The Newcomes

by William Makepeace Thackeray

key of it. I think of some honest Othello pausing over this very sentence

  in a railroad carriage, and stealthily gazing at Desdemona opposite to

  him, innocently administering sandwiches to their little boy--I am trying

  to turn off the sentence with a joke, you see--I feel it is growing too

  dreadful, too serious.

  And to what, pray, do these serious, these disagreeable, these almost

  personal observations tend? To this simply, that Charles Honeyman, the

  beloved and popular preacher, the elegant divine to whom Miss Blanche

  writes sonnets, and whom Miss Beatrice invites to tea; who comes with

  smiles on his lip, gentle sympathy in his tones, innocent gaiety in his

  accent; who melts, rouses, terrifies in the pulpit; who charms over the

  tea-urn and the bland bread-and-butter: Charles Honeyman has one or two

  skeleton closets in his lodgings, Walpole Street, Mayfair; and many a

  wakeful night, whilst Mrs. Ridley, his landlady, and her tired husband,

  the nobleman's major-domo, whilst the lodger on the first floor, whilst

  the cook and housemaid and weary little bootboy are at rest (mind you,

  they have all got their closets, which they open with their

  skeleton-keys); he wakes up, and looks at the ghastly occupant of that

  receptacle. One of the Reverend Charles Honeyman's grisly night-haunters

  is--but stop; let us give a little account of the lodgings, and of some

  of the people frequenting the same.

  First floor, Mr. Bagshot, Member for a Norfolk borough. Stout jolly

  gentleman;--dines at the Carlton Club; greatly addicted to Greenwich and

  Richmond, in the season: bets in a moderate way: does not go into

  society, except now and again to the chiefs of his party, when they give

  great entertainments; and once or twice to the houses of great country

  dons who dwell near him in the country. Is not of very good family; was,

  in fact, an apothecary: married a woman with money, much older than

  himself, who does not like London, and stops at home at Hummingham, not

  much to the displeasure of Bagshot; gives every now and then nice little

  quiet dinners, which Mrs. Ridley cooks admirably, to exceedingly stupid

  jolly old Parliamentary fogies, who absorb, with much silence and

  cheerfulness, a vast quantity of wine. They have just begun to drink '24

  claret now, that of '15 being scarce, and almost drunk up. Writes daily,

  and hears every morning from Mrs. Bagshot; does not read her letters

  always: does not rise till long past eleven o'clock of a Sunday, and has

  John Bull and Bell's Life, in bed: frequents the Blue Posts sometimes;

  rides a stout cob out of his county, and pays like the Bank of England.

  The house is a Norfolk house. Mrs. Ridley was housekeeper to the great

  Squire Bayham, who had the estate before the Conqueror, and who came to

  such a dreadful crash in the year 1825, the year of the panic. Bayhams

  still belongs to the family, but in what a state, as those can say who

  recollect it in its palmy days! Fifteen hundred acres of the best

  land in England were sold off: all the timber cut down as level as a

  billiard-board. Mr. Bayham now lives up in one corner of the house, which

  used to be filled with the finest company in Europe. Law bless you! the

  Bayhams have seen almost all the nobility of England come in and go out,

  and were gentlefolks when many a fine lord's father of the present day

  was sweeping a counting-house.

  The house will hold genteelly no more than these two inmates; but in the

  season it manages to accommodate Miss Cann, who too was from Bayhams,

  having been a governess there to the young lady who is dead, and who now

  makes such a livelihood as she can best raise, by going out as a daily

  teacher. Miss Cann dines with Mrs. Ridley in the adjoining little

  back-parlour. Ridley but seldom can be spared to partake of the family

  dinner, his duties in the house and about the person of my Lord Todmorden

  keeping him constantly near that nobleman. How little Miss Cann can go on

  and keep alive on the crumb she eats for breakfast, and the scrap she

  picks at dinner, du astonish Mrs. Ridley, that it du! She declares that

  the two canary-birds encaged in her window (whence is a cheerful prospect

  of the back of Lady Whittlesea's Chapel) eat more than Miss Cann. The two

  birds set up a tremendous singing and chorussing when Miss Cann, spying

  the occasion of the first-floor lodger's absence, begins practising her

  music-pieces. Such trills, roulades, and flourishes go on from the birds

  and the lodger! it is a wonder how any fingers can move over the jingling

  ivory so quickly as Miss Cann's. Excellent a woman as she is, admirably

  virtuous, frugal, brisk, honest, and cheerful, I would not like to live

  in lodgings where there was a lady so addicted to playing variations. No

  more does Honeyman. On a Saturday, when he is composing his valuable

  sermons (the rogue, you may be sure, leaves his work to the last day, and

  there are, I am given to understand, among the clergy many better men

  than Honeyman, who are as dilatory as he), he begs, he entreats with

  tears in his eyes, that Miss Cann's music may cease. I would back little

  Cann to write a sermon against him, for all his reputation as a popular

  preacher.

  Old and weazened as that piano is, feeble and cracked her voice, it is

  wonderful what a pleasant concert she can give in that parlour of a

  Saturday evening, to Mrs. Ridley, who generally dozes a good deal, and to

  a lad, who listens with all his soul, with tears sometimes in his great

  eyes, with crowding fancies filling his brain and throbbing at his heart,

  as the artist plies her humble instrument. She plays old music of Handel

  and Haydn, and the little chamber anon swells into a cathedral, and he

  who listens beholds altars lighted, priests ministering, fair children

  swinging censers, great oriel windows gleaming in sunset, and seen

  through arched columns and avenues of twilight marble. The young fellow

  who hears her has been often and often to the opera and the theatres. As

  she plays Don Juan, Zerlina comes tripping over the meadows, and Masetto

  after her, with a crowd of peasants and maidens: and they sing the

  sweetest of all music, and the heart beats with happiness, and kindness,

  and pleasure. Piano, pianissimo! the city is hushed. The towers of the

  great cathedral rise in the distance, its spires lighted by the broad

  moon. The statues in the moonlit place cast long shadows athwart the

  pavement: but the fountain in the midst is dressed out like Cinderella

  for the night, and sings and wears a crest of diamonds. That great sombre

  street all in shade, can it be the famous Toledo?--or is it the Corso?--

  or is it the great street in Madrid, the one which leads to the Escurial

  where the Rubens and Velasquez are? It is Fancy Street--Poetry Street--

  Imagination Street--the street where lovely ladies look from balconies,

  where cavaliers strike mandolins and draw swords and engage, where long

  processions pass, and venerable hermits, with long beards, bless the

  kneeling people: where the rude soldiery, swaggering through the place

  with flags and halberts, and fife and dance, seize the slim wai
sts of the

  daughters of the people, and bid the pifferari play to their dancing.

  Blow, bagpipes, a storm of harmony! become trumpets, trombones,

  ophicleides, fiddles, and bassoons! Fire, guns sound, tocsins! Shout,

  people! Louder, shriller and sweeter than all, sing thou, ravishing

  heroine! And see, on his cream-coloured charger Massaniello prances in,

  and Fra Diavolo leaps down the balcony, carabine in hand; and Sir Huon of

  Bordeaux sails up to the quay with the Sultan's daughter of Babylon. All

  these delights and sights, and joys and glories, these thrills of

  sympathy, movements of unknown longing, and visions of beauty, a young

  sickly lad of eighteen enjoys in a little dark room where there is a bed

  disguised in the shape of a wardrobe, and a little old woman is playing

  under a gas-lamp on the jingling keys of an old piano.

  For a long time Mr. Samuel Ridley, butler and confidential valet to the

  Right Honourable John James Baron Todmorden, was in a state of the

  greatest despair and gloom about his only son, the little John James,--a

  sickly and almost deformed child "of whom there was no making nothink,"

  as Mr. Ridley said. His figure precluded him from following his father's

  profession, and waiting upon the British nobility, who naturally require

  large and handsome men to skip up behind their rolling carriages, and

  hand their plates at dinner. When John James was six years old his father

  remarked, with tears in his eyes, he wasn't higher than a plate-basket.

  The boys jeered at him in the streets--some whopped him, spite of his

  diminutive size. At school he made but little progress. He was always

  sickly and dirty, and timid and crying, whimpering in the kitchen away

  from his mother; who, though she loved him, took Mr. Ridley's view of his

  character, and thought him little better than an idiot until such time as

  little Miss Cann took him in hand, when at length there was some hope of

  him.

  "Half-witted, you great stupid big man," says Miss Cann, who had a fine

  spirit of her own. "That boy half-witted! He has got more wit in his

  little finger than you have in all your great person! You are a very good

  man, Ridley, very good-natured I'm sure, and bear with the teasing of a

  waspish old woman: but you are not the wisest of mankind. Tut, tut, don't

  tell me. You know you spell out the words when you read the newspaper

  still, and what would your bills look like if I did not write them in my

  nice little hand? I tell you that boy is a genius. I tell you that one

  day the world will hear of him. His heart is made of pure gold. You think

  that all the wit belongs to the big people. Look at me, you great tall

  man! Am I not a hundred times cleverer than you are? Yes, and John James

  is worth a thousand such insignificant little chits as I am; and he is as

  tall as me too, sir. Do you hear that! One day I am determined he shall

  dine at Lord Todmorden's table, and he shall get the prize at the Royal

  Academy, and be famous, sir--famous!"

  "Well, Miss C., I wish he may get it; that's all I say," answers Mr.

  Ridley. "The poor fellow does no harm, that I acknowledge; but I never

  see the good he was up to yet. I wish he'd begin it; I du wish he would

  now." And the honest gentleman relapses into the study of his paper.

  All those beautiful sounds and thoughts which Miss Cann conveys to him

  out of her charmed piano, the young artist straightway translates into

  forms; and knights in armour, with plume, and shield, and battle-axe; and

  splendid young noblemen with flowing ringlets, and bounteous plumes of

  feathers, and rapiers, and russet boots; and fierce banditti with crimson

  tights, doublets profusely illustrated with large brass buttons, and the

  dumpy basket-hilted claymores known to be the favourite weapon with which

  these whiskered ruffians do battle; wasp-waisted peasant girls, and young

  countesses with oh, such large eyes and the lips!--all these splendid

  forms of war and beauty crowd to the young draughtsman's pencil, and

  cover letter-backs, copybooks, without end. If his hand strikes off some

  face peculiarly lovely, and to his taste, some fair vision that has shone

  on his imagination, some houri of a dancer, some bright young lady of

  fashion in an opera-box, whom he has seen, or fancied he has seen (for

  the youth is short-sighted, though he hardly as yet knows his

  misfortune)--if he has made some effort extraordinarily successful, our

  young Pygmalion hides away the masterpiece, and he paints the beauty with

  all his skill; the lips a bright carmine, the eyes a deep, deep cobalt,

  the cheeks a dazzling vermilion, the ringlets of a golden hue; and he

  worships this sweet creature of his in secret, fancies a history for her;

  a castle to storm, a tyrant usurper who keeps her imprisoned, and a

  prince in black ringlets and a spangled cloak, who scales the tower, who

  slays the tyrant, and then kneels gracefully at the princess's feet, and

  says, "Lady, wilt thou be mine?"

  There is a kind lady in the neighbourhood, who takes in dressmaking for

  the neighbouring maid-servants, and has a small establishment of

  lollipops, theatrical characters, and ginger-beer for the boys in Little

  Craggs Buildings, hard by the Running Footman public-house, where father

  and other gentlemen's gentlemen have their club: this good soul also

  sells Sunday newspapers to the footmen of the neighbouring gentry; and

  besides, has a stock of novels for the ladies of the upper servants'

  table. Next to Miss Cann, Miss Flinders is John James's greatest friend

  and benefactor. She has remarked him when he was quite a little man, and

  used to bring his father's beer of a Sunday. Out of her novels he has

  taught himself to read, dull boy at the day-school though he was, and

  always the last in his class, there. Hours, happy hours, has he spent

  cowering behind her counter, or hugging her books under his pinafore when

  he had leave to carry them home. The whole library has passed through his

  hands, his long, lean, tremulous hands, and under his eager eyes. He has

  made illustrations to every one of those books, and been frightened at

  his own pictures of Manfroni or the One-handed Monk, Abellino the

  Terrific Bravo of Venice, and Rinaldo Rinaldini Captain of Robbers. How

  he has blistered Thaddeus of Warsaw with his tears, and drawn him in his

  Polish cap, and tights, and Hessians! William Wallace, the Hero of

  Scotland, how nobly he has depicted him! With what whiskers and bushy

  ostrich plumes!--in a tight kilt, and with what magnificent calves to his

  legs, laying about him with his battle-axe, and bestriding the bodies of

  King Edward's prostrate cavaliers! At this time Mr. Honeyman comes to

  lodge in Walpole Street, and brings a set of Scott's novels, for which he

  subscribed when at Oxford; and young John James, who at first waits upon

  him and does little odd jobs for the reverend gentleman, lights upon the

  volumes, and reads them with such a delight and passion of pleasure as

  all the delights of future days will scarce equal. A fool, is he?--an

  idle feller, out of whom no good will ever come, as his father says.

&nb
sp; There was a time when, in despair of any better chance for him, his

  parents thought of apprenticing him to a tailor, and John James was waked

  up from a dream of Rebecca and informed of the cruelty meditated against

  him. I forbear to describe the tears and terror, and frantic desperation

  in which the poor boy was plunged. Little Miss Cann rescued him from that

  awful board, and Honeyman likewise interceded for him, and Mr. Bagshot

  promised that, as soon as his party came in, he would ask the Minister

  for a tide-waitership for him; for everybody liked the solemn,

  soft-hearted, willing little lad, and no one knew him less than his

  pompous and stupid and respectable father.

  Miss Cann painted flowers and card-screens elegantly, and "finished"

  pencil-drawings most elaborately for her pupils. She could copy prints,

  so that at a little distance you would scarcely know that the copy in

  stumped chalk was not a bad mezzotinto engraving. She even had a little

  old paint-box, and showed you one or two ivory miniatures out of the

  drawer. She gave John James what little knowledge of drawing she had, and

  handed him over her invaluable recipes for mixing water-colours--"for

  trees in foregrounds, burnt sienna and indigo"--"for very dark foliage,

  ivory black and gamboge"--"for flesh-colour," etc. etc. John James went

  through her poor little course, but not so brilliantly as she expected.

  She was forced to own that several of her pupils' "pieces" were executed

  much more dexterously than Johnny Ridley's. Honeyman looked at the boy's

  drawings from time to time, and said, "Hm, ha!--very clever--a great deal

  of fancy, really." But Honeyman knew no more of the subject than a deaf

  and dumb man knows of music. He could talk the art cant very glibly, and

  had a set of Morghens and Madonnas as became a clergyman and a man of

  taste; but he saw not with eyes such as those wherewith Heaven had

  endowed the humble little butler's boy, to whom splendours of Nature were

  revealed to vulgar sights invisible, and beauties manifest in forms,

  colours, shadows of common objects, where most of the world saw only what

  was dull, and gross, and familiar. One reads in the magic story-books of

  a charm or a flower which the wizard gives, and which enables the bearer

  to see the fairies. O enchanting boon of Nature, which reveals to the

  possessor the hidden spirits of beauty round about him! spirits which the

  strongest and most gifted masters compel into painting or song. To others

  it is granted but to have fleeting glimpses of that fair Art-world; and

  tempted by ambition, or barred by faint-heartedness, or driven by

  necessity, to turn away thence to the vulgar life-track, and the light of

  common day.

  The reader who has passed through Walpole Street scores of times, knows

  the discomfortable architecture of all, save the great houses built in

  Queen Anne's and George the First's time; and while some of the

  neighbouring streets, to wit, Great Craggs Street, Bolingbroke Street,

  and others, contain mansions fairly coped with stone, with little

  obelisks before the doors, and great extinguishers wherein the torches of

  the nobility's running footmen were put out a hundred and thirty or forty

  years ago:--houses which still remain abodes of the quality, and where

  you shall see a hundred carriages gather of a public night; Walpole

  Street has quite faded away into lodgings, private hotels, doctors'

  houses, and the like; nor is No. 23 (Ridley's) by any means the best

  house in the street. The parlour, furnished and tenanted by Miss Cann as

  has been described; the first floor, Bagshot, Esq., M.P.; the second

  floor, Honeyman; what remains but the garrets, and the ample staircase

  and the kitchens? and the family being all put to bed, how can you

  imagine there is room for any more inhabitants?

  And yet there is one lodger more, and one who, like almost all the other

  personages mentioned up to the present time (and some of whom you have no