Kitabı oku: «Nuts and Nutcrackers», sayfa 6
A NUT FOR DOMESTIC HAPPINESS
Our law code would, were its injunctions only carried out in private life, effect most extraordinary reformations in our customs and habits. The most singular innovations in our tastes and opinions would spring out of the statutes. It was only a few days ago where a man sought reparation for the greatest injury one could inflict on another, the great argument of the defendant’s counsel was based on the circumstance that the plaintiff and his wife had not been proved to have lived happily together, except on the testimony of their servants. Great stress was laid upon this fact by the advocate; and such an impression did it make on the minds of the jury, that the damages awarded were a mere trifle. Now, only reflect for a moment on the absurdity of such a plea, and think how many persons there are whose quiet and unobtrusive lives are unnoticed beyond the precincts of their own door – nay, how many estimable and excellent people who live less for the world than for themselves, and although, probably for this very reason, but little exposed to the casualty in question, would yet deem the injustice great that placed them beyond the pale of reparation because they had been homely and domestic.
Civilisation and the march of mind are fine things, and doubtless it is a great improvement that the criminal is better lodged, and fed, in the prison, than the hungry labourer in the workhouse. It is an admirable code that makes the debt of honour, the perhaps swindled losses of the card-table, an imperative obligation, while the money due to toiling, working industry, may be evaded or escaped from. Still, it is a bold step to invade the privacy of domestic life, to subvert the happiness we deem most national, and to suggest that the world has no respect for, nor the law no belief in, that peaceful course in life, which, content with its own blessings, seeks neither the gaze of the crowd, nor the stare of fashion. Under the present system, a man must appear in society like a candidate on the hustings – profuse in protestations of his happiness and redolent of smiles; he must lead forth his wife like a blooming débutante, and, while he presents her to his friends, must display, by every endeavour in his power, the angelic happiness of their state. The coram publico endearments, so much sneered at by certain fastidious people, are now imperative; and, however secluded your habits, however retiring your tastes, it is absolutely necessary you should appear a certain number of times every year before the world, to assure that kind-hearted and considerate thing, how much conjugal felicity you are possessed of.
It is to no purpose that your man-servant and your maid-servant, and even the stranger within your gates, have seen you in the apparent enjoyment of domestic happiness: it is the crowd of a ball-room must testify in your favour – it is the pit of a theatre – it is the company of a steam-boat, or the party on a rail-road, you must adduce in evidence. They are the best – they are the only judges of what you, in the ignorance of your heart, have believed a secret for your own bosom.
Your conduct within-doors is of little moment, so that your bearing without satisfy the world. What a delightful picture of universal happiness will England then present to the foreigner who visits our salons! With what ecstasy will he contemplate the angelic felicity of conjugal life! Instead of the indignant coldness of a husband, offended by some casual levity of his wife, he will now redouble his attentions, and take an opportunity of calling the company to witness that they live together like turtle-doves. He knows not how soon, if he mix much in fashionable life, their testimony may avail him; and the loving smile he throws his spouse across the supper-table is worth three thousand pounds before any jury in Middlesex.
Romance writers will now lose one stronghold of sentiment. Love in a cottage will possess as little respect as it ever did attraction for the world. The pier at Brighton, a Gravesend steamer, Hyde Park on a Sunday, will be the appropriate spheres for the interchange of conjugal vows. No absurd notions of solitude will then hold sway. Alas! how little prophetic spirit is there in poetry! But a few years ago, and one of our sirens of song said,
“When should lovers breathe their vows?
When should ladies hear them?
When the dew is on the boughs —
When none else is near them.”
Not a word of it! The appropriate place is amid the glitter of jewels, the glare of lamps, the crush of fashion, and the din of conversation. The private boxes of the opera are even, too secluded, and your happiness is no more genuine, until recognised by society, than is an exchequer bill with the mere signature of Lord Monteagle.
The benefits of this system will be great. No longer will men be reduced to the cultivation of those meeker virtues that grace and adorn life; no more will they study those accomplishments that make home happy and their hearth cheerful. A winter at Paris and a box at the Variétés will be more to the purpose. Scribe’s farces will teach them more important lessons, and they will obtain an instructive example in the last line of a vaudeville, where an injured husband presents himself at the fall of the curtain, and, as he bows to the audience, embraces both his wife and her lover, exclaiming, “Maintenant je suis heureux – ma femme – mon meilleur ami!” He then may snap his fingers at Charles Phillips and Adolphus: he has not only proved his affection to his wife, but his confidence in his friend. Let him lay the damages at ten thousand, and, with a counsel that can cry, he’ll get every shilling of the money.
A NUT FOR LADIES BOUNTIFUL
Jean Jacques tells us, that when his wife died every farmer in the neighbourhood offered to console him by one of their daughters; but that a few weeks afterwards his cow having shared the same fate, no one ever thought of replacing his loss by the offer of another; thereby proving the different value people set upon their cows and children – this seems absurd enough, but is it a bit more so, than what is every day taking place in professional life? How many parsons are there who would not lend you five pounds, would willingly lend you their pulpit, and the commonest courtesy from a hospital surgeon is, to present his visitor with a knife and entreat him to carve a patient. He has never seen the individual before, he doesn’t know whether he be short-sighted, or nervous, or ignorant, or rash, all he thinks of, is doing the honours of the institution; and although like a hostess, who sees the best dish at her table mangled by an unskilful carver, he suffers in secret, yet is she far too well-bred to evince her displeasure, but blandly smiles at her friend, and says “No matter, pray go on.” This, doubtless, is highly conducive to science; and as medicine is declared to be a science of experiment, great results occasionally arise from the practice. Now that I am talking of doctors – what a strange set they are, and what a singular position do they hold in society; admitted to the fullest confidence of the world, yet by a strange perversion, while they are the depositaries of secrets that hold together the whole fabric of society, their influence is neither fully recognised, nor their power acknowledged. The doctor is now what the monk once was, with this additional advantage, that from the nature of his studies and the research of his art, he reads more deeply in the human heart, and penetrates into its most inmost recesses. For him, life has little romance; the grosser agency of the body re-acting ever on the operations of the mind, destroy many a poetic daydream and many a high-wrought illusion. To him alone does a man speak “son dernier mot:” while to the lawyer the leanings of self-respect will make him always impart a favourable view of his case. To the physician he will be candid, and even more than candid – yes, these are the men who, watching the secret workings of human passion, can trace the progress of mankind in virtue, and in vice; while ministering to the body they are exploring the mind, and yet, scarcely is the hour of danger passed, scarcely the shadow of fear dissipated, when they fall back to their humble position in life, bearing with them but little gratitude, and, strange to say, no fear!
The world expects them to be learned, well-bred, kind, considerate, and attentive, patient to their querulousness, and enduring under their caprice; and, after all this, the humbug of homoeopathy, the preposterous absurdity of the water cure, or the more reprehensible mischief of Mesmerism, will find more favour in their sight than the highest order of ability accompanied by, great natural advantages.
Every man – and still more, every woman – imagine themselves to be doctors. The taste for physic, like that for politics, is born with us, and nothing seems easier than to repair the injuries of the constitution, whether of the state or the individual. Who has not seen, over and over again, physicians of the first eminence put aside, that the nostrum of some ignorant pretender, or the suggestion of some twaddling old woman, should be, as it is termed, tried? No one is too stupid, no one too old, no one too ignorant, too obstinate, or too silly, not to be superior to Brodie and Chambers, Crampton and Marsh; and where science, with anxious eye and cautious hand, would scarcely venture to interfere, heroic ignorance would dash boldly forward and cut the Gordian difficulty by snapping the thread of life. How comes it that these old ladies, ol either sex, never meddle with the law? Is the game beneath them, where the stake is only property, and not life? or is there less difficulty in the knowledge of an art whose principles rest on so many branches of science, than in a study founded on the basis of precedent? Would to heaven the “Ladies Bountiful” would take to the quarter-sessions and the assizes, in lieu of the infirmaries and dispensaries, and make Blackstone their aid-de-camp —vice Buchan retired.
A NUT FOR THE PRIESTS
There would be no going through this world if one had not an India-rubber conscience, and one could no more exist in life without what watch-makers call accommodation, in the machinery of one’s heart, than a blue-bottle fly could grow fat in the shop of an apothecary. Every man’s conscience has, like Janus, two faces – one looks most plausibly to the world, with a smile of courteous benevolence, the other with a droll leer seems to say, I think we are doing them. In fact, not only would the world be impossible, and its business impracticable, but society itself would be a bear-garden without hypocrisy.
Now, the professional classes have a kind of licence on this subject; just as a poet is permitted to invent sunsets, and a painter to improvise clouds and cataracts, so a lawyer dilates upon the virtues or attractions of his client, and a physician will weep you good round substantial tears, at a guinea a drop, for the woes of his patient; but the church, I certainly thought, was exempt from this practice. A paragraph in a morning paper, however, disabused my ignorance in the most remarkable manner. The Roman Catholic hierarchy have unanimously decided that all persons following the profession of the stage, are to be considered without the pale of the church, they are neither to he baptized nor confirmed, married nor buried; they may get a name in the streets, and a wite there also, but the church will neither bless the one, nor confirm the other; in fact, the sock and the buskin are proclaimed in opposition to Christianity, and Madame Lafarge is not a bit more culpable than Robert Macaire. A few days since, one of the most fashionable churches in Paris was crowded to suffocation by the attraction of high mass, celebrated with the assistance of the whole opera choir, with Duprez at their head. The sum contributed by the faithful was enormous, and the music of Mozart was heard to great effect through the vaulted aisles of Notre Dame, yet the very morning after, not an individual of the choir could receive the benediction of the church – the rationale of all which is, that the Dean of Notre Dame, like the Director of the Odeon, likes a good house and a heavy benefit. He gets the most attractive company he can secure, and although he makes no scruple to say they are the most disreputable acquaintances, still they fill the benches, and it will be time enough to damn them when the performance is over!
Whenever the respectable Whigs are attacked for their alliance with O’Connell, they make the same reply the priest would probably do in this circumstance – How can we help it? We want a mob; if he sings, we have it – we know his character as well as you; so only let us fill our pockets, and then – I do not blame them in the least, if the popery of their politics has palled upon the appetite; if they can work no more miracles of reform and revolution, I do not see how they can help calling in aid from without.
A NUT FOR LEARNED SOCIETIES
We laugh at the middle ages for their trials by ordeal, their jousts, their tournaments, their fat monasteries, and their meagre people; but I am strongly disposed to think, that before a century pass over, posterity will give us as broad a grin for our learned societies. Of all the features that characterise the age, I know of none so pre-eminently ridiculous, as nine-tenths of these associations would prove; supported by great names, aided by large title, with a fine house, a library and a librarian, they do the honours of science pretty much as the yeomen of the guard do those of a court on a levee day, and they bear about the same relation to literature and art, that do the excellent functionaries I have mentioned, to the proceedings around the throne.
An old gentleman, hipped by celibacy, and too sour for society, has contracted a habit of looking out of his window every morning, to observe the weather: he sees a cloud very like a whale, or he fancies that when the wind blows in a particular direction, and it happens to rain at the same time, that the drops fall in a peculiarly slanting manner. He notes down the facts for a month or two, and then establishes a meteorological society, of which he is the perpetual president, with a grant from Parliament to extend its utility. Another takes to old volumes on a book-stall; and becoming, as most men are who have little knowledge of life, fascinated with his own discoveries, thinks he has ascertained some curious details of ancient history, and communicating his results to others as stupid and old as himself, they dub themselves antiquarians, or archaeologists, and obtain a grant also.
Now, one half of these societies are neither more nor less than most impertinent sarcasms on the land we live id. The man who sets himself down deliberately to chronicle the clouds in our atmosphere, and jot down the rainy days in our calendar, is, to my thinking, performing about as grateful a task, as though he were to count the carbuncles on his friend’s nose. We have, it is true, a most abominable climate: the sun rarely shows himself, and, when he does, it is through a tattered garment of clouds, dim and disagreeable; but why throw it in our teeth? and, still more, why pay a body of men to publish the slander? Then again, as to history, all the world knows that since the Flood the Irish have never done any thing else than make love, illicit whiskey, and beat each other. What nonsense, then, to talk about the ancient cultivation of the land, of its high rank in literature, and its excellence in art. A stone bishop, with a nose like a negro, and a crosier like a garden-rake, are the only evidences of our ancestors’ taste in sculpture; and some doggrel verses in Irish, explaining how King Phelim O’Toole cheated a brother monarch out of his smallclothes, are about the extent of our historic treasures. But, for argument’s sake, suppose it otherwise; imagine for a moment that our ancestors were all that Sir William Betham and Mr. Petrie would make them – I do not know how other people may feel, but I myself deem it no pleasant reflection to think of their times and look at our own. What if we were poets and painters, architects, historians, and musicians! What have we now among us to represent these great and mighty gifts? I am afraid, except our Big Beggarman, we have not a single living celebrity; and is this a comfortable reflection, is this a pleasing thought, that while, fourteen hundred years ago, some Irish Raphael and some Galway Grisi were the delight of our illustrious ancestors – that while the splendour of King Malachi, with his collar of gold, astonished the ladies in the neighbourhood of Trim – we have nothing to boast of, save Dan for Lord Mayor, and Burton Bindon’s oysters? Once more, I say, if what these people tell us be facts, they are the most unpalatable facts could be told to a nation; and I see no manner of propriety or good-breeding in replying to a gipsy who begs for a penny, by the information, that “his ancestors built the Pyramids.”
Again, if our days are dark, our nights are worse; and what, in Heaven’s name, have we to do with an observatory and a telescope as long as the Great Western? The planets are the most expensive vagabonds to the Budget, and the fixed stars are a fixed imposition. Were I Chancellor of the Exchequer, I’d pension the Moon, and give the Great Bear a sum of money as compensation. Do not tell me of the distresses of the people, arising from cotton, or corn, China, or Chartists – it is our scientific institutions are eating into the national resources. There is not an egg-saucepan of antiquity that does not cost the country a plum, and every wag of a comet’s tail may be set down at half-a-million. I warrant me the people in the Moon take us a deuced deal more easily, and give themselves very little trouble to make out the size of Ireland’s eye or the height of Croaghpatrick. No, no; let the Chancellor of the Exchequer come down with a slapping measure of retrenchment, and make a clear stage of all of them. Every man with money to buy a cotton umbrella is his own meteorologist; and a pocket telescope, price eight-and-fourpence, is long enough, in all conscience, for any man in a climate like ours; or, if such a course seem too peremptory, call on these people for their bill, and let there be a stated sum for each item. At Dolly’s chop-house, you know to the exact farthing how much your beefsteak and glass of ale will cost you; and if you wish, in addition, a slice of Stilton with your XX, you consult your pocket before you speak. Let not the nation be treated worse than the individual: let as first look about us, and see if a year of prosperity and cheap potatoes will permit us the indulgence of obtaining a new luminary or an old chronicle; then, when we know the cost, we may calculate with safety. Suppose a fixed star, for instance, be set down at ten pounds; a planet at five; Saturn has so many belts, I would not give more than half-a-crown for a new one; and, as for an eclipse of the sun, I had rather propose a reward for the man who could tell us when we could see him palpably.
For the present I merely throw out these suggestions in a brief, incomplete manner, intending, however, to return to the subject on another occasion.
A NUT FOR THE LAWYERS
Authors have long got the credit of being the most accomplished persons going – thoroughly conversant not only with the features of every walk and class in life, but also with their intimate sentiments, habits of thought, and modes of expression. Now, I have long been of opinion, that in all these respects, lawyers are infinitely their superiors. The author chooses his characters as you choose your dish, or your wine at dinner – he takes what suits, and leaves what is not available to his purpose. He then fashions them to his hand – finishing off this portrait, sketching that one – now bringing certain figures into strong light, anon throwing them into shadow: they are his creatures, who must obey him while living, and even die at his command. Now, the lawyer is called on for all the narrative and descriptive powers of his art, at a moment’s notice, without time for reading or preparation; and worse than all, his business frequently lies among the very arts and callings his taste is most repugnant to. One day he is to be found creeping, with a tortoise slowness through all the wearisome intricacy of an equity case – the next he is borne along in a torrent of indignant eloquence, in defence of some Orange processionist or some Ribbon associate: now he describes, with the gravity of a landscape gardener, the tortuous windings of a mill-stream; now expatiating in Lytton Bulwerisms over the desolate hearth and broken fortunes of some deserted husband. In one court he attempts to prove that the elderly gentleman whose life was insured for a thousand at the Phoenix, was instrumental to his own decease, for not eating Cayenne with his oysters; in another, he shows, with palpable clearness, that being stabbed in the body, and having the head fractured, is a venial offence, and merely the result of “political excitement” in a high-spirited and warm-hearted people.
These are all clever efforts, and demand consummate powers, at the hand of him who makes them; but what are they to that deep and critical research with which he seems, instinctively, to sound the depths of every scientific walk in life, and every learned profession. Hear him in a lunacy case – listen to the deep and subtle distinctions he draws between the symptoms of mere eccentricity and erring intellect – remark how insignificant the physician appears in the case, who has made these things the study of a life long – hear how the barrister confounds him with a hail-storm of technicals – talking of the pineal gland as if it was an officer of the court, and of atrophy of the cerebral lobes, as if he was speaking of an attorney’s clerk. Listen to him in a trial of supposed death by poison; what a triumph he has there, particularly if he be a junior barrister – how he walks undismayed among all the tests for arsenic – how little he cares for Marsh’s apparatus and Scheele’s discoveries – hydro-sulphates, peroxydes, iodurates, and proto-chlorides are familiar to him as household words. You would swear that he was nursed at a glass retort, and sipped his first milk through a blow-pipe. Like a child who thumps the keys of a pianoforte, and imagines himself a Liszt or Moschelles, so does your barrister revel amid the phraseology of a difficult science – pelting the witnesses with his insane blunders, and assuring the jury that their astonishment means ignorance.
Nothing in anatomy is too deep – nothing in chemistry too subtle – no fact in botany too obscure – no point in metaphysics too difficult. Like Dogberry, these things are to him but the gift of God; and he knows them at his birth. Truly, the chancellor is a powerful magician; and the mystic words by which he calls a gentleman to the bar, must have some potent spell within them.
The youth you remember as if it were yesterday, the lounger at evening parties, or the chaperon of tiding damsels to the Phoenix, comes forth now a man of deep and consummate acquirement – he whose chemistry went no further than the composition of a “tumbler of punch,” can now perform the most difficult experiments of Orfila or Davy, or explain the causes of failure in a test that has puzzled the scientific world for half a century. He knows the precise monetary value of a deserted maiden’s affections – he can tell you the exact sum, in bank notes, that a widow will be knocked down for, when her heart has been subject to but a feint attack of Cupid.
With what consummate skill, too, he can show that an indictment is invalid, when stabbing is inserted for cutting; and when the crown prosecutor has been deficient in his descriptive anatomy, what a glorious field for display is opened to him. Then, to be sure, what droll fellows they are! – how they do quiz the witness as he sits trembling on the table – what funny allusions to his habits of life – his age – his station – turning the whole battery of their powers of ridicule against him – ready, if he venture to retort, to throw themselves on the protection of the court. And truly, if a little Latin suffice for a priest, a little wit goes very far in a law court. A joke is a universal blessing: the judge, who, after all, is only “an old lawyer,” loves it from habit: the jury, generally speaking, are seldom in such good company, and they laugh from complaisance; and the bar joins in the mirth, on that great reciprocity principle, which enables them to bear each other’s dulness, and dine together afterwards. People are insane enough to talk of absenteeism as one of the evils of Ireland, and regret that we have no resident aristocracy among us – rather let us rejoice that we have them not, so long as the lawyers prove their legitimate successors.
How delightful in a land where civilization has still some little progress before it, and where the state of crime is not quite satisfactory – to know that we have those amongst us who know all things, feel all things, explain all things, and reconcile all things – who can throw such a Claude Lorraine light over right and wrong, that they are both mellowed into a sweet and hallowed softness, delightful to gaze on. How the secret of this universal acquirement is accomplished I know not – perhaps it is the wig.
What set me first on this train of thought, was a trial I lately read, where a cross action was sustained for damage at sea – the owners of the brig Durham against the Aurora, a foreign vessel, and vice versa, for the result of a collision at noon, on the 14th of October. It appeared that both vessels had taken shelter in the Humber from stress of weather, nearly at the same time – that the Durham, which preceded the Prussian vessel, “clewed up her top-sails, and dropped her anchor rather suddenly; and the Aurora being in the rear, the vessels came in collision.” The question, therefore, was, whether the Durham came to anchor too precipitately, and in an unseamanlike manner; or, in other words, whether, when the “Durham clewed up topsails, and let go her anchor, the Aurora should not have luffed up, or got stern way on her,” &c. Nothing could possibly be more instructive, nor anything scarcely more amusing, than the lucid arguments employed by the counsel on both sides. The learned Thebans, that would have been sick in a ferry-boat, spoke as if they had circumnavigated the globe. Stay-sails, braces, top-gallants, clews, and capstans they hurled at each other like bon bons at a carnival; and this naval engagement lasted from daylight to dark. Once only, when the judge “made it noon,” for a little refection, did they cease conflict, to renew the strife afterwards with more deadly daring, till at last so confused were the witnesses – the plaintiff, defendant, and all, that they half wished, they had gone to the bottom, before they thought of settling the differences in the Admiralty Court. This was no common occasion for the display of these powers so peculiarly the instinctive gift of the bar, and certainly they used it with all the enthusiasm of a bonne bouche.
How I trembled for the Aurora, when an elderly gentleman, with a wart on his nose, assured the court that the Durham had her top-sail backed ten minutes before the anchor fell; and then, how I feared again for the Durham, as a thin man in spectacles worked the Prussian, about in a double-reefed mainsail, and stood round in stays so beautifully. I thought myself at sea, so graphic was the whole description – the waves splashed and foamed around the bulwarks, and broke in spray upon the deck – the wind rattled amid the rigging – the bulkheads creaked, and the good ship heaved heavily in the trough of the sea, like a mighty monster in his agony. But my heart quailed not – I knew that Dr. Lushington was at the helm, and Dr. Haggard had the look-out a-head – I felt that Dr. Robinson stood by the lee braces, and Dr. Addison waited, hatchet in hand, to cut away the mainmast. These were comforting reflections, till I was once more enabled to believe myself in her Majesty’s High Court of Admiralty.
Alas! ye Coopers – ye Marryats – ye Charniers – ve historians of storm and sea-fight, how inferior are your triumphs compared with the descriptive eloquence of a law court. Who can pourtray the broken heart of blighted affection, like Charles Phillips in a breach of promise? What was Scott compared to Scarlett? – how inferior is Dickens to Counsellor O’Driscoll? – here are the men, who, without the trickery of trade, ungilt, unlettered, and unillustrated, can move the world to laughter and to tears. They ask no aid from Colburn, nor from Cruikshank – they need not “Brown” nor Longman. Heaven-born warriors, doctors, chemists, and anatomists – deep in every art, learned in every science – mankind is to them an open book, which they read at will, and con over at leisure – happy country, where we have you in abundance, and where your talents are so available, that they can be had for asking.
