Complete Works of R S Surtees

by R S Surtees

  All sportsmen can vouch for the truth of Nimrod’s remark that “if a horse goes but two strides faster than another over one large field (in Leicestershire), a price is instantly put upon him, and he is sold”; whereas in a provincial country he would not find a market till his exploits had been talked of for a twelvemonth. We know no such uphill work as selling a horse in the country. Absurdly dear as railway carriage is for horses, we would sooner pay it and consign a horse to the easy transfer of Messrs Tattersall, than encounter the haggling and, most likely, subsequent vexation of a country deal.

  Only those who have done road work can estimate the enormous expense of an itinerant stud; including the cost of the horses themselves, many of them high-priced, with their expensive gear (Nimrod was always an advocate for the very best of everything), the wages and outfit of their attendants, fees to huntsmen, servants, &c., it is not surprising to learn that in the course of six years Nimrod drew £9000 from the Sporting Magazine. Against such expenditure by one contributor it was hardly possible for a periodical to bear up in a field so limited as that of sport; and we have heard on good authority that some time before his death Mr Pittman had determined on discontinuing the Tours, at least on the grand scale.

  (Of Nimrod’s second and successful attempt to write the article on Fox-hunting for the ‘Quarterly Review.’)

  We had no great expectations of it, nor was that impression removed by a cursory reading by Nimrod of parts. This took place one winter’s afternoon in a back bedroom of the Sabloniere Hotel in Leicester Square. Whether it was the darkness of the room, the difficulty he had in joining and reading his own scratchy manuscript written on the worst French paper, which, further, he kept in the same bag with his dirty linen and in much the same degree of order, or the disinclination one has to hearing in bits a thing one means to read as a whole — especially near dinner-time — we do not know; but we remember that we were not much taken by it. Moreover, it had not then undergone the revision of Mr Lockhart, who is allowed to be the best hand ever known at dressing up an article; he would not interfere with the sporting part, but there are divers little bits that owe, we do not doubt, their parentage to him: the moral, for instance, at the end is evidently his, being opposed to all that Nimrod had ever written on the irresistible attractions of Leicestershire. This article, The Chase, is the cleverest and most spirited union of truth and fiction ever written. The line of the run, we believe, was given by the late Mr Moore of Melton celebrity, son of the late Archbishop of Canterbury; but the detail, the filling in, was Nimrod’s.

  The success of “The Chase” article encouraged the editor of the Qvarterly to try Nimrod again; and, with admirable judgment, he selected “The Road,” a subject upon which his contributor was an acknowledged authority. In this case Nimrod enters at once on his story and compares, in vivid word-pictures, the journey to Exeter as it was in 1742 when a fortnight was occupied, and as it was at the time he wrote, when it occupied seventeen hours. The interest of the article was therefore enhanced by the manner in which the wonderful improvements were set forth.

  If John Cressell of the Charter House was employed by the country gentlemen in 1673 to write down stage-coaches (of which there were then only six in existence) for fear that their wives and daughters, thus able to obtain easy and cheap conveyance to London, might not settle down afterwards to their domestic duties at the Hall or the Grange, what ought the present generation to do to the honourable member for Sunderland who has accomplished what others only threatened? Yet who Avould abolish railways? They are the great civilisers of our time. At the period when Nimrod’s old gentleman fell asleep (1742) there was only one coach between Edinburgh and London, and it was from twelve to sixteen days on the road. Before another year elapses this journey will be done in one day.

  Of Nimrod’s third article in the Quarterly it is best described by saying it was neither a hit nor a miss. Racing people attach immense importance to accuracy, and racing, of all subjects, is the most dangerous for the uninformed writer to touch. He is sure to bring a hornet’s nest about his ears, and this was the case with Nimrod; an able and well-informed turfite (author of the papers called “Turfiana,” which attracted much attention in the New Sporting Magazine) exposed in Bell’s Life in London many inaccuracies and misstatements.... The paper concludes with a dissertation on betting, a matter of which Nimrod knew nothing; he was no gambler; doubtless he might have obtained plenty of information on that subject from those who had found it necessary to seek refuge at Calais and Boulogne!

  The portrait which forms the frontispiece to the volume containing the three Quarterly essays is a good likeness in the main, but the artist, Daniel Maclise, has, we think, made the eyes rather finer than they actually were.

  “The Chase” and its fellow-article “The Road” would make the reputation of any man. Such a paper as the former, however, was not a thing of which a man can write two; this Nimrod found when he tried his hand at a second run in his “Character of Leicestershire as a Hunting Country” (New Sporting Magazine, Vol. 3). The principal feature in this run is the circumstance of the hero being mounted on a five-year-old, from whose fictitious misfortunes an amusing real incident arose. The story as told by Nimrod made the unfortunate horse get his eye knocked out at a bull-finch, notwithstanding which his humane rider (in great grief, of course) went on as if nothing had happened. The run was severe and the horse died. The paper was a curious combination of cruelty and feeling — the former predominating over the latter — so, by way of reducing them to somewhat of an equality, the editor made the horse get a thorn in his eye instead of allowing it to be knocked out. The story is bad enough thus amended; and so it was evidently considered, for one gentleman wrote a strong letter of remonstrance, urging the editor to submit all such papers to the revision of Nimrod who, he said, was the only man capable of appreciating the taste and feelings of sportsmen!

  Nimrod’s “Hunting Reminiscences,” commenced in July 1833, was in our opinion the best thing he wrote for the New Sporting Magazine, distinguished as it was by his old fire. The title of this series was soon amplified by the addition of “The Crack Riders of England.”

  Those whose memories extend through the doings of the last twenty years will remember Mr John Mytton of Halston at the zenith of his kind-hearted eccentricity and extravagance. He was the enemy of no one but himself; possessed of first-rate talents and an ample fortune he unfortunately lacked the restraining hand of a father, and was hurried by a generous but too ardent and impetuous spirit into every species of mischief and folly. Nimrod was much with him, but he had no hand in bringing about his friend’s ruin. We believe the saying of an old servant of Mr Mytton was true:— “If all the people who frequented Halston had been like Captain Apperley, Mr Mytton would never have come to any harm.”

  The critics were either puzzled by Nimrod’s Life of John Mytton or thought it beneath their notice; at all events very little was said of it when the book appeared, after publication in the N.S.M. The Literary Gazette denounced it in terms which moved the author to ask for a copy of the issue, before he parted with the revised second edition upon which he was engaged. Making every allowance for the difficulty of memoir writing, we do not think the work calculated to increase the literary reputation of Nimrod. It is a sad jumble of inconsistencies, of accusation and palliation, which keeps the reader in a state of suspense, undecided as to the view the author really means to espouse.

  III. THE MAN AND HIS WRITINGS — CONTINUED.

  OF THE “NORTHERN Tour” little need be said. Nimrod was liberally mounted by the sportsmen of the various countries through which he passed, the Duke of Buccleuch, we believe, having ordered a horse to be at the covert-side for him every day while in his country. Lord Elcho, Mr Hay, Mr Ramsay, Captain Hay, Mr Dalyell, Lord Kintore, Lord Kelbume, and others, also mounted him. ‘Touring’ was his hobby, or he would never have risked the delicate obligations acceptance of such attentions imposed. There is reason to think that Lor
d Kintore, at whose invitation he undertook this tour, rather repented having asked him; for Nimrod, expatiating on his lordship’s mastership of the Vale of White Horse country, asserted that his butcher’s hills averaged £90 a month; a statement which caused Lord Kintore to write in high dudgeon, begging that the press might be stopped pending communication with Nimrod. The only result of that communication was to alter the statement to “£300 a year”; but we suspect that it conveyed intimation that the author should stick to sport and leave domestic matters alone.

  Nimrod spent upwards of five months on his Northern Tour during nearly the whole of which time he was an inmate of the houses of the several noblemen and gentlemen with whose hounds he hunted. The Tour, when it appeared, however, did not ‘take.’ Whether the interest had evaporated owing to delay in publication, or the sporting world was tired of Touring we do not pretend to say; but neither as it passed through the pages of the New Sporting Magazine, nor when it appeared in volume form did it achieve any success.

  A “French Tour” followed the Northern. This contained a good deal about French travelling, living, customs, and horses, with a little about racing and hunting at Chantilly. At the close Nimrod described his visit to Count Duval de Beaulieu at his chateau near Brussels, but the sporting part — as all foreign sporting must be — was dull by comparison with English.

  A very excellent American paper, The New York Spirit of The Times, in a review of English sporting literature made a guess, amusing to at least one person. After remarking that Nimrod stood confessedly at the head of English writers on sport, the editor proceeded to say, “he is now engaged, as we suspect, upon Sporting Lectures under the nom de guerre of Jack Jorrocks. This is but a suspicion of our own which is not sustained by the opinions of many gentlemen with whom we have conversed. But, whoever may be the author, we like the Lectures, and would rather have written the second one than any number of Tours, so full is it of wit and pleasantry, such practical shrewdness and knowledge of the science of ‘unting and ‘osses.”

  Nimrod’s papers on “My Horses” were written at the suggestion of the first editor of the New Sporting Magazine. They were very good, containing much original, amusing, and useful matter; written, moreover, with far more spirit than had distinguished anything that had come from the author’s pen for some time. According to his own account he had had none but good horses, and, like all gentleman dealers, had ‘made a vast of money’ by them.

  Sporting By Nimrod is one of the handsomest books ever issued from the press. Nimrod called it his magnum opus; while he praises several of the papers it contains, he runs down what we consider the best — namely, “Epsom Races,” by a Sentimental Gentleman. This is the account of all he saw and heard on his journey by coach from Town to Epsom Downs and back, by a pretended ignoramus on Turf matters, but in reality by one of the shrewdest and cleverest men going. Nimrod’s only objection seems to have been that the author was a London lawyer: as if being a lawyer disqualified a man from having a taste for the Turf! This London lawyer, we say, is the man Mr Murray ought to have employed to write his Turf article for the Quarterley Review — this London lawyer being, if we do not greatly mistake, the now renowned Bunbury, a writer who makes even Whigs read the Morning Herald, so neat and sprightly are his Turf articles.

  The Life of A Sportsman, which may be regarded as Nimrod’s great work (though he himself assigned that title to Nimrod on Sporting, of which he was rather compiler or editor than author), was a project of the late Mr Ackermann, who wished it written in verse, after the style of Doctor Syntax, of which work he furnished our author with a copy, but forgot to supply him with the ability. Doctor Syntax, we may observe, was also a speculation of Mr Ackermann, and a very successful one.

  There had been some personal interviews between Nimrod and the publisher on the subject; and it seems that Mr Aiken commenced illustrating the work before it was written, thus making Nimrod write to his plates, instead of making the plates illustrate the letterpress — a sadly cramping, disadvantageous method as far as the author is concerned.

  Nimrod was a great man for chopping and changing; and attached such importance to trifles that he was an expensive customer to booksellers inclined to humour his fancies. Thus, the intended frontispiece for his Life of A Sportsman was to be “The Child in The Dining-room with the Fox’s Brush”; this, after three days had to make way for another plate, which after all was not so used. He wrote Mr Ackermann, “The scene at dessert must be the frontispiece. The costumes of the figures totally precludes my making use of it, as no man in those days wore a red coat at dinner. It will do well, however, as a frontispiece as the costumes then will not be material.”

  For ‘further particulars,’ as the advertising medicine people say, we beg to refer the reader to the volume itself. It is a goodly-looking tome, finely bound, richly gilt, and abounding in coloured illustrations in Mr Aiken’s best and most spirited style. If anything the page is rather full for a work of light reading, and we do not know but that Nimrod’s original idea of having it in two volumes was right. It contains a great variety of good sporting matter, and though nothing but what it professes to be — the “Life of a Sportsman,” — it will be read with interest by many who, in a larger or smaller way, have led a similar career. The tale was commenced in the New Sporting Magazine of March 1841; and was the last thing of any note by Nimrod that appeared in the periodical.

  In an agreeable three-page sketch published in the N.S.M. of January 1843, entitled “A Pleasant New Year’s Eve,” Nimrod vouched for the goodness of fox-hunting husbands: “My experience assures me,” writes he, “that the generality of fox-hunters and sportsmen make good husbands, notwithstanding they are given to fall asleep in their arm-chairs after a hard day’s work. The very nature of their pursuits makes them domestic, and the exercise they take in the open air preserves their constitution to a late period of their lives, thus insuring to their names a sound and healthy posterity.”

  It might have been thought that Boulogne was a more suitable place than Calais for Nimrod to take up his abode; the latter certainly has little to recommend it — a dull, heavy, prisonlike place, — whereas Boulogne is surpassed by few towns for light, cheerfulness, and gaiety — in a word for all the attractions of a watering-place. Nimrod, however, had little relish for trivial amusements or for watering-place society, and perhaps selected Calais on account of the seclusion there to be enjoyed. He lived very quietly, receiving English friends as chance brought them in his way, but mixing little with the residents of the place, or the runaways. In one of his papers he says, “If he could bring himself to believe that life was given him to be frittered away in billiard-rooms and cafés he would fling it back to Him who gave it as a boon not worth the possession”; and elsewhere, when expatiating on the joys of an active life, he says the greatest punishment the world could inflict upon him would be to give him—”... a genteel house in Burton Crescent, his pockets full of money, a black butler, and nothing to do.” That, we believe, was really his feeling; he had no taste for idleness. And here we may remark that he possessed one most valuable quality in a writer for periodicals — great punctuality; if he promised a paper he rarely failed to send it. The Quarterly articles raised his market value, and the applications he received from editors were many and various. Publishers are supremely ignorant of the subjects that lay within his range, and thought he could write equally well on any. He was not always happy in his response to such appeals; Mr Colburn once commissioned him to write on the Goodwood Races for the Court Journal, and Nimrod furnished so meagre an account that the editor thought he could have produced as good a one himself from the return lists.

  Indeed we believe that many editors were not a little surprised and disappointed by the articles sent them by the celebrated author of “The Chase.” The following, from a high authority, reveals his shortcomings: —

  DEAR NIMROD, — I have hastily read your paper, and think it contains a great deal of good stuff; but you
must really take no little pains in correcting it. You ramble from subject to subject, there are needless repetitions, and there is an obvious deficiency of arrangement throughout. You had better put heads in italics to the several branches of improvement you wish to suggest, and then see that the chapter sticks close to its own text. Moreover, see that you express your meaning clearly. I sometimes am at a loss to follow you, and many of the readers of the — must be as little conversant with such matters as myself.... Pray do revise it most laboriously, and with a sharp eye to verbal inaccuracies....

  We wish the order of his fife had been reversed; that Nimrod might have ended his days in the comfortable circumstances that attended his early career with the Old Sporting Magazine. His great mistake was in quarrelling with that periodical, and the great mistake of the proprietors of that work was in allowing him to launch out too largely at first, and make his assistance too costly to retain. Nimrod was meant for a man of fortune, and we dare say his constant intercourse with the wealthy caused him to forget his own circumstances and do whatever he saw other people do.... If he had been moderate in his ideas his connection with the Old Sporting Magazine might have been lasting and mutually advantageous to himself and to it; a magazine of that description was the true field for the development of his peculiar talent.