Part 4 (2/2)

And reminding one of that inscription, so justly admired by Paul Richtor, which a Russian Czarina placed on a guide-post near Moscow--_This is the road that leads to Constantinople_.]

[NOTE 5.

Yes, old--very old phrase: not as ignoramuses fancy, a phrase recently minted by a Repealer in Ireland.]

[NOTE 6.

Our sisters are always rather uneasy when we say anything of them in Latin or Greek. It is like giving sealed orders to a sea captain, which he is not to open for his life till he comes into a certain lat.i.tude, which lat.i.tude, perhaps, he never _will_ come into, and thus may miss the secret till he is going to the bottom. Generally I acknowledge that it is not polite before our female friends to cite a single word of Latin without instantly translating it. But in this particular case, where I am only iterating a disagreeable truth, they will please to recollect that the politeness lies in _not_ translating. However, if they insist absolutely on knowing this very night, before going to bed, what it is that those ill-looking lines contain, I refer them to Dryden's Virgil, somewhere in the 6th Book of the aeneid, except as to the closing line and a half, which contain a private suggestion of my own to discontented nymphs anxious to see the equilibrium of advantages re-established between the two s.e.xes.]

[NOTE 7.

Amongst the many ebullitions of M. Michelet's fury against us poor English, are four which will be likely to amuse the reader; and they are the more conspicuous in collision with the justice which he sometimes does us, and the very indignant admiration which, under some aspects, he grants to us.

1. Our English literature he admires with some gnas.h.i.+ng of teeth. He p.r.o.nounces it ”fine and sombre,” but, I lament to add, ”sceptical, Judaic, Satanic--in a word, Anti-Christian.” That Lord Byron should figure as a member of this diabolical corporation, will not surprise men. It _will_ surprise them to hear that Milton is one of its Satanic leaders. Many are the generous and eloquent Frenchmen, beside Chateaubriand, who have, in the course of the last thirty years, n.o.bly suspended their own burning nationality, in order to render a more rapturous homage at the feet of Milton; and some of them have raised Milton almost to a level with angelic natures. Not one of them has thought of looking for him _below_ the earth.

As to Shakspeare, M. Michelet detects in him a most extraordinary mare's nest. It is this: he does ”not recollect to have seen the name of G.o.d” in any part of his works. On reading such words, it is natural to rub one's eyes, and suspect that all one has ever seen in this world may have been a pure ocular delusion. In particular, I begin myself to suspect that the word ”_la gloire_” never occurs in any Parisian journal. ”The great English nation,” says M. Michelet, ”has one immense profound vice,” to wit, ”pride.” Why, really, that may be true; but we have a neighbor not absolutely clear of an ”immense profound vice,” as like ours in color and shape as cherry to cherry. In short, M. Michelet thinks us, by fits and starts, admirable, only that we are detestable; and he would adore some of our authors, were it not that so intensely he could have wished to kick them.

2. M. Michelet thinks to lodge an arrow in our sides by a very odd remark upon Thomas a Kempis: which is, that a man of any conceivable European blood--a Finlander, suppose, or a Zantiote--might have written Tom; only not an Englishman. Whether an Englishman could have forged Tom, must remain a matter of doubt, unless the thing had been tried long ago. That problem was intercepted for ever by Tom's perverseness in choosing to manufacture himself. Yet, since n.o.body is better aware than M. Michelet, that this very point of Kempis _having_ manufactured Kempis is furiously and hopelessly litigated, three or four nations claiming to have forged his work for him, the shocking old doubt will raise its snaky head once more--whether this forger, who rests in so much darkness, might not, after all, be of English blood. Tom, it may be feared, is known to modern English literature chiefly by an irreverent mention of his name in a line of Peter Pindar's (Dr.

Wolcot) fifty years back, where he is described as

”Kempis Tom, Who clearly shows the way to Kingdom Come.”

Few in these days can have read him, unless in the Methodist version of John Wesley. Amongst those few, however, happens to be myself; which arose from the accident of having, when a boy of eleven, received a copy of the _De Imitatione Christi_, as a bequest from a relation, who died very young; from which cause, and from the external prettiness of the book, being a Glasgow reprint, by the celebrated Foulis, and gaily bound, I was induced to look into it; and finally read it many times over, partly out of some sympathy which, even in those days, I had with its simplicity and devotional fervor; but much more from the savage delight I found in laughing at Tom's Latinity. _That_, I freely grant to M. Michelet, is inimitable; else, as regards substance, it strikes me that I could forge a better _De Imitatione_ myself. But there is no knowing till one tries. Yet, after all, it is not certain whether the original _was_ Latin. But, however _that_ may have been, if it is possible that M. Michelet[A] can be accurate in saying that there are no less than _sixty_ French versions (not editions, observe, but separate versions) existing of the _De Imitatione_, how prodigious must have been the adaptation of the book to the religious heart of the fifteenth century! Excepting the Bible, but excepting that only in Protestant lands, no book known to man has had the same distinction. It is the most marvellous bibliographical fact on record.

[Footnote A: ”If M. Michelet can be accurate.” However, on consideration, this statement does not depend on Michelet. The bibliographer, Barbier, has absolutely _specified_ sixty in a separate dissertation, _soixante traductions_, amongst those even that have not escaped the search. The Italian translations are said to be thirty. As to mere _editions_, not counting the early MSS. for half a century before printing was introduced, those in Latin amount to two thousand, and those in French to one thousand.

Meantime, it is very clear to me that this astonis.h.i.+ng popularity, so entirely unparalleled in literature, could not have existed except in Roman Catholic times, nor subsequently have lingered in any Protestant land. It was the denial of Scripture fountains to thirsty lands which made this slender rill of Scripture truth so pa.s.sionately welcome.]

3. Our English girls, it seems, are as faulty in one way as we English males in another. None of us lads could have written the _Opera Omnia_ of Mr. a Kempis; neither could any of our la.s.ses have a.s.sumed male attire like _La Pucelle_. But why? Because, says Michelet, English girls and German think so much of an indecorum. Well, that is a good fault, generally speaking. But M. Michelet ought to have remembered a fact in the martyrologies which justifies both parties,--the French heroine for doing, and the general choir of English girls for _not_ doing. A female saint, specially renowned in France, had, for a reason as weighty as Joanna's, viz., expressly to s.h.i.+eld her modesty amongst men, wore a male military harness. That reason and that example authorized _La Pucelle_; but our English girls, as a body, have seldom any such reason, and certainly no such saintly example, to plead. This excuses _them_. Yet, still, if it is indispensable to the national character that our young women should now and then trespa.s.s over the frontier of decorum, it then becomes a patriotic duty in me to a.s.sure M. Michelet that we have such ardent females amongst us, and in a long series--some detected in naval hospitals, when too sick to remember their disguise; some on fields of battle; mult.i.tudes never detected at all; some only suspected; and others discharged without noise by war offices and other absurd people. In our navy, both royal and commercial, and generally from deep remembrances of slighted love, women have sometimes served in disguise for many years, taking contentedly their daily allowance of burgoo, biscuit, or cannon b.a.l.l.s--anything, in short, digestible or indigestible, that it might please Providence to send. One thing, at least, is to their credit: never any of these poor masks, with their deep silent remembrances, have been detected through murmuring, or what is nautically understood by ”skulking.” So, for once, M. Michelet has an _erratum_ to enter upon the fly-leaf of his book in presentation copies.

4. But the last of these ebullitions is the most lively. We English, at Orleans, and after Orleans (which is not quite so extraordinary, if all were told,) fled before the Maid of Arc. Yes, says M. Michelet, you _did_: deny it, if you can. Deny it, my dear? I don't mean to deny it. Running away, in many cases, is a thing so excellent, that no philosopher would, at times, condescend to adopt any other step. All of us nations in Europe, without one exception, have shown our philosophy in that way at times. Even people, ”_qui ne se rendent pas_,” have deigned both to run and to shout, ”_Sauve qui pent_” at odd times of sunset; though, for my part, I have no pleasure in recalling unpleasant remembrances to brave men; and yet, really, being so philosophic, they ought _not_ to be unpleasant. But the amusing feature in M. Michelet's reproach, is the way in which he _improves_ and varies against us the charge of running, as if he were singing a catch. Listen to him. They ”_showed their backs_,” did these English. (Hip, hip, hurrah! three times three!) ”_Behind good walls, they let themselves be taken,_” (Hip, hip! nine times nine!) They ”_ran as fast as their legs could carry them._” (Hurrah! twenty-seven times twenty-seven!) They ”_ran before a girl_;” they did. (Hurrah! eighty-one times eighty-one!) This reminds one of criminal indictments on the old model in English courts, where (for fear the prisoner should escape) the crown lawyer varied the charge perhaps through forty counts. The law laid its guns so as to rake the accused at every possible angle. Whilst the indictment was reading, he seemed a monster of crime in his own eyes; and yet, after all, the poor fellow had but committed one offence, and not always _that_. N.B.--Not having the French original at hand, I make my quotations from a friend's copy of Mr. Walter Kelly's translation, which seems to me faithful, spirited, and idiomatically English--liable, in fact, only to the single reproach of occasional provincialisms.

THE ENGLISH MAIL-COACH;

OR,

THE GLORY OF MOTION.

Some twenty or more years before I matriculated at Oxford, Mr. Palmer, M.P. for Bath, had accomplished two things, very hard to do on our little planet, the Earth, however cheap they may happen to be held by the eccentric people in comets: he had invented mail-coaches, and he had married the daughter[1] of a duke. He was, therefore, just twice as great a man as Galileo, who certainly invented (or _discovered_) the satellites of Jupiter, those very next things extant to mail-coaches in the two capital points of speed and keeping time, but who did _not_ marry the daughter of a duke.

These mail-coaches, as organized by Mr. Palmer, are ent.i.tled to a circ.u.mstantial notice from myself--having had so large a share in developing the anarchies of my subsequent dreams, an agency which they accomplished, first, through velocity, at that time unprecedented; they first revealed the glory of motion: suggesting, at the same time, an under-sense, not unpleasurable, of possible though indefinite danger; secondly, through grand effects for the eye between lamp-light and the darkness upon solitary roads; thirdly, through animal beauty and power so often displayed in the cla.s.s of horses selected for this mail service; fourthly, through the conscious presence of a central intellect, that, in the midst of vast distances,[2] of storms, of darkness, of night, overruled all obstacles into one steady cooperation in a national result. To my own feeling, this post-office service recalled some mighty orchestra, where a thousand instruments, all disregarding each other, and so far in danger of discord, yet all obedient as slaves to the supreme _baton_ of some great leader, terminate in a perfection of harmony like that of heart, veins, and arteries, in a healthy animal organization. But, finally, that particular element in this whole combination which most impressed myself, and through which it is that to this hour Mr. Palmer's mail-coach system tyrannizes by terror and terrific beauty over my dreams, lay in the awful political mission which at that time it fulfilled. The mail-coaches it was that distributed over the face of the land, like the opening of apocalyptic vials, the heart-shaking news of Trafalgar, of Salamanca, of Vittoria, of Waterloo. These were the harvests that, in the grandeur of their reaping, redeemed the tears and blood in which they had been sown. Neither was the meanest peasant so much below the grandeur and the sorrow of the times as to confound these battles, which were gradually moulding the destinies of Christendom, with the vulgar conflicts of ordinary warfare, which are oftentimes but gladiatorial trials of national prowess. The victories of England in this stupendous contest rose of themselves as natural _Te Deums_ to heaven; and it was felt by the thoughtful that such victories, at such a crisis of general prostration, were not more beneficial to ourselves than finally to France, and to the nations of western and central Europe, through whose pusillanimity it was that the French domination had prospered.

The mail-coach, as the national organ for publis.h.i.+ng these mighty events, became itself a spiritualized and glorified object to an impa.s.sioned heart; and naturally, in the Oxford of that day, all hearts were awakened. There were, perhaps, of us gownsmen, two thousand _resident_[3] in Oxford, and dispersed through five-and-twenty colleges. In some of these the custom permitted the student to keep what are called ”short terms;” that is, the four terms of Michaelmas, Lent, Easter, and Act, were kept severally by a residence, in the aggregate, of ninety-one days, or thirteen weeks. Under this interrupted residence, accordingly, it was possible that a student might have a reason for going down to his home four times in the year. This made eight journeys to and fro. And as these homes lay dispersed through all the s.h.i.+res of the island, and most of us disdained all coaches except his majesty's mail, no city out of London could pretend to so extensive a connection with Mr. Palmer's establishment as Oxford. Naturally, therefore, it became a point of some interest with us, whose journeys revolved every six weeks on an average, to look a little into the executive details of the system. With some of these Mr. Palmer had no concern; they rested upon bye-laws not unreasonable, enacted by posting-houses for their own benefit, and upon others equally stern, enacted by the inside pa.s.sengers for the ill.u.s.tration of their own exclusiveness. These last were of a nature to rouse our scorn, from which the transition was not _very long_ to mutiny.

Up to this time, it had been the fixed a.s.sumption of the four inside people, (as an old tradition of all public carriages from the reign of Charles II.,) that they, the ill.u.s.trious quaternion, const.i.tuted a porcelain variety of the human race, whose dignity would have been compromised by exchanging one word of civility with the three miserable delf ware outsides. Even to have kicked an outsider might have been held to attaint the foot concerned in that operation; so that, perhaps, it would have required an act of parliament to restore its purity of blood. What words, then, could express the horror, and the sense of treason, in that case, which _had_ happened, where all three outsides, the trinity of Pariahs, made a vain attempt to sit down at the same breakfast table or dinner table with the consecrated four? I myself witnessed such an attempt; and on that occasion a benevolent old gentleman endeavored to soothe his three holy a.s.sociates, by suggesting that, if the outsides were indicted for this criminal attempt at the next a.s.sizes, the court would regard it as a case of lunacy (or _delirium tremens_) rather than of treason. England owes much of her grandeur to the depth of the aristocratic element in her social composition. I am not the man to laugh at it. But sometimes it expressed itself in extravagant shapes. The course taken with the infatuated outsiders, in the particular attempt which I have noticed, was, that the waiter, beckoning them away from the privileged _salle-a-manger_, sang out, ”This way, my good men;” and then enticed them away off to the kitchen. But that plan had not always answered. Sometimes, though very rarely, cases occurred where the intruders, being stronger than usual, or more vicious than usual, resolutely refused to move, and so far carried their point, as to have a separate table arranged for themselves in a corner of the room. Yet, if an Indian screen could be found ample enough to plant them out from the very eyes of the high table, or _dais_, it then became possible to a.s.sume as a fiction of law--that the three delf fellows, after all, were not present. They could be ignored by the porcelain men, under the maxim, that objects not appearing, and not existing, are governed by the same logical construction.

Such now being, at that time, the usages of mail-coaches, what was to be done by us of young Oxford? We, the most aristocratic of people, who were addicted to the practice of looking down superciliously even upon the insides themselves as often very suspicious characters, were we voluntarily to court indignities? If our dress and bearing sheltered us, generally, from the suspicion of being ”raff,” (the name at that period for ”sn.o.bs,”[4]) we really _were_ such constructively, by the place we a.s.sumed.

If we did not submit to the deep shadow of eclipse, we entered at least the skirts of its penumbra. And the a.n.a.logy of theatres was urged against us, where no man can complain of the annoyances incident to the pit or gallery, having his instant remedy in paying the higher price of the boxes. But the soundness of this a.n.a.logy we disputed. In the case of the theatre, it cannot be pretended that the inferior situations have any separate attractions, unless the pit suits the purpose of the dramatic reporter. But the reporter or critic is a rarity. For most people, the sole benefit is in the price. Whereas, on the contrary, the outside of the mail had its own incommunicable advantages. These we could not forego. The higher price we should willingly have paid, but that was connected with the condition of riding inside, which was insufferable. The air, the freedom of prospect, the proximity to the horses, the elevation of seat--these were what we desired; but, above all, the certain antic.i.p.ation of purchasing occasional opportunities of driving.

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