by Anthology
“Would you like to speak with him?” said my host. “He is coming this way.”
I said I would be delighted to, and, as Captain Jackson walked towards the house where we were sitting, my host rose and beckoned to him.
Captain Jackson had a remarkable face, remarkable for its extreme pallor, and for the brilliance of his penetrating eyes. He looked me up and down, and then asked in an abrupt way:
“Oxford or Cambridge?”
I felt embarrassed by his abruptness, but managed to get the word Oxford across my lips.
“What college?” he asked. “Balliol, I suppose.” And without waiting for an answer he said: “What are you studying?”
I said: “History.”
“Bah,” he said, “they can’t teach history at Oxford. There are only two places where you can learn history. One is the Navy and the other the Army, and both of them in times of war.”
Upon which he took a pinch of snuff, turned his back, and walked quickly away.
Up to that moment the conversation had seemed to me quite natural, as if I had belonged to the circumstances in which I suddenly found myself, as if I was a contemporary, taking part in the events of the day, but from the moment that Captain Jackson left us I seemed to be two people: the man who was on the island and who belonged to this remoter epoch, and my real twentieth-century self.
“Did Captain Jackson fight for Napoleon?” I asked.
“Napoleon?” said my host. “I never heard of him.”
“The Emperor of the French,” I said.
“There never was no Emperor as I ever heard of,” said my host. “There was a King and they cut his head off. And then there was a Jacobite Republic which overran half Europe, spreading revolution wherever it went, in Italy, Spain, Germany, and even in Russia. They won victories, then they were beat. As soon as all the world made peace, they made war again and won victories again, and at last they were beat altogether, and the King came into his own.”
“Then who,” I asked, “is King of France now?”
“Why, Louis XVIII, of course. And thanks to those Jacobites, of a much smaller France than belonged to his ancestors. He had to give up Alsace and half Lorraine to the Germans.”
His voice seemed to grow faint as he said this, and the scene melted. I rubbed my eyes and found that I was walking down a street, arm-in-arm with a stranger. I soon recognized the street. It was Whitehall.
“That,” said the man who was walking with me, “is the Horse Guards.”
I realized that I was being shown over London. I was possibly a stranger of distinction. My guide was floridly dressed. He wore a crimson necktie and a carbuncle pin, a yellow satin waistcoat, a large choker, a little imperial; his eyes were bright and penetrating, his manner vivacious. There was something slightly histrionic about him.
I recognized certain familiar landmarks. The traffic, the hansom carriages, and the four-wheelers made a clatter in the street; elegant barouches passed us. The ladies wore crinolines; the men, Dundreary whiskers. I felt I had been landed into the world of Thackeray. We passed an unfamiliar statue which stood where the war memorial now stands.
“Who is that?” I asked.
“That,” said my guide, “is the statue erected in memory of a poet who died fighting for the cause of royalty, order, and the fleur-de-lis against the hosts of anarchy and murder in France during the great Jacobin War. He was killed fighting on the barricades in Paris. He showed great promise as a writer. His name was William Wordsworth.”
Just then we passed a dignified-looking old gentleman with white hair dressed in the fashion of an earlier period. He wore a blue swallow-tailed coat, a buff nankeen waistcoat, and a fob with many seals hanging from it. He was a dignified and picturesque figure. He stooped slightly. His eyes were those of a mathematician or an inventor. There was an air of great distinction about him, not unmingled with a whiff of scholarship. I asked my guide who he was.
“That,” he answered, “is the Conservative Member for Horsham, Sir Percy Shelley.”
“The son of the poet?” I asked.
“Oh dear, no,” said my guide. “His father was not a poet. His father was a squire, Sir Timothy Shelley. It is true that Sir Percy did write some verse as a youth, but we never refer to that now. I assure you nobody ever refers to it. Boyish peccadilloes. Very regrettable, as they were atheistic, often heathen in tone, and sometimes even licentious in character. But boys will be boys, and the young must sow their wild oats. He has amply atoned for all that. Fortunately few of those early effusions were printed, and Sir Percy was able to withdraw from circulation and to destroy every single copy of that most deplorable doggerel. Sir Percy is one of the pillars of the Conservative Party, and the speech he made against Reform and the Extension of Suffrage Bill is a classic. He is a great patriot, is Sir Percy, and he wrote some stirring words about the war which were published in The Times newspaper, and then set to music and enjoyed a wide popularity.
“The refrain ran:
We don’t want to fight,
But Zeus help them if we do.
You see, Sir Percy is a classical scholar and can never resist a Greek word. He never quotes Greek in the House, but Horace is always upon his lips. Horace, as he rightly says, is so quotable.”
“Then he never writes now?” I asked.
“He occasionally writes to The Times newspaper,” said my guide. “You see,” he went on, “he is a very busy man, chairman of many committees, and one of the most prominent members of the Conservative Club, and on the boards of I don’t know how many hospitals and charitable institutions. He plays a fair hand at whist, and always rides to the meet of the foxhounds if it is not too far off, and he is a sound and earnest Churchman—”
“Not a ritualist, I suppose?”
“Oh, no, not a ritualist; far from it. A sound, broad Churchman; not too high and not too low. He reads the lessons on Sunday at Horsham, with much expression and fervour, although his voice is a little shrill.”
“Does he ever refer to his friendship with Lord Byron?” I asked.
“They meet sometimes on State occasions.”
“But isn’t Lord Byron dead?”
“Dead! Dear me, no, unless he died last night. I haven’t heard His Eminence was ill.”
“I thought he died at Missolonghi in 1824.”
“Oh, no; he returned from that Grecian expedition much shattered in health, and after a period of solitary reflection, which he spent in the Channel Islands, he joined the Church of Rome. He is now, of course, a Cardinal, and lives at Birmingham.”
“But his works?” I asked. “Did he suppress them?”
“Oh dear, no, sir. He wrote a great deal, and the last cantos of Don Juan, which tell of the Don’s conversion and bona mors, are reckoned to be among the most pious and edifying books of the century, by men of all religious denominations. He wrote, too, a fine sequel to Cain, called The Death of Cain, which is even more edifying, and even now he still writes hymns, some of which are popular both in the Roman, Anglican, and Evangelical Churches. Notably one which begins:
The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold.
“But Cardinal Byron is better known now for his sermons than for his lyrics. He preaches most eloquently, and it is worth a journey to Birmingham to hear him.”
“But who,” I asked, “are the greatest contemporary poets?”
“Well,” said my guide, “undoubtedly the greatest living poet is a woman, a portentous star of the first magnitude; I am talking of the fiery, volcanic, incandescent genius of Felicia Hemans, the author of that burning rhapsody Casa Bianca. She is undoubtedly the greatest woman poet since the days of Sappho, and perhaps even more passionate. We have just lost one great poet, James Montgomery. He was the greatest, in fact the only, epic poet since the days of Gray. Then there is Benjamin Disraeli, author of so many beautiful poetical dramas. Then you have the sombre and tortured broodings of Adelaide Proctor, and the fierce, bitter, biting etchings of Jean Ingel
ow; in fact, it is an age of poetesses more than of poets.”
“And what about Alfred Tennyson?” I asked.
“The brother of the poet, Frederick?” said my guide. “Poor fellow, he was killed in the war a few months ago at Balaclava; a very gallant soldier.”
“And the poet Keats,” I said. “Have you heard of him?”
“Of course,” was the answer. “Who has not heard of him? It is impossible to avoid. He publishes a fresh volume of verse every year; but ever since he has lived at Torquay, where he originally settled down some thirty years ago, he has written practically nothing except about agriculture and crops and livestock. The hero of his last verse-narrative was a Shorthorn. He writes too much. All very instructive, of course, and parts of it are descriptive, but he writes a great deal too much. That’s just what ruined Coleridge.”
“But Coleridge is surely not alive?” I said.
“He died,” I was informed, “two or three years ago. He was eighty years old. He died of overwork. He had just finished the last book of his epic, Kubla Khan. It has fifteen books, you will remember, and it is the longest epic in the English language. His one fear was that he should die before he should complete it. As it was, he finished it just six months before his death, and he had the joy of seeing the massive work in print. It is longer than the Iliad and the Odyssey put together, and the building of it occupied the whole of the poet’s life.”
“And did it meet with a satisfactory reception?” I asked.
“Most satisfactory. One critic in the Quarterly Review even went so far—it was perhaps a little extravagant on his part—as to put it in the same rank as Southey’s immortal epics.”
“Did Coleridge finish all his poems?” I asked.
My guide seemed quite offended by this question. Offended for Coleridge and shocked at my ignorance.
“Of course he did,” he said. “Coleridge was the most hard-working and conscientious of writers, and, as I have already told you, he died of overwork.”
“But,” I persisted, “did he ever finish Chiistabel?”
My guide smiled a superior, tolerant smile.
“Chiistabel,” he said, “is not by Coleridge at all. It is by De Quincey.”
I gasped with astonishment.
“De Quincey, the opium eater?”
“He wrote several things of the same kind. The Albatross and The Dark Lady, all most fantastic stuff. Poor man, he was lightheaded at the last. It came from taking drugs.”
This account of the world of poetry so bewildered me that I thought I should feel on firmer ground if we passed to the domain of prose, and I asked who were considered the best novelists of the day.
“Well,” said my guide, “there has been nothing very interesting in that way just lately. Mr. Thackeray has written a most insignificant story called Vanity Fair; all about those trumpery Jacobin Wars, which interest nobody now. Mr. Carlyle wrote a spirited romance some years ago which suffered from the same fault, namely, that of dealing with a hackneyed, commonplace and dreary epoch: the Jacobin revolt. Indeed, Mr. Carlyle’s work is the more tedious as it deals solely with France and with the French, and nobody now takes any interest in that country. There are, of course, a fine series of romances by Froude, and the powerful but rather morbid studies of real life by Miss Charlotte Yonge; the monumental history of Harrison Ainsworth; the fantastic short stories of Ruskin, and the almost too sprightly, too flippant satire and Puck-like wit of Herbert Spencer.”
I asked whether the influence of the French was felt in recent literature. My guide said that the influence of French literature had been negligible. Ever since the restoration of the French monarchy French literature had been pursuing an even but uninteresting course. During the prosperous and calm reign of Charles X, the most notable names in the literature of France were, as in England, nearly all those of women. There was Madame Desbordes Valmore, Madame Victor Hugo, Mademoiselle Lamartine, all of whom had written agreeable lyrics and some tuneful and melodious narrative poems. Among the male poets the most remarkable was Georges Sand. During the reign of Henry V the same pure and refined standards had been upheld, but it could not be denied that this literature, although admirable in tone, sane in its outlook, and exemplary in the lessons which it taught, did not go down across the Channel. The England of Miss Yonge and Mrs. Gaskell—those unflinching realists, those intrepid divers into the unplumbed depths and mysteries of the human soul, those undaunted and ruthless surgeons of all the secret sores of the spirit and of the flesh—was used to stronger meat, and insisted on getting it.
“But,” I said, “what about Musset and Baudelaire?”
My guide seemed astonished. “Musset?” he said. “I have never heard of a writer called Musset.”
“Alfred de Musset,” I suggested.
“There is a Secretary of the French Embassy here by that name, but as far as we know he has never written anything. As for Baudelaire, his hymns, psalms, and meditations are fervent and pious, and deserve respect, but they are so ultra-devotional and so full of technical theology and the jargon of the sacristy, that they would certainly find no public here. Cardinal Byron, it is true, admires them greatly, and has even published a translation of some of the hymns. No, we have little use for the goody-goody milk-and-water idealism here. All that would never go down in the country of Miss Austen.”
“But,” I objected, “surely Miss Austen was a great artist.”
“Certainly, certainly, as great as the Pyramids, but artist is hardly the word. It is true she created the whole world, but she looked at the universe through the distorted lens of her lurid and monstrous imagination. She dipped her pen into the waters of Tartarus, so that she invests a page boy with the personality of a Hannibal, and lends satanic proportions to the meanest of her rogues. Yet what she saw she described with such minute accuracy and with such wealth of detail, and abundance and even redundance of description, that the critics have almost universally acclaimed her as the founder of the great realistic-naturalistic English novel, whereas if they would only think more carefully they would see that Miss Austen is the last of the great romantic poets, the lineal descendant of Pope and Cowper, and the kindred spirit and rival of that most flamboyant of all the romantics, Crabbe.”
“And Russian literature?” I asked. “Has that had any influence here?”
“Ever since the Russian Republic and the United States of Russia were called into being by the Emperor Alexander I in 1819, Russian art and literature practically came to an end. Politics and business engrossed the minds of the rising generation there, and, as General John Bright, that dashing cavalry soldier, so well put it: ‘The Russians are completely inartistic. They are a nation of shopkeepers.’ ”
“But are not we fighting the Russians in the Crimea now?” I asked.
“We are fighting in the Crimea, but not against the Russians. They are our Allies and we are fighting the Turks. The Emperor Constantine has arranged with our Foreign Secretary, Feargus O’Connor, that Russia is to have Constantinople, we are to take Egypt, and the French are to have Syria. As for Palestine, it is possible that the Jews may be allowed to go there. Ever since their expulsion from England, twenty years ago, they have greatly complained of having nowhere to live.”
Just at that moment an open carriage drove by drawn by four white horses with postilions and outriders. Inside the carriage a magnificent Englishman with a long black beard bowed to the populace, who cheered. I asked who it was.