Volume I Part 1 (1/2)

The Dodd Family Abroad.

Vol. I.

by Charles James Lever.

PREFACE.

Although the faulty judgment of authors on their own productions has a.s.sumed something like the force of a proverb, I am ready to incur the hazard of avowing that the present volume is, to my own thinking, better than anything else I have done. I am not about to defend its numerous shortcomings and great faults. I will not say one word in extenuation of a plan which, to many readers, forms an insuperable objection,--that of a story in letters. I wish simply to record the fact that the book afforded me much pleasure in the writing, and that I felt an amount of interest in the character of Kenny Dodd such as I have never before nor since experienced for any personage of my own creation.

The reader who is at all acquainted with the incidents of foreign travel, and the strange individuals to be met with on every European highway, will readily acquit me of exaggeration either in describing the mistaken impressions conceived of Continental life, or the difficulties of forming anything like a correct estimate of national habits by those whose own sphere of observation was so limited in their own country.

In Kenny Dodd, I attempted to portray a man naturally acute and intelligent, sensible and well judging where his prejudices did not pervert his reason, and singularly quick to appreciate the ridicule of any absurd situation in which he did not figure himself. To all the pretentious ambitions of his family,--to their exaggerated sense of themselves and their station,--to their inordinate desire to figure in a rank above their own, and appear to be something they had never hitherto attempted,--I have made him keenly and sensitively alive. He sees Mrs.

Dodd's perils,--there is not a sunk rock nor a shoal before her that he has not noted, and yet for the life of him he can't help booking himself for the voyage. There is an Irishman's love of drollery,--that pa.s.sion for what gives him a hearty laugh, even though he come in for his share of the ridicule, which repays him for every misadventure. If he is momentarily elated by the high and distinguished company in which he finds himself, so far from being shocked when he discovers them to be swindlers and blacklegs, he chuckles over the blunders of Mrs. D. and Mary Anne, and writes off to his friend Purcell a letter over which he laughs till his eyes run.

Of those broad matters to which a man of good common-sense can apply his faculties fairly, his opinions are usually just and true; he likes truth, he wants to see things as they are. Of everything conventional he is almost invariably in error; and it is this struggle that in a manner reflects the light and shade of his nature, showing him at one moment clear-headed and observant, and at the next absurdly mistaken and ignorant.

It was in no spirit of sarcasm on my countrymen that I took an Irishman to represent these incongruities; nay, more, I will say that in the very liability to be so strongly impressed from without, lies much of that unselfishness which forms that staple of the national character which so greatly recommends them to strangers.

If I do not speak of the other characters of the book, it is because I feel that whatever humble merit the volume may possess is ascribable to the truthfulness of this princ.i.p.al personage. It is less the Dodd family for which I would bespeak the reader's interest, than for the trials of Kenny Dodd himself, his thoughts and opinions.

Finally, let me observe that this story has had the fortune to be better liked by my friends, and less valued by the public, than any other of my books.

I wrote it, as I have said, with pleasure; well satisfied should I be that any of my readers might peruse it with as much. It was planned and executed in a quiet little cottage in the Gulf of Spezia, something more than six years ago. I am again in the same happy spot; and, as I turn over the pages, not altogether lost to some of the enjoyment they once afforded me in the writing, and even more than before anxious that I should not be alone in that sentiment.

It is in vain, however, for an author to bespeak favor for that which comes not recommended by merits of its own; and if Kenny Dodd finds no acceptance with you on his own account, it is hopeless to expect that he will be served by the introduction of so partial a friend as

Your devoted servant,

CHARLES LEVER.

Marola, Gulf of Spezia,

October 1,1859.

A WORD FROM THE EDITOR.

The Editor of the Dodd Correspondence may possibly be expected to give the Public some information as to the manner by which these Letters came into his possession, and the reasons which led him to publish them.

Happily he can do both without any breach of honorable confidence. The circ.u.mstances were these:--

Mr. Dodd, on his returning to Ireland, pa.s.sed through the little watering-place of Spezzia, where the Editor was then sojourning. They met accidentally, formed acquaintances.h.i.+p, and then intimacy. Amongst the many topics of conversation between them, the Continent and its habits occupied a very wide s.p.a.ce. Mr. D. had lived little abroad; the Editor had pa.s.sed half of a life there. Their views and judgment were, as might be surmised, not always alike; and if novelty had occasionally misled one, time and habit had not less powerfully blunted the perceptions of the other. The old resident discovered, to his astonishment, that the very opinions which he smiled at from his friend, had been once his own; that he had himself incurred some of the mistakes, and fallen into many of the blunders, which he now ridiculed, and that, so far from the Dodd Family being the exception, they were in reality no very unfair samples of a large cla.s.s of our travelling countrymen. They had come abroad with crude and absurd notions of what awaited them on the Continent. They dreamed of economy, refinement, universal politeness, and a profound esteem for England from all foreigners. They fancied that the advantages of foreign travel were to be obtained without cost or labor; that locomotion could educate, sight-seeing cultivate them; that in the capacity of British subjects every society should be open to them, and that, in fact, it was enough to emerge from home obscurity to become at once recognized in the fas.h.i.+onable circles of any Continental city.

They not only entertained all these notions, but they held them in defiance of most contradictory elements. They practised the most rigid economy when professing immense wealth; they affected to despise the foreigner while shunning their own countrymen; they a.s.sumed to be votaries of art when merely running over galleries; and lastly, while laying claim, and just claim, for their own country to the highest moral standard of Europe, they not unfrequently outraged all the proprieties of foreign life by an open and shameless profligacy. It is difficult to understand how a mere change of locality can affect a man's notions of right and wrong, and how Cis-Alpine evil may be Trans-Alpine good. It is very hard to believe that a few parallels of lat.i.tude can affect the moral thermometer; but so it is, and so Mr. Dodd honestly confessed he found it. He not only avowed that he could do abroad what he could not dare to do at home, but that, worse still, the infraction cost no sacrifice of self-esteem, no self-reproach. It was not that these derelictions were part of the habits of foreign life, or at least of such of it as met the eye; it was, in reality, because he had come abroad with his own preconceived ideas of a certain lat.i.tude in morals, and was resolved to have the benefit of it. Such inconsistency in theory led, naturally, to absurdity in action, and John Bull became, in consequence, a mark for every trait of eccentricity that satirists could describe, or caricaturists paint.

The gradations of rank so rigidly defined in England are less accurately marked out abroad. Society, like the face of the soil, is not enclosed by boundaries and fenced by hedgerows, but stretches away in boundless undulations of unlimited extent. The Englishman fancies there are no boundaries, because he does not see the landmarks. Since all seems open, he imagines there can be no trespa.s.s. This is a serious mistake! Not less a one is, to connect t.i.tle with rank. He fancies that n.o.bility represents abroad the same pretensions which it maintains in England, and indignantly revenges his own blunder by calumniating in common every foreigner of rank.

Mr. Dodd fell into some of these errors; from others he escaped. Most, indeed, of his mistakes were those inseparable from a false position; and from the acuteness of his remarks in conversation, it is clear that he possessed fair powers of observation, and a mind well disposed to receive and retain the truth. One quality certainly his observations possessed,--they were ”his own.” They were neither worked out from the Guide-book, nor borrowed from his _Laquais de Place_. They were the honest convictions of a good ordinary capacity, sharpened by the habits of an active life. It was with sincere pleasure the Editor received from him the following note, which reached him about three weeks after they parted:--