do not
at this moment remember; but this name was of very little importance,
being soon merged in that of Harvey, bestowed on her at the altar by a
country gentleman. The squire--not very rich, I believe, but rich
enough to rank as a matrimonial prize in the lottery of a country girl,
whom one single step of descent in life might have brought within sight
of menial service--had been captivated by the young woman's beauty; and
this, at that period, when accompanied by the advantages of youth, must
have been resplendent. I, who had known her all my life, down to my
sixteenth year (during which year she died), and who naturally,
therefore, referred her origin back to some remote ancestral
generation, nevertheless, in her sole case, was made to feel that there
might be some justification for the Church of England discountenancing
in her Liturgy, "marriage with your great-grandmother; neither shalt
thou marry thy great-grandfather's widow." She, poor thing! at that
time was thinking little of marriage; for even then, though known only
to herself and her _femme de chambre_, that dreadful organic malady
(cancer) was raising its adder's crest, under which finally she
died. But, in spite of languor interchanging continually with
disfiguring anguish, she still impressed one as a regal beauty. Her
person, indeed, and figure, _would_ have tended towards such a
standard; but all was counteracted, and thrown back into the mould of
sweet natural womanhood, by the cherubic beauty of her features. These
it was--these features, so purely childlike--that reconciled me in a
moment of time to great-grandmotherhood. The stories about Ninon de
l'Enclos are French fables--speaking plainly, are falsehoods; and sorry
I am that a nation so amiable as the French should habitually disregard
truth, when coming into collision with their love for the extravagant.
But, if anything could reconcile me to these monstrous old fibs about
Ninon at ninety, it would be the remembrance of this English
enchantress on the high-road to seventy. Guess, reader, what she must
have been at twenty-eight to thirty-two, when she became the widow of
the Gerenian horseman, Harvey. How bewitching she must have looked in
her widow's caps! So had once thought Colonel Watson, who happened to
be in England at that period; and to the charming widow this man of war
propounded his hand in marriage. This hand, this martial hand, for
reason inexplicable to me, Mrs. Harvey declined; and the colonel
bounced off in a rage to Bengal. There were others who saw young Mrs.
Harvey, as well as Colonel Watson. And amongst them was an ancient
German gentleman, to what century belonging I do not know, who had
every possible bad quality known to European experience, and a solitary
good one, namely, eight hundred thousand pounds sterling. The man's
name was Schreiber. Schreiber was an aggregate resulting from the
conflux of all conceivable bad qualities. That was the elementary base
of Schreiber; and the superstructure, or Corinthian decoration of his
frontispiece, was, that Schreiber cultivated one sole science, namely,
the science of taking snuff. Here were two separate objects for
contemplation: one, bright as Aurora--that radiant Koh-i-noor, or
mountain of light--the eight hundred thousand pounds; the other, sad,
fuscous, begrimed with the snuff of ages, namely, the most ancient
Schreiber. Ah! if they _could_ have been divided--these twin yoke-
fellows--and that ladies might have the privilege of choosing between
them! For the moment there was no prudent course open to Mrs. Harvey,
but that of marrying Schreiber (which she did, and survived); and,
subsequently, when the state of the market became favorable to such
"conversions" of stock, then the new Mrs. Schreiber parted from
Schreiber, and disposed of her interest in Schreiber at a settled rate
in three per cent. consols and terminable annuities; for every
_coupon_ of Schreiber receiving a _bonus_ of so many thousand pounds,
paid down according to the rate agreed on by the lawyers of the
two parties; or, strictly speaking, _quarrelled on_ between the
adverse factions; for agreement it was hard to effect upon any point.
The deadly fear which had been breathed into him by Mrs. Schreiber's
scale of expenditure in a Park Lane house proved her most salutary
ally. Coerced by this horrid vision, Schreiber consented (which else he
never would have done) to grant her an allowance, for life, of about
two thousand per annum. Could _that_ be reckoned an anodyne for
the torment connected with a course of Schreiber? I pretend to no
opinion.
Such were the facts: and exactly at this point in her career had Mrs.
Schreiber arrived, when, once more, Colonel Watson and General Smith
were visiting England, and for the last time, on the errand of settling
permanently some suitable establishment for their two infant daughters.
The superintendence of this they desired to devolve upon some lady,
qualified by her manners and her connections for introducing the young
ladies, when old enough, into general society. Mrs. Schreiber was the
very person required. Intellectually she had no great pretensions; but
these she did not need: her character was irreproachable, her manners
were polished, and her own income placed her far above all mercenary
temptations. She had not thought fit to accept the station of Colonel
Watson's wife, but some unavowed feeling prompted her to undertake,
with enthusiasm, the duties of a mother to the colonel's daughter.
Chiefly on Miss Watson's account it was at first that she extended her
maternal cares to General Smith's daughter; but very soon so sweet and
winning was the disposition of Miss Smith that Mrs. Schreiber
apparently loved _her_ the best.
Both, however, appeared under a combination of circumstances too
singularly romantic to fail of creating an interest that was universal.
Both were solitary children, unchallenged by any relatives. Neither had
ever known what it was to taste of love, paternal or maternal. Their
mothers had been long dead--not consciously seen by either; and their
fathers, not surviving their last departure from home long enough to
see them again, died before returning from India. What a world of
desolation seemed to exist for them! How silent was every hall into
which, by natural right, they should have had entrance! Several people,
kind, cordial people, men and women, were scattered over England, that,
during their days of infancy, would have delighted to receive them;
but, by some fatality, when they reached their fifteenth year, and
might have been deemed old enough to undertake visits, all of these
paternal friends, except two, had died; nor had they, by that time, any
relatives at all that remained alive, or were eligible as associates.
Strange, indeed, was the contrast between the silent past of their
lives and that populous future to which their large fortunes would
probably introduce them. Throw open a door in the rear that should lay
bare the long vista of chambers through which their childhood might
symbolically be represented as having travelled--what silence! what
solemn solitude! Open a door in advance that should do the same
figurative office for the future--suddenly what a jubilation! what a
tumult of festal greetings!
But the succeeding stages of life did not, perhaps, in either case
fully correspond to the early promise. Rank and station the two young
ladies attained; but rank and station do not always throw people upon
prominent stages of action or display. Many a family, possessing both
rank and wealth, and not undistinguished possibly by natural endowments
of an order fitted for brilliant popularity, never emerge from
obscurity, or not into any splendor that can be called national;
sometimes, perhaps, from a temper unfitted for worthy struggles in the
head of the house; possibly from a haughty, possibly a dignified
disdain of popular arts, hatred of petty rhetoric, petty sycophantic
courtships, petty canvassing tricks; or again, in many cases, because
accidents of ill-luck have intercepted the fair proportion of success
due to the merits of the person; whence, oftentimes, a hasty self-
surrender to impulses of permanent disgust. But, more frequently than
any other cause, I fancy that impatience of the long struggle required
for any distinguished success interferes to thin the ranks of
competitors for the prizes of public ambition. Perseverance is soon
refrigerated in those who fall back under any result, defeated or not
defeated, upon splendid mansions and luxuries of every kind, already
far beyond their needs or their wishes. The soldier described by the
Roman satirist as one who had lost his purse, was likely enough, under
the desperation of his misfortune, to see nothing formidable in any
obstacle that crossed his path towards another supplementary purse;
whilst the very same obstacle might reasonably alarm one who, in
retreating, fell back under the battlements of twenty thousand per
annum. In the present case, there was nothing at all to move wonder in
the final result under so continual a siege of temptation from the
seductions of voluptuous ease; the only wonder is, that one of the
young ladies, namely, Miss Watson, whose mind was masculine, and in
some directions aspiring, should so readily have acquiesced in a result
which she might have anticipated from the beginning.
Happy was the childhood, happy the early dawn of womanhood, which these
two young ladies passed under the guardianship of Mrs. Schreiber.
Education in those days was not the austere old lady that she is now.
At least, in the case of young ladies, her exactions were merciful and
considerate. If Miss Smith sang pretty well, and Miss Watson
_very_ well, and with the power of singing difficult _part_ music
at sight, they did so for the same reason that the lark sings,
and chiefly under the same gentle tuition--that of nature, glad
almighty nature, breathing inspiration from her Delphic tripod of
happiness, and health, and hope. Mrs. Schreiber pretended to no
intellectual gifts whatever; and yet, practically, she was wiser than
many who have the greatest. First of all other tasks which she imposed
upon her wards, was that of daily exercise, and exercise carried to
_excess_. She insisted upon four hours' exercise daily; and, as
young ladies walk fast, _that_ would have yielded, at the rate of
three and a half miles per hour, thirteen plus one third miles. But
only two and a half hours were given to walking; the other one and a
half to riding. No day was a day of rest; absolutely none. Days so
stormy that they "kept the raven to her nest," snow the heaviest, winds
the most frantic, were never listened to as any ground of reprieve from
the ordinary exaction. I once knew (that is, not personally, for I
never saw her, but through the reports of her many friends) an intrepid
lady, [Footnote: If I remember rightly, some account is given of this
palæstric lady and her stern Pædo-gymnastics, in a clever book on
household medicine and surgery under circumstances of inevitable
seclusion from professional aid, written about the year 1820-22, by Mr.
Haden, a surgeon of London.] living in the city of London (that is,
technically the _city_, as opposed to Westminster, etc., Mary-le-
bone, etc.), who made a point of turning out her newborn infants for a
pretty long airing, even on the day of their birth. It made no
difference to her whether the month were July or January; good,
undeniable air is to be had in either month. Once only she was baffled,
and most indignant it made her, because the little thing chose to be
born at half-past nine P. M.; so that, by the time its toilet was
finished, bonnet and cloak all properly adjusted, the watchman was
calling "Past eleven, and a cloudy night;" upon which, most
reluctantly, she was obliged to countermand the orders for that day's
exercise, and considered herself, like the Emperor Titus, to have lost
a day. But what came of the London lady's or of Mrs. Schreiber's
Spartan discipline? Did the little blind kittens of Gracechurch-street,
who were ordered by their penthesiléan mamma, on the very day of their
nativity, to face the most cruel winds--did _they_, or did Mrs.
Schreiber's wards, justify, in after life, this fierce discipline, by
commensurate results of hardiness? In words written beyond all doubt by
Shakspeare, though not generally recognized as his, it might have been
said to any one of this Amazonian brood,--
"Now mild may be thy life;
For a more blust'rous birth had never babe.
Quiet and gentle be thy temperature;
For thou'rt the rudeliest welcomed to this world
That e'er was woman's child. Happy be the sequel!
Thou hast as chiding a nativity
As fire, air, water, earth, and heaven, can make,
To herald thee from darkness!"--_Pericles, Act III._
As to the city kittens, I heard that the treatment prospered; but the
man who reported this added, that by original constitution they were as
strong as Meux's dray-horses; and thus, after all, they may simply
illustrate the old logical _dictum_ ascribed to some medical man,
that the reason why London children of the wealthier classes are
noticeable even to a proverb for their robustness and bloom, is because
none but those who are already vigorous to excess, and who start with
advantages of health far beyond the average scale, have much chance of
surviving that most searching quarantine, which, in such [Footnote: For
myself, meantime, I am far from assenting to all the romantic abuse
applied to the sewerage and the church-yards of London, and even more
violently to the river Thames. As a tidal river, even: beyond the
metropolitan bridges, the Thames undoubtedly does much towards
cleansing the atmosphere, whatever may be the condition of its waters.
And one most erroneous postulate there is from which the _Times_
starts in all its arguments, namely, this, that supposing the Thames to
be even a vast sewer, in short, the _cloaca maxima_ of London,
there is in that arrangement of things any special reproach applying to
our mighty English capital. On the contrary, _all_ great cities
that ever were founded have sought out, as their first and elementary
condition, the adjacency of some great cleansing river. In the long
process of development through which cities pass, commerce and other
functions of civilization come to usurp upon the earlier functions of
such rivers, and sometimes (through increasing efforts of luxurious
refinement) may come entirely to absorb them. But, in the infancy of
every great city, the chief function for which she looks to her river
is that of purification. Be thou my huge _cloaca_, says infant
Babylon to the Euphrates, says infant Nineveh to the Tigris, says
infant Rome to the Tiber. So far is that reproach from having any
special application to London. Smoke is not unwholesome; in many
circumstances it is salubrious, as a counter-agent to worse influences.
Even sewerage is chiefly insalubrious from its moisture, and not, in
any degree yet demonstrated, from its odor.] an atmosphere, they are
summoned to weather at starting. Coming, however, to the special case
of Mrs. Schreiber's household, I am bound to report that in no instance
have I known young ladies so thoroughly steeled against all the
ordinary host of petty maladies which, by way of antithesis to the
capital warfare of dangerous complaints, might be called the
_guerilla_ nosology; influenza, for instance, in milder forms,
catarrh, headache, toothache, dyspepsia in transitory shapes, etc.
Always the spirits of the two girls were exuberant; the enjoyment of
life seemed to be intense, and never did I know either of them to
suffer from _ennui_. My conscious knowledge of them commenced when
I was about two years old, they being from ten to twelve years older.
Mrs. Schreiber had been amongst my mother's earliest friends as Mrs.
Harvey, and in days when my mother had opportunities of doing her
seasonable services. And as there were three special advantages which
adorned my mother, and which ranked in Mrs. Schreiber's estimate as the
highest which earth could show, namely: 1°, that she spoke and wrote
English with singular elegance; 2°, that her manners were eminently
polished; and 3°, that, even in that early stage of my mother's life, a
certain tone of religiosity, and even of ascetic devotion, was already
diffused as a luminous mist that served to exalt the coloring of her
morality. To this extent Mrs. Schreiber approved of religion; but
nothing of a sectarian cast could she have tolerated; nor had she
anything of that nature to apprehend from my mother. Viewing my mother,
therefore, as a pure model of an English matron, and feeling for her,
besides, a deeper sentiment of friendship and affection than for
anybody else on her visiting list, it was natural enough that she
should come with her wards on an annual visit to "The Farm" (a pretty,
rustic dwelling occupied by my father in the neighborhood of
Manchester), and subsequently (when _that_ arose) to Greenhay.
[Footnote: "_Greenhay_."--As this name might, under a false
interpretation, seem absurd as including incongruous elements, I ought,
in justification of my mother, who devised the name, to have mentioned
that _hay_ was meant for the old English word (derived from the
old French word _haie_) indicating a rural enclosure. Conventionally,
a _hay_ or _haie_ was understood to mean a country-house within a
verdant ring-fence, narrower than a park: which word park, in Scotch
use, means any enclosure whatever, though not twelve feet square; but
in English use (witness Captain Burt's wager about Culloden parks)
means an enclosure measured by square miles, and usually accounted to
want its appropriate furniture, unless tenanted by deer. By the way, it
is a singular illustration of a fact illustrated in one way or other
every hour, namely, of the imperfect knowledge which England possesses
of England, that, within these last eight or nine months, I saw in the
_Illustrated London News_ an article assuming that the red deer was
unknown in England. Whereas, if the writer had ever been at the English
lakes during the hunting season, he might have seen it actually hunted
over Martindale forest and its purlieus. Or, again, in Devonshire and
Cornwall, over Dartmoor, etc., and, I believe, in many other regions,
though naturally narrowing as civilization widens. The writer is
equally wrong in supposing the prevailing deer of our parks to be the
_roe_ deer, which are very little known. It is the _fallow_ deer that
chiefly people our parks. Red deer were also found at Blenheim, in
Oxfordshire, when it was visited by Dr. Johnson, as may be seen in
"Boswell."] As my father always retained a town-house in Manchester
(somewhere in Fountain-street), and, though a plain, unpretending man,
was literary to the extent of having written a book, all things were so
arranged that there was no possibility of any commercial mementos ever
penetrating to the rural retreat of his family; such mementos, I mean,
as, by reviving painful recollections of that ancient Schreiber, who
was or ought to be by this time extinct, would naturally be odious and
distressing. Here, therefore, liberated from all jealousy of
overlooking eyes, such as haunted persons of their expectations at
Brighton, Weymouth, Sidmouth, or Bath, Miss Smith and Miss Watson used
to surrender themselves without restraint to their glad animal impulses
of girlish gayety, like the fawns of antelopes when suddenly
transferred from tiger-haunted thickets to the serene preserves of
secluded rajahs. On these visits it was, that I, as a young pet whom
they carried about like a doll from my second to my eighth or ninth
year, learned to know them; so as to take a fraternal interest in the
succeeding periods of their lives. Their fathers I certainly had not
seen; nor had they, consciously. These two fathers must both have died
in India, before my inquiries had begun to travel in that direction.
But, as old acquaintances of my mother's, both had visited The Farm
before I was born; and about General Smith, in particular, there had
survived amongst the servants a remembrance which seemed to us (that is
to them and to myself) ludicrously awful, though, at that time, the
practice was common throughout our Indian possessions. He had a Hindoo
servant with him; and this servant every night stretched himself along
the "sill" or outer threshold of the door; so that he might have been
trodden on by the general when retiring to rest; and from this it was
but a moderate step in advance to say that he _was_ trodden on. Upon
which basis many other wonders were naturally reared. Miss Smith's
father, therefore, furnished matter for a not very amiable tradition;
but Miss Smith herself was the sweetest-tempered and the loveliest of
girls, and the most thoroughly English in the style of her beauty. Far
different every way was Miss Watson. In person she was a finished
beauty of the very highest pretensions, and generally recognized as
such; that is to say, her figure was fine and queenly; her features
were exquisitely cut, as regarded their forms and the correspondences
of their parts; and usually by artists her face was said to be Grecian.
Perhaps the nostrils, mouth, and forehead, might be so; but nothing
could be less Grecian, or more eccentric in form and position, than the
eyes. They were placed obliquely, in a way that I do not remember to
have seen repeated in any other face whatever. Large they were, and
particularly long, tending to an almond-shape; equally strange, in
fact, as to color, shape, and position: but the remarkable position of
these eyes would have absorbed your gaze to the obliteration of all
other features or peculiarities in the face, were it not for one other
even more remarkable distinction affecting her complexion: this lay in
a suffusion that mantled upon her cheeks, of a color amounting almost
to carmine. Perhaps it might be no more than what Pindar meant by the
_porphyreon phos erotos_, which Gray has falsely [Footnote: Falsely,
because poxphuxeos rarely, perhaps, means in the Greek use what we mean
properly by _purple_, and _could_ not mean it in the Pindaric passage;
much oftener it denotes some shade of _crimson_, or else of _puniceus_,
or blood-red. Gibbon was never more mistaken than when he argued that
all the endless disputing about the _purpureus_ of the ancients might
have been evaded by attending to its Greek designation, namely,
_porphyry_-colored: since, said he, porphyry is always of the same
color. Not at all. Porphyry, I have heard, runs through as large a
gamut of hues as marble; but, if this should be an exaggeration, at all
events porphyry is far from being so monochromatic as Gibbon's argument
would presume. The truth is, colors were as loosely and
latitudinarially distinguished by the Greeks and Romans as degrees of
affinity and consanguinity are everywhere. _My son-in-law_, says a
woman, and she means _my stepson._ _My cousin_, she says, and she means
any mode of relationship in the wide, wide world. _Nos neveux_, says a
French writer, and means not _our nephews_, but _our grandchildren_,
or more generally _our descendants_.] translated as "the bloom of
young desire, and PURPLE light of love." It was not unpleasing, and
gave a lustre to the eyes, but it added to the eccentricity of the
face; and by all strangers it was presumed to be an artificial color,
resulting from some mode of applying a preparation more brilliant than
rouge. But to us children, so constantly admitted to her toilet, it was
well known to be entirely natural. Generally speaking, it is not likely
to assist the effect of a young woman's charms, that she presents any
such variety in her style of countenance as could naturally be called
_odd_. But Miss Watson, by the somewhat scenical effect resulting
from the harmony between her fine figure and her fine countenance,
triumphed over all that might else have been thought a blemish; and
when she was presented at court on occasion of her marriage, the king
himself pronounced her, to friends of Mrs. Schreiber, the most splendid
of all the brides that had yet given lustre to his reign. In such cases
the judgments of rustic, undisciplined tastes, though marked by
narrowness, and often by involuntary obedience to vulgar ideals (which,
for instance, makes them insensible to all the deep sanctities of
beauty that sleep amongst the Italian varieties of the Madonna face),
is not without its appropriate truth. Servants and rustics all thrilled
in sympathy with the sweet English loveliness of Miss Smith; but all
alike acknowledged, with spontaneous looks of homage, the fine presence
and finished beauty of Miss Watson. Naturally, from the splendor with
which they were surrounded, and the notoriety of their great
expectations,--so much to dazzle in one direction, and, on the other
hand, something for as tender a sentiment as pity, in the fact of both
from so early an age having been united in the calamity of orphanage,--
go where they might, these young women drew all eyes upon themselves;
and from the _audible_ comparisons sometimes made between them, it
might be imagined that if ever there were a situation fitted to nourish
rivalship and jealousy, between two girls, here it might be anticipated
in daily operation. But, left to themselves, the yearnings of the
female heart tend naturally towards what is noble; and, unless where it
has been tried too heavily by artificial incitements applied to the
pride, I do not believe that women generally are disposed to any
unfriendly jealousy of each other. Why should they? Almost every woman,
when strengthened in those charms which nature has given to her by such
as she can in many ways give to herself, must feel that she has her own
separate domain of empire unaffected by the most sovereign beauty upon
earth. Every man that ever existed has probably his own peculiar talent
(if only it were detected), in which he would be found to excel all the
rest of his race. And in every female face possessing any attractions
at all, no matter what may be her general inferiority, there lurks some
secret peculiarity of expression--some mesmeric individuality--which is
valid within its narrower range--limited superiority over the supreme
of beauties within a narrow circle. It is unintelligibly but
mesmerically potent, this secret fascination attached to features
oftentimes that are absolutely plain; and as one of many cases within
my own range of positive experience, I remember in confirmation, at
this moment, that in a clergyman's family, counting three daughters,
all on a visit to my mother, the youngest, Miss F---- P----, who was
strikingly and memorably plain, never walked out on the Clifton Downs
unattended, but she was followed home by a crowd of admiring men,
anxious to learn her rank and abode; whilst the middle sister,
eminently handsome, levied no such _visible_ tribute of admiration
on the public.
I mention this fact, one of a thousand similar facts, simply by way of
reminding the reader of what he must himself have often witnessed;
namely, that no woman is condemned by nature to any ignoble necessity
of repining against the power of other women; her own may be far more
confined, but within its own circle may possibly, measured against that
of the haughtiest beauty, be the profounder. However, waiving the
question thus generally put here, and as it specially affected these
two young women that virtually were sisters, any question of precedency
in power or display, when brought into collision with sisterly
affection, had not a momentary existence. Each had soon redundant
proofs of her own power to attract suitors without end; and, for the
more or the less, _that_ was felt to be a matter of accident.
Never, on this earth, I am satisfied, did that pure sisterly love
breathe a more steady inspiration than now into the hearts and through
the acts of these two generous girls; neither was there any sacrifice
which either would have refused _to_ or _for_ the other. The
period, however, was now rapidly shortening during which they would
have any opportunity for testifying this reciprocal love. Suitors were
flocking around them, as rank as cormorants in a storm. The grim old
chancellor (one, if not both, of the young ladies having been a ward in
Chancery) had all his legal jealousies awakened on their behalf. The
worshipful order of _adventurers_ and _fortune-hunters_, at that
time chiefly imported from Ireland, as in times more recent from
Germany, and other moustachoed parts of the continent, could not live
under the raking fire of Mrs. Schreiber, on the one side, with her
female tact and her knowledge of life, and of the chancellor, with his
huge discretional power, on the other. That particular chancellor, whom
the chronology of the case brought chiefly into connection with Miss
Watson's interests, was (if my childish remembrances do not greatly
mislead me) the iracund Lord Thurlow. Lovers and wooers this grim
lawyer regarded as the most impertinent order of animals in universal
zoology; and of these, in Miss Watson's case, he had a whole menagerie
to tend. Penelope, according to some school-boy remembrance of mine,
had one hundred and eighteen suitors. These young ladies had almost as
many. Heavens! I what a crew of Comus to follow or to lead! And what a
suitable person was this truculent old lord on the woolsack to enact
the part of shepherd--Corydon, suppose, or Alphesibæus--to this goodly
set of lambs! How he must have admired the hero of the "Odyssey," who
in one way or other accounted for all the wooers that "sorned" upon his
house, and had a receipt for their bodies from the grave-digger of
Ithaca! But even this wily descendant of Sisyphus would have found it
no such easy matter to deal with the English suitors, who were not the
feeble voluptuaries of the Ionian Islands, that suffered themselves to
be butchered as unresistingly as sheep in the shambles--actually
standing at one end of a banqueting-room to be shot at with bows and
arrows, not having pluck enough to make a rush--but were _game_
men; all young, strong, rich, and in most cases technically "noble;"
all, besides, contending for one or other of two prizes a thousand
times better fitted to inspire romantic ardor than the poor, withered
Penelope. One, by the way, amongst these suitors (I speak of those who
addressed Miss Watson), merits a separate commemoration, as having
drawn from Sheridan his very happiest _impromptu_--and an _impromptu_
that was really such--(the rarest of all things from Sheridan).
This was Lord Belgrave, eldest son of Lord Grosvenor—then an
earl, but at some period, long subsequent to this, raised to the
Marquisate of Westminster, a title naturally suggesting in itself a
connection with the vast Grosvenor property, sweeping across the whole
area of that most aristocratic region in the metropolis now called
_Belgravia_, which was then a name unknown; and this Hesperian
region had as yet no architectural value, and consequently no ground-
rent value, simply because the world of fashion and distinction had as
yet not expanded itself in that direction. In those days the
territorial importance of this great house rested exclusively upon its
connection with the county of Chester. In this connection it was that
the young Viscount Belgrave had been introduced, by his family
interest, into the House of Commons; he had delivered his maiden speech
with some effect; and had been heard favorably on various subsequent
occasions; on one of which it was that, to the extreme surprise of the
house, he terminated his speech with a passage from Demosthenes--not
presented in English, but in sounding Attic Greek. Latin is a
privileged dialect in parliament. But Greek! It would not have been at
all more startling to the usages of the house, had his lordship quoted
Persic or Telinga. Still, though felt as something verging on the
ridiculous, there was an indulgent feeling to a young man fresh from
academic bowers, which would not have protected a mature man of the
world. Everybody bit his lips, and as yet did _not_ laugh. But the
final issue stood on the edge of a razor. A gas, an inflammable
atmosphere, was trembling sympathetically through the whole excited
audience; all depended on a match being applied to this gas whilst yet
in the very act of escaping. Deepest silence still prevailed; and, had
any commonplace member risen to address the house in an ordinary
business key, all would have blown over. Unhappily for Lord Belgrave,
in that critical moment up rose the one solitary man, to wit, Sheridan,
whose look, whose voice, whose traditional character, formed a prologue
to what was coming. Here let the reader understand that, throughout the
"Iliad," all speeches or commands, questions or answers, are introduced
by Homer under some peculiar formula. For instance, replies are usually
introduced thus:
"_But him answering thus addressed the sovereign Agamemnon;_"
or; in sonorous Greek:
"Ton d' apameibomenos prosephé kreion Agamemnon;"
or, again, according to the circumstances:
"But him sternly surveying saluted the swift-footed Achilles;"
"Ton d'ar', upodra idon, prosephé podas okus Achilleus."
This being premised, and that every one of the audience, though
pretending to no Greek, yet, from his school-boy remembrances, was as
well acquainted with these _formulæ_ as with the scriptural
formula of _Verily, verily, I say unto you, &c._, Sheridan,
without needing to break its force by explanations, solemnly opened
thus:
"Ton d' apameibomenos prosephé Sheridanios heros."_
Simply to have commenced his answer in Greek would have sufficiently
met the comic expectation then thrilling the house; but, when it
happened that this Greek (so suitable to the occasion) was also the one
sole morsel of Greek that everybody in that assembly understood, the
effect, as may be supposed, was overwhelming, and wrapt the whole house
in what might be called a fiery explosion of laughter. Meantime, as
prizes in the matrimonial lottery, and prizes in all senses, both young
ladies were soon carried off. Miss Smith, whose expectations I never
happened to hear estimated, married a great West India proprietor; and
Miss Watson, who (according to the popular report) would succeed to six
thousand a year on her twenty-first birthday, married Lord Carbery.
Miss Watson inherited also from her father something which would not
generally be rated very highly, namely, a chancery lawsuit, with the
East India Company for defendant. However, if the company is a potent
antagonist, thus far it is an eligible one, that, in the event of
losing the suit, the honorable company is solvent; and such an event,
after some nine or ten years' delay, did really befall the company. The
question at issue respected some docks which Colonel Watson had built
for the company in some Indian port. And in the end this lawsuit,
though so many years doubtful in its issue, proved very valuable to
Miss Watson; I have heard (but cannot vouch for it) not less valuable
than that large part of her property which had been paid over without
demur upon her twenty-first birth-day. Both young ladies married
happily; but in marriage they found their separation, and in that
separation a shock to their daily comfort which was never replaced to
either. As to Miss Smith's husband, I did not know him; but Lord
Carbery was every way an estimable man; in some things worthy of
admiration; and his wife never ceased to esteem and admire him. But she
yearned for the society of her early friend; and this being placed out
of her reach by the accidents of life, she fell early into a sort of
disgust with her own advantages of wealth and station, which, promising
so much, were found able to perform nothing at all in this first and
last desire of her heart. A portrait of her friend hung in the drawing-
room; but Lady Carbery did not willingly answer the questions that were
sometimes prompted by its extraordinary loveliness. There are women to
whom a female friendship is indispensable, and cannot be supplied by
any companion of the other sex. That blessing, therefore, of her golden
youth, turned eventually into a curse for her after-life; for I believe
that, through one accident or another, they never met again after they
became married women. To me, as one of those who had known and loved
Miss Smith, Lady Carbery always turned the more sunny side of her
nature; but to the world generally she presented a chilling and
somewhat severe aspect--as to a vast illusion that rested upon pillars
of mockery and frauds. Honors, beauty of the first order, wealth, and
the power which follows wealth as its shadow--what could these do? what
_had_ they done? In proportion as they had settled heavily upon
herself, she had found them to entail a load of responsibility; and
those claims upon her she had labored to fulfil conscientiously; but
else they had only precipitated the rupture of such tics as had given
sweetness to her life.
From the first, therefore, I had been aware, on this visit to Laxton,
that Lady Carbery had changed, and was changing. She had become
religious; so much I knew from my sister's letters. And, in fact, this
change had been due to her intercourse with my mother. But, in reality,
her premature disgust with the world would, at any rate, have made her
such; and, had any mode of monastic life existed for Protestants, I
believe that she would before this have entered it, supposing Lord
Carbery to have consented. People generally would have stated the case
most erroneously; they would have said that she was sinking into gloom
under religious influences; whereas the very contrary was the truth;
namely, that, having sunk into gloomy discontent with life, and its
miserable performances as contrasted with its promises, she sought
relief and support to her wounded feelings from religion.
But the change brought with it a difficult trial to myself. She
recoiled, by natural temperament and by refinement of taste, from all
modes of religious enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is a large word, and in many
cases I could not go along with her; but _canting_ of all descriptions
was odious to both of us alike. To cultivate religious knowledge in an
intellectual way, she very well understood that she must study
divinity. And she relied upon me for assisting her. Not that she made
the mistake of ascribing to me any knowledge on that subject; but I
could learn; and, whatsoever I _had_ learned, she knew, by experience,
that I could make abundantly plain to her understanding. Wherever I did
_not_ understand, I was far too sincere to dissemble that fact. Where I
_did_ understand, I could enable _her_ to understand.
On the subject of theology, it was not easy indeed for anybody, man or
boy, to be more ignorant than myself. My studies in that field had been
none at all. Nor was this any subject for wonder, or (considering my
age) for blame. In reality, to make theology into a captivating study
for the young, it must be translated into controversial theology. And
in what way could such a polemic interest be evoked except through
political partisanship? But such partisanship connects itself naturally
with the irritability of sectarianism, and but little with the majestic
repose of a church such as the Romish or the Anglican, founded upon the
broad basis of national majorities, and sheltered from danger, or the
sense of danger, by state protection. Dissenters stand upon another
footing. The Dissenter from the national church, whether in England or
in France, is reminded by his own distinguishing religious opinions of
the historic struggles through which those opinions have travelled. The
doctrines which give to his own sect a peculiar denomination are also
those which record its honorable political conflicts; so that his own
connection, through his religious brotherhood, with the civil history
of his country, furnishes a standing motive of pride for some
acquaintance more or less with divinity; since it is by deviating
painfully, conscientiously, and at some periods dangerously, from the
established divinity, that his fathers have achieved their station in
the great drama of the national evolution.
But, whilst I was ignorant of theology, as a direct and separate branch
of study, the points are so many at which theology inosculates with
philosophy, and with endless casual and random suggestions of the self-
prompted reason, that inevitably from that same moment in which I began
to find a motive for directing my thoughts to this new subject, I
wanted not something to say that might have perplexed an antagonist, or
(in default of such a vicious associate) that might have amused a
friend, more especially a friend so predisposed to a high estimate of
myself as Lady Carbery. Sometimes I did more than amuse her; I startled
her, and I even startled myself, with distinctions that to this hour
strike me as profoundly just, and as undeniably novel. Two out of many
I will here repeat; and with the more confidence, that in these two I
can be sure of repeating the exact thoughts; whereas, in very many
other cases, it would not be so certain that they might not have been
insensibly modified by cross-lights or disturbing shadows from
intervening speculations.
1. Lady Carbery one day told me that she could not see any reasonable
ground for what is said of Christ, and elsewhere of John the Baptist,
that he opened his mission by preaching "repentance." Why "repentance"?
Why then, more than at any other time? Her reason for addressing this
remark to me was, that she fancied there might be some error in the
translation of the Greek expression. I replied that, in my opinion,
there was; and that I had myself always been irritated by the entire
irrelevance of the English word, and by something very like cant, on
which the whole burden of the passage is thrown. How was it any natural
preparation for a vast spiritual revolution, that men should first of
all acknowledge any special duty of repentance? The repentance, if any
movement of that nature could intelligibly be supposed called for,
should more naturally _follow_ this great revolution--which, as
yet, both in its principle and in its purpose, was altogether
mysterious--than herald it, or ground it. In my opinion, the Greek word
_metanoia_ concealed a most profound meaning--a meaning of prodigious
compass--which bore no allusion to any ideas whatever of repentance.
The _meta_ carried with it an emphatic expression of its original
idea--the idea of transfer, of translation, of transformation; or,
if we prefer a Grecian to a Roman apparelling, the idea of a
_metamorphosis_. And this idea, to what is it applied? Upon
what object is this idea of spiritual transfiguration made to
bear? Simply upon the _noetic_ or intellectual faculty--the
faculty of shaping and conceiving things under their true relations.
The holy herald of Christ, and Christ himself the finisher of prophecy,
made proclamation alike of the same mysterious summons, as a baptism or
rite of initiation; namely, _Metanoei_. Henceforth transfigure
your theory of moral truth; the old theory is laid aside as infinitely
insufficient; a new and spiritual revelation is established.
_Metanoeite_--contemplate moral truth as radiating from a new
centre; apprehend it under transfigured relations.
John the Baptist, like other earlier prophets, delivered a message
which, probably enough, he did not himself more than dimly understand,
and never in its full compass of meaning. Christ occupied another
station. Not only was he the original Interpreter, but he was himself
the Author--Founder, at once, and Finisher--of that great
transfiguration applied to ethics, which he and the Baptist alike
announced as forming the code for the new and revolutionary era now
opening its endless career. The human race was summoned to bring a
transfiguring sense and spirit of interpretation (_metanoia_) to a
transfigured ethics--an altered organ to an altered object. This is by
far the grandest miracle recorded in Scripture. No exhibition of blank
power--not the arresting of the earth's motion--not the calling back of
the dead unto life, can approach in grandeur to this miracle which we
all daily behold; namely, the inconceivable mystery of having written
and sculptured upon the tablets of man's heart a new code of moral
distinctions, all modifying--many reversing--the old ones. What would
have been thought of any prophet, if he should have promised to
transfigure the celestial mechanics; if he had said, I will create a
new pole-star, a new zodiac, and new laws of gravitation; briefly, I
will make new earth and new heavens? And yet a thousand times more
awful it was to undertake the writing of new laws upon the spiritual
conscience of man. _Metanoeite_ (was the cry from the wilderness),
wheel into a new centre your moral system; _geocentric_ has that
system been up to this hour--that is, having earth and the earthly for
its starting-point; henceforward make it _heliocentric_ (that is,
with the sun, or the heavenly for its principle of motion).
2. A second remark of mine was, perhaps, not more important, but it
was, on the whole, better calculated to startle the prevailing
preconceptions; for, as to the new system of morals introduced by
Christ, generally speaking, it is too dimly apprehended in its great
differential features to allow of its miraculous character being
adequately appreciated; one flagrant illustration of which is furnished
by our experience in Affghanistan, where some officers, wishing to
impress Akhbar Khan with the beauty of Christianity, very judiciously
repeated to him the Lord's Prayer and the Sermon on the Mount, by both
of which the Khan was profoundly affected, and often recurred to them;
but others, under the notion of conveying to him a more
_comprehensive_ view of the Scriptural ethics, repeated to him the
Ten Commandments; although, with the sole exception of the two first,
forbidding idolatry and Polytheism, there is no word in these which
could have displeased or surprised a Pagan, and therefore nothing
characteristic of Christianity. Meantime my second remark was
substantially this which follows: What is a religion? To Christians it
means, over and above a mode of worship, a dogmatic (that is, a
doctrinal) system; a great body of doctrinal truths, moral and
spiritual. But to the ancients (to the Greeks and Romans, for
instance), it meant nothing of the kind. A religion was simply a
_cultus_, a _thræskeia_, a mode of ritual worship, in which
there might be two differences, namely: 1. As to the particular deity
who furnished the motive to the worship; 2. As to the ceremonial, or
mode of conducting the worship. But in no case was there so much as a
pretence of communicating any religious truths, far less any moral
truths. The obstinate error rooted in modern minds is, that, doubtless,
the moral instruction was bad, as being heathen; but that still it was
as good as heathen opportunities allowed it to be. No mistake can be
greater. Moral instruction had no existence even in the plan or
intention of the religious service. The Pagan priest or flamen never
dreamed of any function like that of _teaching_ as in any way
connected with his office. He no more undertook to teach morals than to
teach geography or cookery. He taught nothing. What he undertook was,
simply to _do_: namely, to present authoritatively (that is,
authorized and supported by some civil community, Corinth, or Athens,
or Rome, which he represented) the homage and gratitude of that
community to the particular deity adored. As to morals or just opinions
upon the relations to man of the several divinities, all this was
resigned to the teaching of nature; and for any polemic functions the
teaching was resigned to the professional philosophers--academic,
peripatetic, stoic, etc. By religion it was utterly ignored.
The reader must do me the favor to fix his attention upon the real
question at issue. What I say--what then I said to Lady Carbery--is
this: that, by failing to notice as a _differential_ feature of
Christianity this involution of a doctrinal part, we elevate Paganism
to a dignity which it never dreamed of. Thus, for instance, in the
Eleusinian mysteries, what was the main business transacted? I, for my
part, in harmony with my universal theory on this subject,--namely,
that there could be no doctrinal truth delivered in a Pagan religion,--
have always maintained that the only end and purpose of the mysteries
was a more solemn and impressive worship of a particular goddess.
Warburton, on the other hand, would insist upon it that some great
affirmative doctrines, interesting to man, such as the immortality of
the soul, a futurity of retribution, &c., might be here commemorated.
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