There are not many dogs like this good Coolin, and not many people.
But the type is one well marked, both in the human and the canine
family. Gallantry was not his aim, but a solid and somewhat
oppressive respectability. He was a sworn foe to the unusual and
the conspicuous, a praiser of the golden mean, a kind of city uncle
modified by Cheeryble. And as he was precise and conscientious in
all the steps of his own blameless course, he looked for the same
precision and an even greater gravity in the bearing of his deity,
my father. It was no sinecure to be Coolin's idol: he was exacting
like a rigid parent; and at every sign of levity in the man whom he
respected, he announced loudly the death of virtue and the
proximate fall of the pillars of the earth.
I have called him a snob; but all dogs are so, though in varying
degrees. It is hard to follow their snobbery among themselves; for
though I think we can perceive distinctions of rank, we cannot
grasp what is the criterion. Thus in Edinburgh, in a good part of
the town, there were several distinct societies or clubs that met
in the morning to - the phrase is technical - to "rake the backets"
in a troop. A friend of mine, the master of three dogs, was one
day surprised to observe that they had left one club and joined
another; but whether it was a rise or a fall, and the result of an
invitation or an expulsion, was more than he could guess. And this
illustrates pointedly our ignorance of the real life of dogs, their
social ambitions and their social hierarchies. At least, in their
dealings with men they are not only conscious of sex, but of the
difference of station. And that in the most snobbish manner; for
the poor man's dog is not offended by the notice of the rich, and
keeps all his ugly feeling for those poorer or more ragged than his
master. And again, for every station they have an ideal of
behaviour, to which the master, under pain of derogation, will do
wisely to conform. How often has not a cold glance of an eye
informed me that my dog was disappointed; and how much more gladly
would he not have taken a beating than to be thus wounded in the
seat of piety!
I knew one disrespectable dog. He was far liker a cat; cared
little or nothing for men, with whom he merely coexisted as we do
with cattle, and was entirely devoted to the art of poaching. A
house would not hold him, and to live in a town was what he
refused.
He led, I believe, a life of troubled but genuine pleasure, and
perished beyond all question in a trap. But this was an exception,
a marked reversion to the ancestral type; like the hairy human
infant. The true dog of the nineteenth century, to judge by the
remainder of my fairly large acquaintance, is in love with
respectability. A street-dog was once adopted by a lady. While
still an Arab, he had done as Arabs do, gambolling in the mud,
charging into butchers' stalls, a cat-hunter, a sturdy beggar, a
common rogue and vagabond; but with his rise into society he laid
aside these inconsistent pleasures. He stole no more, he hunted no
more cats; and conscious of his collar, he ignored his old
companions. Yet the canine upper class was never brought to
recognise the upstart, and from that hour, except for human
countenance, he was alone. Friendless, shorn of his sports and the
habits of a lifetime, he still lived in a glory of happiness,
content with his acquired respectability, and with no care but to
support it solemnly. Are we to condemn or praise this self-made
dog? We praise his human brother. And thus to conquer vicious
habits is as rare with dogs as with men. With the more part, for
all their scruple-mongering and moral thought, the vices that are
born with them remain invincible throughout; and they live all
their years, glorying in their virtues, but still the slaves of
their defects. Thus the sage Coolin was a thief to the last; among
a thousand peccadilloes, a whole goose and a whole cold leg of
mutton lay upon his conscience; but Woggs, (7) whose soul's
shipwreck in the matter of gallantry I have recounted above, has
only twice been known to steal, and has often nobly conquered the
temptation. The eighth is his favourite commandment. There is
something painfully human in these unequal virtues and mortal
frailties of the best. Still more painful is the bearing of those
"stammering professors" in the house of sickness and under the
terror of death. It is beyond a doubt to me that, somehow or
other, the dog connects together, or confounds, the uneasiness of
sickness and the consciousness of guilt. To the pains of the body
he often adds the tortures of the conscience; and at these times
his haggard protestations form, in regard to the human deathbed, a
dreadful parody or parallel.
I once supposed that I had found an inverse relation between the
double etiquette which dogs obey; and that those who were most
addicted to the showy street life among other dogs were less
careful in the practice of home virtues for the tyrant man. But
the female dog, that mass of carneying affectations, shines equally
in either sphere; rules her rough posse of attendant swains with
unwearying tact and gusto; and with her master and mistress pushes
the arts of insinuation to their crowning point. The attention of
man and the regard of other dogs flatter (it would thus appear) the
same sensibility; but perhaps, if we could read the canine heart,
they would be found to flatter it in very different degrees. Dogs
live with man as courtiers round a monarch, steeped in the flattery
of his notice and enriched with sinecures. To push their favour in
this world of pickings and caresses is, perhaps, the business of
their lives; and their joys may lie outside. I am in despair at
our persistent ignorance. I read in the lives of our companions
the same processes of reason, the same antique and fatal conflicts
of the right against the wrong, and of unbitted nature with too
rigid custom; I see them with our weaknesses, vain, false,
inconstant against appetite, and with our one stalk of virtue,
devoted to the dream of an ideal; and yet, as they hurry by me on
the street with tail in air, or come singly to solicit my regard, I
must own the secret purport of their lives is still inscrutable to
man. Is man the friend, or is he the patron only? Have they
indeed forgotten nature's voice? or are those moments snatched from
courtiership when they touch noses with the tinker's mongrel, the
brief reward and pleasure of their artificial lives? Doubtless,
when man shares with his dog the toils of a profession and the
pleasures of an art, as with the shepherd or the poacher, the
affection warms and strengthens till it fills the soul. But
doubtless, also, the masters are, in many cases, the object of a
merely interested cultus, sitting aloft like Louis Quatorze, giving
and receiving flattery and favour; and the dogs, like the majority
of men, have but foregone their true existence and become the dupes
of their ambition.
CHAPTER XIII. A PENNY PLAIN AND TWOPENCE COLOURED
THESE words will be familiar to all students of Skelt's Juvenile
Drama. That national monument, after having changed its name to
Park's, to Webb's, to Redington's, and last of all to Pollock's,
has now become, for the most part, a memory. Some of its pillars,
like Stonehenge, are still afoot, the rest clean vanished. It may
be the Museum numbers a full set; and Mr. Ionides perhaps, or else
her gracious Majesty, may boast their great collections; but to the
plain private person they are become, like Raphaels, unattainable.
I have, at different times, possessed ALADDIN, THE RED ROVER, THE
BLIND BOY, THE OLD OAK CHEST, THE WOOD DAEMON, JACK SHEPPARD, THE
MILLER AND HIS MEN, DER FREISCHUTZ, THE SMUGGLER, THE FOREST OF
BONDY, ROBIN HOOD, THE WATERMAN, RICHARD I., MY POLL AND MY PARTNER
JOE, THE INCHCAPE BELL (imperfect), and THREE-FINGERED JACK, THE
TERROR OF JAMAICA; and I have assisted others in the illumination
of MAID OF THE INN and THE BATTLE OF WATERLOO. In this roll-call
of stirring names you read the evidences of a happy childhood; and
though not half of them are still to be procured of any living
stationer, in the mind of their once happy owner all survive,
kaleidoscopes of changing pictures, echoes of the past.
There stands, I fancy, to this day (but now how fallen!) a certain
stationer's shop at a corner of the wide thoroughfare that joins
the city of my childhood with the sea. When, upon any Saturday, we
made a party to behold the ships, we passed that corner; and since
in those days I loved a ship as a man loves Burgundy or daybreak,
this of itself had been enough to hallow it. But there was more
than that. In the Leith Walk window, all the year round, there
stood displayed a theatre in working order, with a "forest set," a
"combat," and a few "robbers carousing" in the slides; and below
and about, dearer tenfold to me! the plays themselves, those
budgets of romance, lay tumbled one upon another. Long and often
have I lingered there with empty pockets. One figure, we shall
say, was visible in the first plate of characters, bearded, pistol
in hand, or drawing to his ear the clothyard arrow; I would spell
the name: was it Macaire, or Long Tom Coffin, or Grindoff, 2d
dress? O, how I would long to see the rest! how - if the name by
chance were hidden - I would wonder in what play he figured, and
what immortal legend justified his attitude and strange apparel!
And then to go within, to announce yourself as an intending
purchaser, and, closely watched, be suffered to undo those bundles
and breathlessly devour those pages of gesticulating villains,
epileptic combats, bosky forests, palaces and war-ships, frowning
fortresses and prison vaults - it was a giddy joy. That shop,
which was dark and smelt of Bibles, was a loadstone rock for all
that bore the name of boy. They could not pass it by, nor, having
entered, leave it. It was a place besieged; the shopmen, like the
Jews rebuilding Salem, had a double task. They kept us at the
stick's end, frowned us down, snatched each play out of our hand
ere we were trusted with another, and, increditable as it may
sound, used to demand of us upon our entrance, like banditti, if we
came with money or with empty hand. Old Mr. Smith himself, worn
out with my eternal vacillation, once swept the treasures from
before me, with the cry: "I do not believe, child, that you are an
intending purchaser at all!" These were the dragons of the garden;
but for such joys of paradise we could have faced the Terror of
Jamaica himself. Every sheet we fingered was another lightning
glance into obscure, delicious story; it was like wallowing in the
raw stuff of story-books. I know nothing to compare with it save
now and then in dreams, when I am privileged to read in certain
unwrit stories of adventure, from which I awake to find the world
all vanity. The CRUX of Buridan's donkey was as nothing to the
uncertainty of the boy as he handled and lingered and doated on
these bundles of delight; there was a physical pleasure in the
sight and touch of them which he would jealously prolong; and when
at length the deed was done, the play selected, and the impatient
shopman had brushed the rest into the gray portfolio, and the boy
was forth again, a little late for dinner, the lamps springing into
light in the blue winter's even, and THE MILLER, or THE ROVER, or
some kindred drama clutched against his side - on what gay feet he
ran, and how he laughed aloud in exultation! I can hear that
laughter still. Out of all the years of my life, I can recall but
one home-coming to compare with these, and that was on the night
when I brought back with me the ARABIAN ENTERTAINMENTS in the fat,
old, double-columned volume with the prints. I was just well into
the story of the Hunchback, I remember, when my clergyman-
grandfather (a man we counted pretty stiff) came in behind me. I
grew blind with terror. But instead of ordering the book away, he
said he envied me. Ah, well he might!
The purchase and the first half-hour at home, that was the summit.
Thenceforth the interest declined by little and little. The fable,
as set forth in the play-book, proved to be not worthy of the
scenes and characters: what fable would not? Such passages as:
"Scene 6. The Hermitage. Night set scene. Place back of scene 1,
No. 2, at back of stage and hermitage, Fig. 2, out of set piece, R.
H. in a slanting direction" - such passages, I say, though very
practical, are hardly to be called good reading. Indeed, as
literature, these dramas did not much appeal to me. I forget the
very outline of the plots. Of THE BLIND BOY, beyond the fact that
he was a most injured prince and once, I think, abducted, I know
nothing. And THE OLD OAK CHEST, what was it all about? that
proscript (1st dress), that prodigious number of banditti, that old
woman with the broom, and the magnificent kitchen in the third act
(was it in the third?) - they are all fallen in a deliquium, swim
faintly in my brain, and mix and vanish.
I cannot deny that joy attended the illumination; nor can I quite
forget that child who, wilfully foregoing pleasure, stoops to
"twopence coloured." With crimson lake (hark to the sound of it -
crimson lake! - the horns of elf-land are not richer on the ear) -
with crimson lake and Prussian blue a certain purple is to be
compounded which, for cloaks especially, Titian could not equal.
The latter colour with gamboge, a hated name although an exquisite
pigment, supplied a green of such a savoury greenness that to-day
my heart regrets it. Nor can I recall without a tender weakness
the very aspect of the water where I dipped my brush. Yes, there
was pleasure in the painting. But when all was painted, it is
needless to deny it, all was spoiled. You might, indeed, set up a
scene or two to look at; but to cut the figures out was simply
sacrilege; nor could any child twice court the tedium, the worry,
and the long-drawn disenchantment of an actual performance. Two
days after the purchase the honey had been sucked. Parents used to
complain; they thought I wearied of my play. It was not so: no
more than a person can be said to have wearied of his dinner when
he leaves the bones and dishes; I had got the marrow of it and said
grace.
Then was the time to turn to the back of the play-book and to study
that enticing double file of names, where poetry, for the true
child of Skelt, reigned happy and glorious like her Majesty the
Queen. Much as I have travelled in these realms of gold, I have
yet seen, upon that map or abstract, names of El Dorados that still
haunt the ear of memory, and are still but names. THE FLOATING
BEACON - why was that denied me? or THE WRECK ASHORE? SIXTEEN-
STRING JACK whom I did not even guess to be a highwayman, troubled
me awake and haunted my slumbers; and there is one sequence of
three from that enchanted calender that I still at times recall,
like a loved verse of poetry: LODOISKA, SILVER PALACE, ECHO OF
WESTMINSTER BRIDGE. Names, bare names, are surely more to children
than we poor, grown-up, obliterated fools remember.
The name of Skelt itself has always seemed a part and parcel of the
charm of his productions. It may be different with the rose, but
the attraction of this paper drama sensibly declined when Webb had
crept into the rubric: a poor cuckoo, flaunting in Skelt's nest.
And now we have reached Pollock, sounding deeper gulfs. Indeed,
this name of Skelt appears so stagey and piratic, that I will adopt
it boldly to design these qualities. Skeltery, then, is a quality
of much art. It is even to be found, with reverence be it said,
among the works of nature. The stagey is its generic name; but it
is an old, insular, home-bred staginess; not French, domestically
British; not of to-day, but smacking of O. Smith, Fitzball, and the
great age of melodrama: a peculiar fragrance haunting it; uttering
its unimportant message in a tone of voice that has the charm of
fresh antiquity. I will not insist upon the art of Skelt's
purveyors. These wonderful characters that once so thrilled our
soul with their bold attitude, array of deadly engines and
incomparable costume, to-day look somewhat pallidly; the extreme
hard favour of the heroine strikes me, I had almost said with pain;
the villain's scowl no longer thrills me like a trumpet; and the
scenes themselves, those once unparalleled landscapes, seem the
efforts of a prentice hand. So much of fault we find; but on the
other side the impartial critic rejoices to remark the presence of
a great unity of gusto; of those direct clap-trap appeals, which a
man is dead and buriable when he fails to answer; of the footlight
glamour, the ready-made, bare-faced, transpontine picturesque, a
thing not one with cold reality, but how much dearer to the mind!
The scenery of Skeltdom - or, shall we say, the kingdom of
Transpontus? - had a prevailing character. Whether it set forth
Poland as in THE BLIND BOY, or Bohemia with THE MILLER AND HIS MEN,
or Italy with THE OLD OAK CHEST, still it was Transpontus. A
botanist could tell it by the plants. The hollyhock was all
pervasive, running wild in deserts; the dock was common, and the
bending reed; and overshadowing these were poplar, palm, potato
tree, and QUERCUS SKELTICA - brave growths. The caves were all
embowelled in the Surreyside formation; the soil was all betrodden
by the light pump of T. P. Cooke. Skelt, to be sure, had yet
another, an oriental string: he held the gorgeous east in fee; and
in the new quarter of Hyeres, say, in the garden of the Hotel des
Iles d'Or, you may behold these blessed visions realised. But on
these I will not dwell; they were an outwork; it was in the
accidental scenery that Skelt was all himself. It had a strong
flavour of England; it was a sort of indigestion of England and
drop-scenes, and I am bound to say was charming. How the roads
wander, how the castle sits upon the hill, how the sun eradiates
from behind the cloud, and how the congregated clouds themselves
up-roll, as stiff as bolsters! Here is the cottage interior, the
usual first flat, with the cloak upon the nail, the rosaries of
onions, the gun and powder-horn and corner-cupboard; here is the
inn (this drama must be nautical, I foresee Captain Luff and Bold
Bob Bowsprit) with the red curtain, pipes, spittoons, and eight-day
clock; and there again is that impressive dungeon with the chains,
which was so dull to colour. England, the hedgerow elms, the thin
brick houses, windmills, glimpses of the navigable Thames -
England, when at last I came to visit it, was only Skelt made
evident: to cross the border was, for the Scotsman, to come home to
Skelt; there was the inn-sign and there the horse-trough, all
foreshadowed in the faithful Skelt. If, at the ripe age of
fourteen years, I bought a certain cudgel, got a friend to load it,
and thenceforward walked the tame ways of the earth my own ideal,
radiating pure romance - still I was but a puppet in the hand of
Skelt; the original of that regretted bludgeon, and surely the
antitype of all the bludgeon kind, greatly improved from
Cruikshank, had adorned the hand of Jonathan Wild, pl. I. "This is
mastering me," as Whitman cries, upon some lesser provocation.
What am I? what are life, art, letters, the world, but what my
Skelt has made them? He stamped himself upon my immaturity. The
world was plain before I knew him, a poor penny world; but soon it
was all coloured with romance. If I go to the theatre to see a
good old melodrama, 'tis but Skelt a little faded. If I visit a
bold scene in nature, Skelt would have been bolder; there had been
certainly a castle on that mountain, and the hollow tree - that set
piece - I seem to miss it in the foreground. Indeed, out of this
cut-and-dry, dull, swaggering, obtrusive, and infantile art, I seem
to have learned the very spirit of my life's enjoyment; met there
the shadows of the characters I was to read about and love in a
late future; got the romance of DER FREISCHUTZ long ere I was to
hear of Weber or the mighty Formes; acquired a gallery of scenes
and characters with which, in the silent theatre of the brain, I
might enact all novels and romances; and took from these rude cuts
an enduring and transforming pleasure. Reader - and yourself?
A word of moral: it appears that B. Pollock, late J. Redington, No.
73 Hoxton Street, not only publishes twenty-three of these old
stage favourites, but owns the necessary plates and displays a
modest readiness to issue other thirty-three. If you love art,
folly, or the bright eyes of children, speed to Pollock's, or to
Clarke's of Garrick Street. In Pollock's list of publicanda I
perceive a pair of my ancient aspirations: WRECK ASHORE and
SIXTEEN-STRING JACK; and I cherish the belief that when these shall
see once more the light of day, B. Pollock will remember this
apologist. But, indeed, I have a dream at times that is not all a
dream. I seem to myself to wander in a ghostly street - E. W., I
think, the postal district - close below the fool's-cap of St.
Paul's, and yet within easy hearing of the echo of the Abbey
bridge. There in a dim shop, low in the roof and smelling strong
of glue and footlights, I find myself in quaking treaty with great
Skelt himself, the aboriginal all dusty from the tomb. I buy, with
what a choking heart - I buy them all, all but the pantomimes; I
pay my mental money, and go forth; and lo! the packets are dust.
CHAPTER XIV. A GOSSIP ON A NOVEL OF DUMAS'S
THE books that we re-read the oftenest are not always those that we
admire the most; we choose and we re-visit them for many and
various reasons, as we choose and revisit human friends. One or
two of Scott's novels, Shakespeare, Moliere, Montaigne, THE EGOIST,
and the VICOMTE DE BRAGELONNE, form the inner circle of my
intimates. Behind these comes a good troop of dear acquaintances;
THE PILGRIM'S PROGRESS in the front rank, THE BIBLE IN SPAIN not
far behind. There are besides a certain number that look at me
with reproach as I pass them by on my shelves: books that I once
thumbed and studied: houses which were once like home to me, but
where I now rarely visit. I am on these sad terms (and blush to
confess it) with Wordsworth, Horace, Burns and Hazlitt. Last of
all, there is the class of book that has its hour of brilliancy -
glows, sings, charms, and then fades again into insignificance
until the fit return. Chief of those who thus smile and frown on
me by turns, I must name Virgil and Herrick, who, were they but
"Their sometime selves the same throughout the year,"
must have stood in the first company with the six names of my
continual literary intimates. To these six, incongruous as they
seem, I have long been faithful, and hope to be faithful to the day
of death. I have never read the whole of Montaigne, but I do not
like to be long without reading some of him, and my delight in what
I do read never lessens. Of Shakespeare I have read all but
RICHARD III, HENRY VI., TITUS ANDRONICAS, and ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS
WELL; and these, having already made all suitable endeavour, I now
know that I shall never read - to make up for which unfaithfulness
I could read much of the rest for ever. Of Moliere - surely the
next greatest name of Christendom - I could tell a very similar
story; but in a little corner of a little essay these princes are
too much out of place, and I prefer to pay my fealty and pass on.
How often I have read GUY MANNERING, ROB ROY, OR REDGAUNTLET, I
have no means of guessing, having begun young. But it is either
four or five times that I have read THE EGOIST, and either five or
six that I have read the VICOMTE DE BRAGELONNE.
Some, who would accept the others, may wonder that I should have
spent so much of this brief life of ours over a work so little
famous as the last. And, indeed, I am surprised myself; not at my
own devotion, but the coldness of the world. My acquaintance with
the VICOMTE began, somewhat indirectly, in the year of grace 1863,
when I had the advantage of studying certain illustrated dessert
plates in a hotel at Nice. The name of d'Artagnan in the legends I
already saluted like an old friend, for I had met it the year
before in a work of Miss Yonge's. My first perusal was in one of
those pirated editions that swarmed at that time out of Brussels,
and ran to such a troop of neat and dwarfish volumes. I understood
but little of the merits of the book; my strongest memory is of the
execution of d'Eymeric and Lyodot - a strange testimony to the
dulness of a boy, who could enjoy the rough-and-tumble in the Place
de Greve, and forget d'Artagnan's visits to the two financiers. My
next reading was in winter-time, when I lived alone upon the
Pentlands. I would return in the early night from one of my
patrols with the shepherd; a friendly face would meet me in the
door, a friendly retriever scurry upstairs to fetch my slippers;
and I would sit down with the VICOMTE for a long, silent, solitary
lamp-light evening by the fire. And yet I know not why I call it
silent, when it was enlivened with such a clatter of horse-shoes,
and such a rattle of musketry, and such a stir of talk; or why I
call those evenings solitary in which I gained so many friends. I
would rise from my book and pull the blind aside, and see the snow
and the glittering hollies chequer a Scotch garden, and the winter
moonlight brighten the white hills. Thence I would turn again to
that crowded and sunny field of life in which it was so easy to
forget myself, my cares, and my surroundings: a place busy as a
city, bright as a theatre, thronged with memorable faces, and
sounding with delightful speech. I carried the thread of that epic
into my slumbers, I woke with it unbroken, I rejoiced to plunge
into the book again at breakfast, it was with a pang that I must
lay it down and turn to my own labours; for no part of the world
has ever seemed to me so charming as these pages, and not even my
friends are quite so real, perhaps quite so dear, as d'Artagnan.
Since then I have been going to and fro at very brief intervals in
my favourite book; and I have now just risen from my last (let me
call it my fifth) perusal, having liked it better and admired it
more seriously than ever. Perhaps I have a sense of ownership,
being so well known in these six volumes. Perhaps I think that
d'Artagnan delights to have me read of him, and Louis Quatorze is
gratified, and Fouquet throws me a look, and Aramis, although he
knows I do not love him, yet plays to me with his best graces, as
to an old patron of the show. Perhaps, if I am not careful,
something may befall me like what befell George IV. about the
battle of Waterloo, and I may come to fancy the VICOMTE one of the
first, and Heaven knows the best, of my own works. At least, I
avow myself a partisan; and when I compare the popularity of the
VICOMTE with that of MONTRO CRISTO, or its own elder brother, the
TROIS MOUSQUETAIRES, I confess I am both pained and puzzled.
To those who have already made acquaintance with the titular hero
in the pages of VINGT ANS APRES, perhaps the name may act as a
deterrent. A man might, well stand back if he supposed he were to
follow, for six volumes, so well-conducted, so fine-spoken, and
withal so dreary a cavalier as Bragelonne. But the fear is idle.
I may be said to have passed the best years of my life in these six
volumes, and my acquaintance with Raoul has never gone beyond a
bow; and when he, who has so long pretended to be alive, is at last
suffered to pretend to be dead, I am sometimes reminded of a saying
in an earlier volume: "ENFIN, DIT MISS STEWART," - and it was of
Bragelonne she spoke - "ENFIN IL A FAIL QUELQUECHOSE: C'EST, MA
FOI! BIEN HEUREUX." I am reminded of it, as I say; and the next
moment, when Athos dies of his death, and my dear d'Artagnan bursts
into his storm of sobbing, I can but deplore my flippancy.
Or perhaps it is La Valliere that the reader of VINGT ANS APRES is
inclined to flee. Well, he is right there too, though not so
right. Louise is no success. Her creator has spared no pains; she
is well-meant, not ill-designed, sometimes has a word that rings
out true; sometimes, if only for a breath, she may even engage our
sympathies. But I have never envied the King his triumph. And so
far from pitying Bragelonne for his defeat, I could wish him no
worse (not for lack of malice, but imagination) than to be wedded
to that lady. Madame enchants me; I can forgive that royal minx
her most serious offences; I can thrill and soften with the King on
that memorable occasion when he goes to upbraid and remains to
flirt; and when it comes to the "ALLONS, AIMEZ-MOI DONC," it is my
heart that melts in the bosom of de Guiche. Not so with Louise.
Readers cannot fail to have remarked that what an author tells us
of the beauty or the charm of his creatures goes for nought; that
we know instantly better; that the heroine cannot open her mouth
but what, all in a moment, the fine phrases of preparation fall
from round her like the robes from Cinderella, and she stands
before us, self-betrayed, as a poor, ugly, sickly wench, or perhaps
a strapping market-woman. Authors, at least, know it well; a
heroine will too often start the trick of "getting ugly;" and no
disease is more difficult to cure. I said authors; but indeed I
had a side eye to one author in particular, with whose works I am
very well acquainted, though I cannot read them, and who has spent
many vigils in this cause, sitting beside his ailing puppets and
(like a magician) wearying his art to restore them to youth and
beauty. There are others who ride too high for these misfortunes.
Who doubts the loveliness of Rosalind? Arden itself was not more
lovely. Who ever questioned the perennial charm of Rose Jocelyn,
Lucy Desborough, or Clara Middleton? fair women with fair names,
the daughters of George Meredith. Elizabeth Bennet has but to
speak, and I am at her knees. Ah! these are the creators of
desirable women. They would never have fallen in the mud with
Dumas and poor La Valliere. It is my only consolation that not one
of all of them, except the first, could have plucked at the
moustache of d'Artagnan.
Or perhaps, again, a proportion of readers stumble at the
threshold. In so vast a mansion there were sure to be back stairs
and kitchen offices where no one would delight to linger; but it
was at least unhappy that the vestibule should be so badly lighted;
and until, in the seventeenth chapter, d'Artagnan sets off to seek
his friends, I must confess, the book goes heavily enough. But,
from thenceforward, what a feast is spread! Monk kidnapped;
d'Artagnan enriched; Mazarin's death; the ever delectable adventure
of Belle Isle, wherein Aramis outwits d'Artagnan, with its epilogue
(vol. v. chap. xxviii.), where d'Artagnan regains the moral
superiority; the love adventures at Fontainebleau, with St.
Aignan's story of the dryad and the business of de Guiche, de
Wardes, and Manicamp; Aramis made general of the Jesuits; Aramis at
the bastille; the night talk in the forest of Senart; Belle Isle
again, with the death of Porthos; and last, but not least, the
taming of d'Artagnan the untamable, under the lash of the young
King. What other novel has such epic variety and nobility of
incident? often, if you will, impossible; often of the order of an
Arabian story; and yet all based in human nature. For if you come
to that, what novel has more human nature? not studied with the
microscope, but seen largely, in plain daylight, with the natural
eye? What novel has more good sense, and gaiety, and wit, and
unflagging, admirable literary skill? Good souls, I suppose, must
sometimes read it in the blackguard travesty of a translation. But
there is no style so untranslatable; light as a whipped trifle,
strong as silk; wordy like a village tale; pat like a general's
despatch; with every fault, yet never tedious; with no merit, yet
inimitably right. And, once more, to make an end of commendations,
what novel is inspired with a more unstained or a more wholesome
morality?
Yes; in spite of Miss Yonge, who introduced me to the name of
d'Artagnan only to dissuade me from a nearer knowledge of the man,
I have to add morality. There is no quite good book without a good
morality; but the world is wide, and so are morals. Out of two
people who have dipped into Sir Richard Burton's THOUSAND AND ONE
NIGHTS, one shall have been offended by the animal details; another
to whom these were harmless, perhaps even pleasing, shall yet have
been shocked in his turn by the rascality and cruelty of all the
characters. Of two readers, again, one shall have been pained by
the morality of a religious memoir, one by that of the VICOMTE DE
BRAGELONNE. And the point is that neither need be wrong. We shall
always shock each other both in life and art; we cannot get the sun
into our pictures, nor the abstract right (if there be such a
thing) into our books; enough if, in the one, there glimmer some
hint of the great light that blinds us from heaven; enough if, in
the other, there shine, even upon foul details, a spirit of
magnanimity. I would scarce send to the VICOMTE a reader who was
in quest of what we may call puritan morality. The ventripotent
mulatto, the great cater, worker, earner and waster, the man of
much and witty laughter, the man of the great heart and alas! of
the doubtful honesty, is a figure not yet clearly set before the
world; he still awaits a sober and yet genial portrait; but with
whatever art that may be touched, and whatever indulgence, it will
not be the portrait of a precision. Dumas was certainly not
thinking of himself, but of Planchet, when he put into the mouth of
d'Artagnan's old servant this excellent profession: "MONSIEUR,
J'ETAIS UNE DE CES BONNES PATES D'HOMMES QUE DIEU A FAIT POUR
S'ANIMER PENDANT UN CERTAIN TEMPS ET POUR TROUVER BONNES TOUTES
CHOSES QUI ACCOMPAGNENT LEUR SEJOUR SUR LA TERRE." He was
thinking, as I say, of Planchet, to whom the words are aptly
fitted; but they were fitted also to Planchet's creator; and
perhaps this struck him as he wrote, for observe what follows:
"D'ARTAGNAN S'ASSIT ALORS PRES DE LA FENETRE, ET, CETTE PHILOSOPHIE
DE PLANCHET LUI AYANT PARU SOLIDE, IL Y REVA." In a man who finds
all things good, you will scarce expect much zeal for negative
virtues: the active alone will have a charm for him; abstinence,
however wise, however kind, will always seem to such a judge
entirely mean and partly impious. So with Dumas. Chastity is not
near his heart; nor yet, to his own sore cost, that virtue of
frugality which is the armour of the artist. Now, in the VICOMTE,
he had much to do with the contest of Fouquet and Colbert.
Historic justice should be all upon the side of Colbert, of
official honesty, and fiscal competence.
And Dumas knew it well: three times at least he shows his
knowledge; once it is but flashed upon us and received with the
laughter of Fouquet himself, in the jesting controversy in the
gardens of Saint Mande; once it is touched on by Aramis in the
forest of Senart; in the end, it is set before us clearly in one
dignified speech of the triumphant Colbert. But in Fouquet, the
waster, the lover of good cheer and wit and art, the swift
transactor of much business, "L'HOMME DE BRUIT, L'HOMME DE PLAISIR,
L'HOMME QUI N'EST QUE PARCEQUE LES AUTRES SONT," Dumas saw
something of himself and drew the figure the more tenderly. It is
to me even touching to see how he insists on Fouquet's honour; not
seeing, you might think, that unflawed honour is impossible to
spendthrifts; but rather, perhaps, in the light of his own life,
seeing it too well, and clinging the more to what was left. Honour
can survive a wound; it can live and thrive without a member. The
man rebounds from his disgrace; he begins fresh foundations on the
ruins of the old; and when his sword is broken, he will do
valiantly with his dagger. So it is with Fouquet in the book; so
it was with Dumas on the battlefield of life.
To cling to what is left of any damaged quality is virtue in the
man; but perhaps to sing its praises is scarcely to be called
morality in the writer. And it is elsewhere, it is in the
character of d'Artagnan, that we must look for that spirit of
morality, which is one of the chief merits of the book, makes one
of the main joys of its perusal, and sets it high above more
popular rivals. Athos, with the coming of years, has declined too
much into the preacher, and the preacher of a sapless creed; but
d'Artagnan has mellowed into a man so witty, rough, kind and
upright, that he takes the heart by storm. There is nothing of the
copy-book about his virtues, nothing of the drawing-room in his
fine, natural civility; he will sail near the wind; he is no
district visitor - no Wesley or Robespierre; his conscience is void
of all refinement whether for good or evil; but the whole man rings
true like a good sovereign. Readers who have approached the
VICOMTE, not across country, but by the legitimate, five-volumed
avenue of the MOUSQUETAIRES and VINGT ANS APRES, will not have
forgotten d'Artagnan's ungentlemanly and perfectly improbable trick
upon Milady. What a pleasure it is, then, what a reward, and how
agreeable a lesson, to see the old captain humble himself to the
son of the man whom he had personated! Here, and throughout, if I
am to choose virtues for myself or my friends, let me choose the
virtues of d'Artagnan. I do not say there is no character as well
drawn in Shakespeare; I do say there is none that I love so wholly.
There are many spiritual eyes that seem to spy upon our actions -
eyes of the dead and the absent, whom we imagine to behold us in
our most private hours, and whom we fear and scruple to offend: our
witnesses and judges. And among these, even if you should think me
childish, I must count my d'Artagnan - not d'Artagnan of the
memoirs whom Thackeray pretended to prefer - a preference, I take
the freedom of saying, in which he stands alone; not the d'Artagnan
of flesh and blood, but him of the ink and paper; not Nature's, but
Dumas's. And this is the particular crown and triumph of the
artist - not to be true merely, but to be lovable; not simply to
convince, but to enchant.
There is yet another point in the VICOMTE which I find
incomparable. I can recall no other work of the imagination in
which the end of life is represented with so nice a tact. I was
asked the other day if Dumas made me laugh or cry. Well in this my
late fifth reading of the VICOMTE, I did laugh once at the small
Coquelin de Voliere business, and was perhaps a thought surprised
at having done so: to make up for it, I smiled continually. But
for tears, I do not know. If you put a pistol to my throat, I must
own the tale trips upon a very airy foot - within a measurable
distance of unreality; and for those who like the big guns to be
discharged and the great passions to appear authentically, it may
even seem inadequate from first to last. Not so to me; I cannot
count that a poor dinner, or a poor book, where I meet with those I
love; and, above all, in this last volume, I find a singular charm
of spirit. It breathes a pleasant and a tonic sadness, always
brave, never hysterical. Upon the crowded, noisy life of this long
tale, evening gradually falls; and the lights are extinguished, and
the heroes pass away one by one. One by one they go, and not a
regret embitters their departure; the young succeed them in their
places, Louis Quatorze is swelling larger and shining broader,
another generation and another France dawn on the horizon; but for
us and these old men whom we have loved so long, the inevitable end
draws near and is welcome. To read this well is to anticipate
experience. Ah, if only when these hours of the long shadows fall
for us in reality and not in figure, we may hope to face them with
a mind as quiet!
But my paper is running out; the siege guns are firing on the Dutch
frontier; and I must say adieu for the fifth time to my old comrade
fallen on the field of glory. ADIEU - rather AU REVOIR! Yet a
sixth time, dearest d'Artagnan, we shall kidnap Monk and take horse
together for Belle Isle.
CHAPTER XV. A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE
IN anything fit to be called by the name of reading, the process
itself should be absorbing and voluptuous; we should gloat over a
book, be rapt clean out of ourselves, and rise from the perusal,
our mind filled with the busiest, kaleidoscopic dance of images,
incapable of sleep or of continuous thought. The words, if the
book be eloquent, should run thenceforward in our ears like the
noise of breakers, and the story, if it be a story, repeat itself
in a thousand coloured pictures to the eye. It was for this last
pleasure that we read so closely, and loved our books so dearly, in
the bright, troubled period of boyhood. Eloquence and thought,
character and conversation, were but obstacles to brush aside as we
dug blithely after a certain sort of incident, like a pig for
truffles. For my part, I liked a story to begin with an old
wayside inn where, "towards the close of the year 17-," several
gentlemen in three-cocked hats were playing bowls. A friend of
mine preferred the Malabar coast in a storm, with a ship beating to
windward, and a scowling fellow of Herculean proportions striding
along the beach; he, to be sure, was a pirate. This was further
afield than my home-keeping fancy loved to travel, and designed
altogether for a larger canvas than the tales that I affected.
Give me a highwayman and I was full to the brim; a Jacobite would
do, but the highwayman was my favourite dish. I can still hear
that merry clatter of the hoofs along the moonlit lane; night and
the coming of day are still related in my mind with the doings of
John Rann or Jerry Abershaw; and the words "post-chaise," the
"great North road," "ostler," and "nag" still sound in my ears like
poetry. One and all, at least, and each with his particular fancy,
we read story-books in childhood, not for eloquence or character or
thought, but for some quality of the brute incident. That quality
was not mere bloodshed or wonder. Although each of these was
welcome in its place, the charm for the sake of which we read
depended on something different from either. My elders used to
read novels aloud; and I can still remember four different passages
which I heard, before I was ten, with the same keen and lasting
pleasure. One I discovered long afterwards to be the admirable
opening of WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT: it was no wonder I was pleased
with that. The other three still remain unidentified. One is a
little vague; it was about a dark, tall house at night, and people
groping on the stairs by the light that escaped from the open door
of a sickroom. In another, a lover left a ball, and went walking
in a cool, dewy park, whence he could watch the lighted windows and
the figures of the dancers as they moved. This was the most
sentimental impression I think I had yet received, for a child is
somewhat deaf to the sentimental. In the last, a poet, who had
been tragically wrangling with his wife, walked forth on the sea-
beach on a tempestuous night and witnessed the horrors of a wreck.
(8) Different as they are, all these early favourites have a
common note - they have all a touch of the romantic.
Drama is the poetry of conduct, romance the poetry of circumstance.
The pleasure that we take in life is of two sorts - the active and
the passive. Now we are conscious of a great command over our
destiny; anon we are lifted up by circumstance, as by a breaking
wave, and dashed we know not how into the future. Now we are
pleased by our conduct, anon merely pleased by our surroundings.
It would be hard to say which of these modes of satisfaction is the
more effective, but the latter is surely the more constant.
Conduct is three parts of life, they say; but I think they put it
high. There is a vast deal in life and letters both which is not
immoral, but simply a-moral; which either does not regard the human
will at all, or deals with it in obvious and healthy relations;
where the interest turns, not upon what a man shall choose to do,
but on how he manages to do it; not on the passionate slips and
hesitations of the conscience, but on the problems of the body and
of the practical intelligence, in clean, open-air adventure, the
shock of arms or the diplomacy of life. With such material as this
it is impossible to build a play, for the serious theatre exists
solely on moral grounds, and is a standing proof of the
dissemination of the human conscience. But it is possible to
build, upon this ground, the most joyous of verses, and the most
lively, beautiful, and buoyant tales.
One thing in life calls for another; there is a fitness in events
and places. The sight of a pleasant arbour puts it in our mind to
sit there. One place suggests work, another idleness, a third
early rising and long rambles in the dew. The effect of night, of
any flowing water, of lighted cities, of the peep of day, of ships,
of the open ocean, calls up in the mind an army of anonymous
desires and pleasures. Something, we feel, should happen; we know
not what, yet we proceed in quest of it. And many of the happiest
hours of life fleet by us in this vain attendance on the genius of
the place and moment. It is thus that tracts of young fir, and low
rocks that reach into deep soundings, particularly torture and
delight me. Something must have happened in such places, and
perhaps ages back, to members of my race; and when I was a child I
tried in vain to invent appropriate games for them, as I still try,
just as vainly, to fit them with the proper story. Some places
speak distinctly. Certain dank gardens cry aloud for a murder;
certain old houses demand to be haunted; certain coasts are set
apart for shipwreck. Other spots again seem to abide their
destiny, suggestive and impenetrable, "miching mallecho." The inn
at Burford Bridge, with its arbours and green garden and silent,
eddying river - though it is known already as the place where Keats
wrote some of his ENDYMION and Nelson parted from his Emma - still
seems to wait the coming of the appropriate legend. Within these
ivied walls, behind these old green shutters, some further business
smoulders, waiting for its hour. The old Hawes Inn at the Queen's
Ferry makes a similar call upon my fancy. There it stands, apart
from the town, beside the pier, in a climate of its own, half
inland, half marine - in front
the ferry bubbling with the tide and the guardship swinging to her
anchor; behind, the old garden with the trees. Americans seek it
already for the sake of Lovel and Oldbuck, who dined there at the
beginning of the ANTIQUARY. But you need not tell me - that is not
all; there is some story, unrecorded or not yet complete, which
must express the meaning of that inn more fully. So it is with
names and faces; so it is with incidents that are idle and
inconclusive in themselves, and yet seem like the beginning of some
quaint romance, which the all-careless author leaves untold. How
many of these romances have we not seen determine at their birth;
how many people have met us with a look of meaning in their eye,
and sunk at once into trivial acquaintances; to how many places
have we not drawn near, with express intimations - "here my destiny
awaits me" - and we have but dined there and passed on! I have
lived both at the Hawes and Burford in a perpetual flutter, on the
heels, as it seemed, of some adventure that should justify the
place; but though the feeling had me to bed at night and called me
again at morning in one unbroken round of pleasure and suspense,
nothing befell me in either worth remark. The man or the hour had
not yet come; but some day, I think, a boat shall put off from the
Queen's Ferry, fraught with a dear cargo, and some frosty night a
horseman, on a tragic errand, rattle with his whip upon the green
shutters of the inn at Burford. (9)
Now, this is one of the natural appetites with which any lively
literature has to count. The desire for knowledge, I had almost
added the desire for meat, is not more deeply seated than this
demand for fit and striking incident. The dullest of clowns tells,
or tries to tell, himself a story, as the feeblest of children uses
invention in his play; and even as the imaginative grown person,
joining in the game, at once enriches it with many delightful
circumstances, the great creative writer shows us the realisation
and the apotheosis of the day-dreams of common men. His stories
may be nourished with the realities of life, but their true mark is
to satisfy the nameless longings of the reader, and to obey the
ideal laws of the day-dream. The right kind of thing should fall
out in the right kind of place; the right kind of thing should
follow; and not only the characters talk aptly and think naturally,
but all the circumstances in a tale answer one to another like
notes in music. The threads of a story come from time to time
together and make a picture in the web; the characters fall from
time to time into some attitude to each other or to nature, which
stamps the story home like an illustration. Crusoe recoiling from
the footprint, Achilles shouting over against the Trojans, Ulysses
bending the great bow, Christian running with his fingers in his
ears, these are each culminating moments in the legend, and each
has been printed on the mind's eye for ever. Other things we may
forget; we may forget the words, although they are beautiful; we
may forget the author's comment, although perhaps it was ingenious
and true; but these epoch-making scenes, which put the last mark of
truth upon a story and fill up, at one blow, our capacity for
sympathetic pleasure, we so adopt into the very bosom of our mind
that neither time nor tide can efface or weaken the impression.
This, then, is the plastic part of literature: to embody character,
thought, or emotion in some act or attitude that shall be
remarkably striking to the mind's eye. This is the highest and
hardest thing to do in words; the thing which, once accomplished,
equally delights the schoolboy and the sage, and makes, in its own
right, the quality of epics. Compared with this, all other
purposes in literature, except the purely lyrical or the purely
philosophic, are bastard in nature, facile of execution, and feeble
in result. It is one thing to write about the inn at Burford, or
to describe scenery with the word-painters; it is quite another to
seize on the heart of the suggestion and make a country famous with
a legend. It is one thing to remark and to dissect, with the most
cutting logic, the complications of life, and of the human spirit;
it is quite another to give them body and blood in the story of
Ajax or of Hamlet. The first is literature, but the second is
something besides, for it is likewise art.
