Chapter THE LAST (4)

“The whole style of everything connected with the
court in Spain is on a scale of great magnificence, as
far as outward appearance is concerned. The palace is
beautifully furnished; and the hall of the ambassadors,
or the throne-room, as we should call it, is gorgeous.
The drawing-rooms held by the Queen are called ‘Besa
Manos,’ as all Spaniards kiss hands every time they visit
the sovereign, and not only on presentation, as with us.
They are held of an afternoon, the gentlemen’s Besa-manos
concluding before that of the ladies begins. Foreigners
are more generally presented at a private audience, and
Spaniards themselves prefer it. The drawing-room is
rather a fatiguing undertaking for the Queen; for, after
the general circle has dispersed, all the members of the
household, down to the lowest dependant in the palace, are
admitted to kiss her hand. The balls are on a scale of
great magnificence; and, although the Queen’s ardour for
dancing has somewhat abated, she is still passionately fond
of it, and keeps it up till four or five in the morning,
her partners finding that the qualification of dancing well
is a greater recommendation than rank or station.

“She has now grown immensely stout; and, with the most
good-natured face in the world, has certainly nothing to
boast of in elegance of manner or dignity of deportment.
She looks what she is--most thoroughly kind-hearted, liking
to enjoy herself, and hating all form and etiquette;
extremely charitable, but always acting on the impulse of
the moment, obeying her own will in all things, instead
of being guided by any fixed principles of action. She
dispenses money with a lavish hand, whilst her finances are
not, by any means, in a flourishing condition. Her hours
are not much adapted to business-like habits; she seldom
gets up till four or five o’clock in the afternoon, and
retires to rest about the same hour in the morning. She has
one most inconvenient fault for a queen, being always two
or three hours behind time. If she fixes a Besa-manos at
two o’clock, she comes in about five; if she has a dinner
party announced at seven, it is nine or ten before she
enters the room; and, if she goes in state to the theatre,
and the performances are announced for eight, her Majesty
makes her appearance about ten.”

What innumerable mute maledictions must courtiers, cooks, and managers heap upon her unpunctual Majesty of Spain. Punctuality, it has been said, is the politeness of the great. In sovereigns, it is both politic and a duty. How great a contrast between the slip-shod, lie-abed practices of the Spanish Queen, and the early-rising, well regulated, active habits of our own royal family.

“The interior arrangement of the palace at Madrid would
rather excite surprise in the minds of those accustomed
to the regularity of the English Court. Isabel Segunda
generally dines alone, and the ladies-in-waiting never
reside in the palace, only going when specially summoned.
The Queen and her husband are now apparently on good
terms. He is a most insignificant-looking little man; the
expression of his countenance, however, is not unpleasing,
but his figure is mean and awkward--a counterpart, in this
respect, of his father, the Infante Don Francisco de Paula.

“The court circle is completed by the Queen-Mother, whose
former beauty has now disappeared, as she has grown very
stout; but she possesses still the same fascinating voice,
the same bewitching manner, and the same syren smile, which
make all who speak to her bow before the irresistible charm
which she knows so well how to exercise. Queen Christina
might have worked an immense amount of good for this
unhappy country, had she devoted her talents and energies
to the improvement of the nation; had she exerted her
powerful influence in a good and noble cause, how much
might she not have accomplished! but instead of earning a
reputation which would have called forth the admiration of
posterity, she preferred sacrificing the interests of the
kingdom for the sake of gratifying her own inordinate love
of wealth, and has, in fact, proved merely worthy of the
family from which she sprang.”

The account of the Queen of Spain’s habits derives particular pungency from the fact of its being derived from the writer’s personal observations. Of course Lady Louisa Tenison could but skim the surface; minutely to investigate and describe the manner of life of Isabella, would require a far bolder and more unblushing pen than it would beseem an English lady to handle. The remarks on Queen Christina are exceedingly just. No queen ever had a finer opportunity of benefiting her country, making herself adored by her people, and immortalising her name. Her popularity was once great, her talents are undeniable, her powers of fascination, the influence she acquires over all who come in contact with her, are precisely such as have above been told. Popular as the representative of anti-Carlism and of constitutionalism, she might have made herself beloved for her own sake. A large majority of the Spanish nation--which has ever been noted for its loyalty and monarchical predilections--asked no better than to esteem and respect her, and not to look upon her as a mere necessity, a sort of _pis-aller_, imposed upon Spain by circumstances, and accepted because anything appeared better than the vacillating, priest-ridden Carlos, and the tyranny he aimed at restoring. But it was soon discovered that, whilst professing to combat absolutism, and to represent liberal principles, Maria Christina was at heart an absolutist and a tyrant, that all her political tendencies were retrograde, and that she was utterly selfish, degradingly sensual, and unboundedly covetous. And, to her shame be it spoken, she brought up her child to be no better than herself. The opprobrious epithet shouted at the mother by the Carlist guerillas, during the civil war, was muttered by the Madrileños, but a very few years later, as often as the daughter showed herself in the streets of her capital--and with equal truth. The gross irregularities of Isabella are, at this moment, as notorious in her capital and throughout Spain as anything of the kind possibly can be. Christina, having now considerably passed her prime, has taken up, “for a good old gentlemanly vice,” with avarice. She has a numerous family by Mr Muñoz, for which she cannot hope, unless she dowers them very richly, to obtain such brilliant alliances as her ambition aspires to. So she speculates, accumulates, and hoards; and there is no saying to what exorbitant figure her fortune has by this time attained.

When such bright examples are set by royal personages, it is truly wonderful that any morality or honesty remains in Spain. The quantity is not large, and it must not be sought amongst the statesmen of the country.

“One or two instances, out of a thousand, may show the
manner in which ministerial influence is exerted. In Pinos
de la Valle, in the province of Granada, the Alcalde, whose
office it is to preside over the elections, was suspended
by the Governor as being adverse to the Government
candidate; and a claim against the town of two hundred
pounds was remitted, in consideration of the ministerial
candidate being returned. In the town of Orgiba, in the
same province, a fine of like amount was imposed, and a
further one threatened, should the ministerial candidate
not be returned; and, as if this were insufficient, the
Alcalde was suspended, the second Alcalde was put aside,
and a friend of the candidate named to conduct the voting,
although a criminal suit was actually pending against him.
It may be asked how a government can be allowed to exercise
so shameful and baneful an influence? The discussion is a
wide and difficult one; but one predominating cause may be
found in that insatiable rage for government employment
which pervades Spain. It is essentially a nation of two
classes--‘_empleados_,’ or persons holding offices,
dependent on the Government for their very bread, and
‘_pretendientes_,’ or seekers after place. Had Le Sage
written in the middle of the nineteenth, instead of at the
commencement of the eighteenth century, he could not have
depicted the system more to the life. Public employment
is the primary resource of every needy man who can read
and write, as well as of thousands who cannot; the very
doorkeepers and porters, who encumber the public offices,
being legion.”

There is no gainsaying this. The _empleomania_, the rage for place, is at the bottom of much of Spain’s misery and degradation. It reduces numerous classes, which, in other countries, apply themselves industriously and profitably to professions, arts, and trades, to the mean condition for whose designation Spaniards employ two contemptuous and expressive words, whose satirical force can hardly be rendered in English--_ojalateros_ and _pordioseros_, wishers and beggars.

Lady Louisa Tenison’s illustrations prove her as skilful with the pencil as she is pleasant with the pen, and materially enhance the attractions of her book. There is novelty in her choice of subjects, taste and artistical feeling in the manner of their treatment. The mechanical getting up of the work reflects credit on all concerned; and, as for Mr Bentley’s binding, it is so brilliant that we were almost afraid to touch it, and have been obliged to cover it whilst reviewing, lest our critical judgment should go astray after the gilding.

FOOTNOTES:

[16] _Castile and Andalucia._ By Lady LOUISA TENISON. London: 1853.

[17] FORD’S _Handbook_, first edition, p. 172.

[18] _Handbook for Spain_, p. 789.

THE WANDERER.

INTRODUCTORY.

The throng of Earth’s slow struggles seek not here,
Nor pomp, nor circumstance, nor moving tale;
But whatsoever of that angelic scale,
Whose feet are Earth-set, whose tops touch the Sphere,
By its own splendours may be rendered clear,
Shall show one soul, whether she rise or fail:
Faith’s sympathetic vision will prevail
To see more true things than to sense appear:
The soul sees with the eye as through a glass,
And, if God wills, without it; be it not said,
“This,” or “that is,” or “is not;” shadows pass
Before us: O! ere long may we be made
To own the temporary things we see
A mere penumbra of Eternity!

I.

PROEM.

A barren heath, with bitter east-winds piping,
A garden full of sunshine and of bees,
A village school, a wandering home, a boyhood
Perplexed and various, shot with sin and shame,
A hot and wayward youth, led by false lights
To sloughs and bogs of danger and contempt,
A vague uneasiness, and ignorance--
For knowledge opens but to one key, Love,
The which I partly sought, but found it not--
Such were the earlier hours of Life’s drear night.

II.

A VOICE.

Oft in the dumb hour that precedes the dawn,
Before the cock crows to the waning stars,
When men sleep soundest, and the world is still,
A voice of strangest import came to me--
A welcome, but an awful voice. It came
From hills and green lanes, woods and dewy lawns;
It breathed of innocent pleasures, now not known,
Or, known, not loved; of feverish regret
For things perchance but little valued then,
Now lost for aye, and bitter to the heart;
It was a moaning and a warning voice;
A moan for Eden lost, a boding vague
Of coldness coming on, as if it said,
“God’s Spirit will not always strive with flesh.”

III.

THE PATH.

Fast fade the fields, yet not so fast as fade
The memories of childhood; fades from me
The misty distance of the Hampshire fields;
England is lost already to my heart,
And half the bitterness of death is past.
The moon has made a path upon the waves
Which will be mine to-morrow--toward the East--
The land that bred me cannot nourish me,
And I go forth. I will not mourn the chance.

IV.

SETTING-OUT.

We parted in the sunshine and the crowd,
The inquisitive gaze of noon; the busy hum
Of man about the port; with strangers by;
And cold Convention, with her tyrant forms,
Removed the solace, and drove home the sting.
We should have sundered on a lonely shore,
Where slowly broadened o’er a misty sea
The shimmer of a large, low-lying moon;
My vessel should have loomed against the night,
Nor shown impatience but by one flapped sail,
And in that hour we should have known a noise
Of water crawling gently up the stones,
And falling softly back with silver sound.
Such noise I hear; not now, tho’ tones of night
There are, which, in unquestioned diapason,
Accompany the murmurs of my soul.
By daylight nature jarred with jangling keys,
But now, all mingles well, the sounds are sad,
And I am sad to find myself alone.
So, standing hand in hand upon the beach
We should have parted, you gone back--ah me!--
To your sweet home, to muse upon the past,
I, to my Destiny beyond the sea,
With a heart touched, not torn, beyond a cure.

V.

THE SAME.

I muse upon your lingering words of love
In search of any comfort, as a child
Might play with desperate hand on his own hurt.
As “May the Eldorado that of old
Haunted your lonely visions, and your speech,
Be found a truth by you!” Or thus, “Alas!
I cannot hope that you shall be exempt
From the common lot;” or, “There is but one land
Whereto we send our dearest in all hope,
And doubt not that to follow them were bliss.”
And in a bygone letter “A poet’s heart
Is in your breast, though little uttered yet.
When the Sun leaves the Earth at eventide,
His glory-beams, which shone alike on all,
Leave but the higher hills; slowly withdrawn,
They linger long upon the peaks, till night
Wraps all alike in irrespective darkness:
And on the spirit of man there dwell at first
Beams of his native Heaven, and deck the child.
None but the higher natures keep those rays
Till Death brings night to all;” and “O love Truth,
But never deck her statuary limbs
With the presumptuous garb of paradox.”
Ah me! not even your partial words can cheer
My burthened soul to-night--hark! the ship’s bell
Marks the beginning of another day,
The day on which I sail! Whate’er I do,
Where’er I go, the world turns round the same,
And the great Universe’s pulses beat,
And He alone who is the Governor
And Centre of the circle of all spheres,
Knows what I am, or heeds; and when I die,
The stars will shine, and the whole globe turn round,
And the great Universe’s pulses beat,
And He alone will heed.
So runs the world--
You there, I here, God only everywhere.

VI.

THE HYPHEN.

I am weary of the ocean, emblem of Eternity.
Boundlessness is too ideal. Time and space suffice to me.
Life at sea is but the shadow of the life we led on land,
And the weary glass of Chronos hardly seems to drop a sand.
Life at sea is life suspended in a Present evermore,
All the Past is dim behind us, all the Future vague before.
’Tis an isthmus leading on from continent to continent,
Where the spirit, worn with waiting, sometimes dreams it is content.
For I dream, cast out from action, nothing more remains to do,
Gazing at the sky and ocean, looking up from blue to blue.
Watching in night’s constellations circles of the wheeling mast,
Nourishing a moody fancy with the visions of the Past;
Or if visions of the Future sometimes dimly glide between,
’Tis when memory shapes the To be, by reversing what has been;
That which was was dark and gloomy, clouds of doubt, and storms of sin,
Till I thought ‘Perchance the outer lends its shade to that within;
But the country which is coming is the home of warmth and light,
And the soul may spread her pinions there more beautifully bright.’
Still I erred; I know that change of climate is not change of soul;
Every ship has care for cargo, wheresoe’er the billows roll,
Where storms toss, or calms entrance her, from the line to either pole.
Let what will be, there is nothing wherewithal I may not cope.
Thus I sing between the lands of disappointment and of hope;
Thus I sing, the night wind freshens in the rigging, loft and low,
Fills the canvass, drives the light spray--on our destined path we go.

VII.

Ἀγνωστῳ Θεῳ.

Oh, sought of old on misty mountain-tops,
And by the well-heads of long reverenced streams--
Places in which the cool air lapped men so,
And the all-coloured wavings of the trees,
And the soft, dark-blue distance, and the stir
Of black and white upon the ancient stems,
That they forgot their individual heats,
Merging them in the universal; sought
In frozen caves beneath the purple lights!
THEE, not the sounds of timbrel or of yell
In tropic palm-groves, lone among the waves
Displease; THOU dost not shun the narrow faith
That sees thee in misshapen human forms,
Wrought by artificers from fire-wood trunk;
Nor dost THOU hide THEE from the larger pomp
Of stole and alb, and censer-swinging lads,
And aged men who pray in alien tongues,
And fluted swell of organ, when the vaults
Reverberate the clamour, and the heavens
Blush through the tinted oriel, and all else,
Sight, sound, and deed, be ignorant or vain;
And THOU art found by those, austere and hot,
Who sunder from their brethren, and devote
A simple and unsumptuous rite to THEE,
In open field or tabernacle stern:
With each and all I will believe thou art,
Because with each the shrine is still the same,
The matchless temple, made without hands--man.
Life without THEE is life inanimate;
And better far false gods than none at all;
Yet, with them, is it but a fevered sleep
With vague and unintelligible dreams.
Come THOU to me, all lonely; Lo, my heart
Is empty, swept, and garnished, and I bring
There, to thine altar foot, my wingèd thoughts,
My hornèd resolutions, fruits and flowers--
Worthless, unless thy beams have quickened them:
Lo! what I have I sacrifice to THEE.

VIII.

AD SODALES.

The stars are clear in heaven, and all the slopes
Are slumbering in the silence of the night;
I hear a distant noise of waterfalls;
Far to the northward the great hills of snow
Thrust up their moon-kissed pinnacles; deep peace
Is on the happy world--the peace of God.
The peace of God! when comes there such to me?
Yet life has changes; brothers, we know that,
Even from the bygone lustre; did we dream
(When first, amid the glimmer of the moon,
And the unnumbered laughings of the sea,
We launched our little vessel five years past)--
Dream of the voyage before us? Ah, since then
How many barks, as full of hope as ours,
And tended by as favourable winds,
Have perished from our knowledge; some gone down
To darkness, bearing, to the last, the hues
And beams of their destruction; some--ah, worse,
Still drift among the breakers of despair,
Without a compass--mastless, floating wrecks.
While, thanks to God--for surely not of us
The merit or the claim upon His love--
Our path is still upon serener waves,
Our rigging stout, our needle pointing true,
And our eyes fixed upon the Polar Star.

IX.

RESIGNATION.

And is it true? can such sweet dreams not lie?
O true Egeria of a crownless lord!
Not by cool waterfall and mossy grot,
Beneath the mild light of a temperate sun,
With nature for a temple, do we meet;
But, as we parted, in a busy town,
Among the selfish throng of commerce; here,
Where alien schemers buy a chance of fortune
With sacrifice of all; we meet again--
And I who was the worst and least of those
Learned life’s sweet lesson from thy lips of love,
Young Alchemist, whose heaven-directed search
Has found the great Magistrum, oft denied
To wise men and to prophets of the world.
“Thou didst not think to teach me.” What of that?
Feeling is more than knowledge, thought than speech.
The lesson much I needed, and do still;
My life is not as I would; a dull round
Of trivial cares, and sordid, worldly aims,
Intrench’d by poverty, and sunder’d far
From all my spirit values; I, God wot,
To toil long years in this distemper’d clime,
Cut off from art and sweet commerce of books,
When, in the converse of congenial hearts,
A glorious work had crown’d my sinking head.
It was a dream; yet who is there can say,
“I have awakened, and will dream no more”?
Yet here is work too, though the end be far;
And here, even in exile, is a home--
For some short years a home; while yet I see
The roses not all wither’d on your cheek,
Our little ones still round their mother’s knee;
The sunshine of a hearth, though mostly cold,
And Love, that waits on Virtue--here is home.

X.

PEACE.

Call not our mission exile; who shall dare
To carp at independence, or to rail
Because his fate suffers him not to share
The nippings and the throngings of the mart,
The wrestlings of our overcrowded home--
That other far-off home beyond the seas?
Oh, ’tis the poor man’s Paradise to know,
That day succeeding day shall still provide
Its never-failing sustenance for those
His heart is knit to; and to feel that heart,
Uncheck’d by old Convention, freely beat
And thrill with generous thoughts that link mankind,
And worship its own God, nor be coerced
Hither and thither with prescriptions hard,
And oft-resolved tenacious usages,
That loosen’d cling again at every turn
In that maternal isle.
Oh, proudly swell,
Thou breast of every free man--proudly rise,
Thou voice--for none shall check thine utterance;
And though thy hearers may seem few to thee,
Know, that the aftertime may warm thy words,
Till some of them shall ripen into deeds:
Know this in faith, and it shall be to thee
For an abiding sense of deathlessness.
And yet one would not die here; none can be
Without some vision of a cottage home,
Or in the pastures of the fields, or where
The tide of civilised life is eddying round
Some quiet nook, where men of thought repose,
Nursing the labours of their younger brains,
In great, imperial London.
Mine should be
Some rural spot, whence I could see afar
The cloud that rests for ever over her;
And the black towers of that minster old,
Where kings and poets (kings of their own souls),
Sown by the sedulous hand of Goodman Death,
Await the harvest-time HE will not see.
And I would have the immemorial Thames
To sparkle through my tall, surrounding trees;
And I would have the village church hard by,
That I might see the undulating green,
Where I and some of those I loved should lie.
Ah, foolish heart, that it should better thee
To know, that when thy flutterings shall have still’d--
The first repose that they shall ever know--
Thou shouldst rot here or there; the time shall come
(Ay, and is now), when thoughts like these shall be
Less vivid, less important than the dreams
Of long-forgotten slumbers, than the thoughts
Of prememorial childhood--almost less
Than the faint echoes of a former birth;
And thou, O heart, shall be like one of these,
Or as thou hadst been never--Peace, O Peace!

H. G. K.

THACKERAY’S LECTURES--SWIFT.

A good librarian, as well acquainted with the insides of books as the outsides, made the other day this shrewd observation--that in his experience every third work he took up was defective, either in the title or the first sentence. “What,” he continued, “for example, is the meaning of the word ‘humourist?’ By what authority is it applied to a writer?--is it not misapplied to a wit? unless it be meant to degrade him. ‘The wit,’ says Addison in the _Spectator_, ‘sinks imperceptibly into a humourist.’ A humourist is one whose conduct, whose ways, are eccentric, ‘his actions seldom directed by reason and the nature of things,’ says Watts. It is best the word should be confined according to our dictionaries, to actions, not extended to authorship. The title of Mr Thackeray’s Lectures would lead a lover of plain English to expect narratives of eccentricities taken from real life, and perhaps from the acted buffooneries of itinerant boards, the dominion of Mr Punch’s dynasty--like other dynasties in this age of presumed matter of fact, becoming a ‘dissolving view.’” Mr Thackeray’s English is generally so good, so perfectly to be understood, of such acceptable circulating coinage, that we are surprised at this mistake in the title of his book. Montaigne would head his chapters with any title--as we believe he ushered in one as “On Coach-horses”--and said nothing about them; and we readily admit that the privilege of “_Every Man in his Humour_” may be a fair excuse for the author of _English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century_.

We wish we could say that this little volume were unobjectionable in every other respect--but we cannot. We do not see in it a fair, honest, truth-searching and truth-declaring spirit; yet the style is so captivating, _so insinuating_ in its deceiving plainness, so suggestive of every evil in its simplicity, so alluring onward, even when the passages we have read have left unpleasant impression, that it is impossible to lay down the book, though we fear to proceed. The reader may be like to the poor bird under the known fascination: he never loses sight of the glittering eye--but it looks, even in its confident gaiety, too much like that which charms, and delights in, a victim. We did not, it is true, expect from the author of “_Vanity Fair_” any flattering pictures of men and manners, nor of the world at large, of any age; but we were not prepared for his so strongly expressed dislike and condemnation of other people’s misanthropy as these pages exhibit, particularly in his character of Swift.

And here we think we have a right to protest against Biographical Lectures. It is hardly possible for a lecturer to be fair to his subject. He has an audience to court and to please--to put in good-humour with themselves--to be flattered into a belief of their own goodness, by a bad portraiture of the eminent of the earth. He has to dig out the virtues from the grave to show what vices cling to them--how they look when exhumed in their corruption. Praise is seldom piquant--commonplace is wearisome--startling novelties must put truth to a hazard. If the dead must be called up to judgment of an earthly tribunal, let it not be before a theatrical audience. The lecturer is under the necessity of being too much of an accuser; and if from his own nature, or from some misconception of the characters he takes up, he be a willing one, he has a power to condemn, that the mere writer has not.

In many passages of the book before us there are examples both of the lecturer’s danger, and of his power: many things said because of his audience; and as such audience is generally largely feminine, what advantage has the over-moralising and for the time over-moralised lecturer against the dumb and bodiless culprit called up from his mortal dust, should there be a suspicion of want of tenderness, or doubt of a fidelity and affection, some hundred and fifty years ago, and unpardonable for ever? The lecture-table is no fit place, nor does it offer a fit occasion, to discuss the wondrous intricacies of any human character. It is not enough that the lecturer should have thought--there should be a pause, wherein a reader may think; but an audience cannot: nor is the lecturer, however deeply he may have thought, likely to have such disinterested self-possession and caution, in his oral descriptions and appeals for praise or blame, as are absolutely required for a truthful biographer. It is a bold thing to bid the illustrious dead come from the sanctity of their graves, and stand before the judgment-seat of the author of _Vanity Fair_--to be questioned upon their religion and their morals, and not allowed, even if they could speak for themselves, to answer. The lecturer holds in his hand all their written documents, and all that have been written by scribes of old against them, and he will read, but what he pleases--he, the scrupulously moral, religious man, doubly sanctified at all points for his hour’s lecture in that temporary professor’s garb of proprieties, which he is under no necessity of wearing an hour after he has dismissed his audience. We are not for a moment insinuating any dereliction of all the human virtues and graces, as against Mr Thackeray--but as a lecturer he must put on something of a sanctimonious or of a moral humbug; he is on his stage, he has to act his part, to “fret his hour.” He must do it well--he will do it well; that is, to secure present rapturous applause. The audience is carried away quite out of its sober judgment by the wit, the wisdom, the pathos--and even the well-timed bathos--the pity, the satire, and the satire of all satire, in the pity. The ghosts are dismissed--sent back, as they should be, in the lecturer’s and audience’s estimation, to their “dead men’s bones and all rottenness,” no longer to taint the air of this amiable, judicious, and all-perfect nineteenth century--epitomised in the audience.

Give Professor Owen part of an old bone or a tooth, and he will on the instant draw you the whole animal, and tell you its habits and propensities. What Professor has ever yet been able to classify the wondrous varieties of human character? How very limited as yet the nomenclature! We know there are in our moral dictionary the religious, the irreligious, the virtuous, the vicious, the prudent, the profligate, the liberal, the avaricious, and so on to a few names; but the varieties comprehended under these terms--their mixtures, which, like colours, have no names--their strange complexities and intertwining of virtues and vices, graces and deformities, diversified and mingled, and making individualities--yet of all the myriads of mankind that ever were, not one the same, and scarcely alike: how little way has science gone to their discovery, and to mark their delineation! A few sounds, designated by a few letters, speak all thought, all literature, that ever was or will be. The variety is infinite, and ever creating a new infinite; and there is some such mystery in the endless variety of human character. There are the same leading features to all--these we recognise; but there are hidden individualities that escape research; there is a large _terra incognita_, hard to find, and harder to make a map of. And if any would try to be a discoverer, here is his difficulty--can he see beyond his own ken? How difficult to have a conception of a character the opposite to one’s-self! What man is so gifted? We are but portrait-painters, and no portrait-painter ever yet painted beyond himself--never represented on canvass an intellect greater than his own. In every likeness there is a something of the artist too. We look to other men, and think to find our own idiosyncracies, and we are prepared to love or hate accordingly. As the painter views his sitter in the glass, he is sure to see himself behind him. You biographers, you judges, self-appointed of other men, what a task do you set yourselves!--have you looked well into your own qualifications? You venture to plunge into the deep dark--to bring up the light of truth, which, if you could find it, would mayhap dazzle all your senses. It is far safer for your reputation to go out with Diogenes’s lantern, or your own little one, and thrust it into men’s faces, and make oath you cannot find an honest one; and then draw the glimmer of it close to your own foreheads, and tell people to look there for honesty. But this is our preface, not Mr Thackeray’s. He is too bold to need one. He rushes into his subject without excuse or apology, either for his own defects of delineation, or of his subject’s character. If you would desire to see with what consummate ability, and with what perfect reality in an unlikeness he can paint a monster, read the first life of his Lecture, that of the great man--and we would fain believe, in spite of any of his biographers, a good man--Dean Swift.

If we may be allowed to judge from a collection of contradictory statements respecting Swift, no man’s life can be more difficult for a new writer to undertake, or for any reader to comprehend. If we are to judge from the unhesitating tone of the many biographers, and their ready acceptance of data, no life is so easy. The essayist of the _Times_ makes Swift himself answerable for all the contradictions; that they were all _in_ him, and that he was at all times, from his birth to his death, mad. This is, indeed, to make short work of it, and save the unravelling the perplexed skein of his history. Another writer contends that he was never mad at any period, not even the last of his life. That he was always mad is preposterous, unless we are to accept as insanity what is out of and beyond the common rate of men’s thoughts and doings. We certainly lack in the character of Swift the one prevalent idea, which pervades and occupies the whole mind of the madman. Such may have one vivid, not many opposites in him.

But the contradictions ascribed to Swift are more like the impossibilities of human nature--if they are to be received as absolute characteristics, and not as occasional exceptions, which are apt, in the best of mankind, to take the conceit out of the virtues themselves, and to put them into a temporary abeyance, and mark them with a small infirmity, that they grow not too proud.

The received histories, then, tell us that Swift was sincerely religious, and an infidel; that he was the tenderest of men, a brute, a fiend, a naked unreclaimable savage; a misanthrope, and was the kindest of benefactors; that he was avaricious, and so judiciously liberal that he left no great fortune behind him. Such is the summary; the details are both delightful and odious. The man who owns these vices and virtues must indeed be a monster or a madman! These are characters very hard to fathom. Shakespeare has delineated one, and he has puzzled all the world except Shakespeare, who chose to make his picture more true by leaving it as a puzzle to the world. Hamlet has been pronounced mad from his conduct to Ophelia, mainly if not solely. It is a ready solution of the incomprehensible. Swift was a Hamlet to Stella and Vanessa; and as there are two against him, _versus_ Hamlet’s one love, critics pronounce him doubly mad. It is a very ingenious but not very satisfactory way of getting out of the difficulty. Mad or in his senses, he is a character that provokes; provoked writers are apt to be not fair ones; and because they cannot quite comprehend, they malign: _damnant quod non intelligunt_, is also a rule guiding biographers. Shall he have the qualities “that might become an angel,” or shall his portrait be “under the dark cloud, and every feature be distorted into that of a fiend?” You have equal liberty from the records to depict him as you please. The picture, to be seen at large by an assembled lecturer’s audience, must be strong and coarse in the main, and exhibit some tenderer tones to the near benches in front.

“For a man of my level,” says Swift of himself, “I have as bad a name almost as I deserve! and I pray God that those who give it me, may never have reason to give me a better.” He does not, you see, set up for perfection, but through his present maligners he slaps his after-biographers in the face, who, if they be hurt, will deny the wit or omit it, and prefer instanter a charge of hypocrisy. Angel or fiend! how charitable or how unmerciful are lecturers and biographers! and, being so able to distinguish and choose, how very good they must be themselves! Did the reader ever happen to see a life of Tiberius with two title-pages, both taken from historical authorities; two characters of one and the same person; made up, too, of recorded facts? He is “that inimitable monarch Tiberius,” during most of his reign “the universal dispenser of the blessings of peace,” yet “he permitted the worst of civil wars to rage at Rome!” We may venture to use the words of the essayist, speaking of Swift--“We doubt whether the histories of the world can furnish, for example and instruction, for wonder and pity, for admiration and scorn, for approval and condemnation, a specimen of humanity at once so illustrious and so small.” We have, from perfect authorities, Tiberius handed down for detestation and for universal admiration. The testimonies are not weak; they are alike strong, and equally accepted standards of historical evidence and literature. “Swift stood a living enigma.” It should seem there have been many such enigmas. Shakespeare, who knew all nature, gave the world one to make out as it can.[19] Grave history offers another. The novelist, M. de Wailly, has tried his hand at this enigma--Swift; but the Frenchman, like most French novelists, went altogether out of nature to establish impossible theories. A dramatist might reduce the tale within the limits of nature, if he could but once, for a few moments, be behind the scenes of truth’s theatre--if he knew accurately all the facts, or perhaps one or two facts, that time has concealed, and perhaps ever will conceal; and which, discovered, would solve the enigma at once. Of course, the great enigma lies in Swift’s amours. These apart, no man would ever have ventured to assert the life-long madness of Swift. Great men and little have had, and, as long as the world lasts, will have their amours, honest ones and dishonest; but, excepting for romance-writing and gossiping of a day, such themes have been thought unworthy history, and to be but slightly notable even in biography. Their natural secresy has hitherto covered the correct ones with a sanctity, and the incorrect with a darker veil, that it is better not to lift; nor is it easy at all times to distinguish the right from the wrong. The living resent the scrutiny: we do not admire the impertinence, nor easily admit the privilege of an amatorial inquisition upon the characters of the dead. And what has curiosity gathered, after all, which ought to justify honest people in maligning Swift, Stella, or Vanessa? A mass of contradictions. They cannot all be true. Even Stella’s marriage, stated as a fact by so many writers, is denied, and upon as fair evidence as its supposition. The first account of it is given as many as seven years after Swift’s death, and twenty-four years after Stella’s. There are two versions with respect to the dying scene, and supposed dialogue regarding the marriage. They contradict each other; for, in the one, Swift is made brutally to leave the room, and never to have seen her after; in the other, to have desired to acknowledge the marriage, and that Stella said, “It is too late.” Who knows if either be true? and what means “it is too late?” Do those few simple words, overheard, necessarily imply any such acknowledgment? But there is proof that one malicious statement is false. “This behaviour,” says Mr Thomas Sheridan (not Dr Sheridan, the friend of Swift, for whom he has been mistaken, and weight accordingly given to his statement), threw Mrs Johnson into unspeakable agonies; and for a time she sunk under the weight of so cruel a disappointment. But soon after, roused by indignation, she inveighed against his cruelty in the bitterest terms; and sending for a lawyer, made her will, bequeathing her fortune, by her own name, to charitable uses.” It is said this was done in the presence of Dr Sheridan; but the narrator was a mere lad when his father, from whom he is said to have received it, died. But this very will is, if not of Swift’s dictation, the will he had wished her to make (compare it with Swift’s own will--the very phraseology is strongly indicative of his dictation); for he had thus written to Mr Worral when in London, during Stella’s severe illness: “I wish it could be brought about that she might make her will. Her intentions are to leave the interest of all her fortune to her mother and sister during their lives, afterwards to Dr Stevens’s hospital, to purchase lands for such uses as she designs it.” Upon this Mr Wilde, author of _The Closing Years of Dean Swift’s Life_, remarks most properly: “Now, such was not only the tenor, but the very words of the will made two years afterwards, which Sheridan (Thomas, not Dr Sheridan) would have his readers believe was made in pique at the Dean’s conduct.” Then it follows, that if this paragraph in the tale, and told as a consequence of the previous paragraph, is untrue, as it is proved to be, the first part, the brutal treatment, falls to the ground. In any court the evidence would be blotted from the record. It is curious, and may have possibly some bearing upon the Platonic love of Swift and Stella, that she should, in this will, have been so enamoured of celibacy, that she enjoins it upon the chaplain whom she appointed to read prayers and preach at the hospital. “It is likewise my will that the said chaplain be an unmarried man at the time of his election, and so continue while he enjoys the office of chaplain to the said hospital.” This will is also curious, and worthy of notice, in another respect. Among the slanders upon Swift and Stella, it had been circulated that she had been not only his mistress, but had had a child by him; and an old bellringer’s testimony was adduced for the fact. There may be in the mind of the reader quite sufficient reasons to render the story impossible; but one item of the will is a bequest to this supposed child by name. “I bequeath to Bryan M‘Loglin (a child who now lives with me, and whom I keep on charity) twenty-five pounds, to bind him out apprentice, as my executors, or the survivors of them, shall think fit.” Now, this is the great case of cruelty against Swift, and we think it is satisfactorily disposed of. Have we any other notice given that Swift behaved brutally to Stella? None. Where is there any evidence of her complaining? but there is evidence of the tenderest affection on Swift’s part. Stella’s letters have never seen the light; but, if we may judge by the answers to them, there could have been no charge of cruelty brought against him by her. The whole is an assumption from this narrative of Sheridan the son, and, as we have shown, altogether a misconception or a dream of his. Even with respect to Stella’s parentage authors do not agree--yet each speaks as positively as if he had been at the birth. Swift himself says that her father was a younger brother of a good family in Nottinghamshire, and her mother of a lower degree. Some assert that she was the natural daughter of Sir Wm. Temple. Johnson says, the daughter of Sir Wm. Temple’s steward; but, in contradiction to this, it is pretty clear that her mother did not marry this steward, whose name was Mosse, till after Sir Wm. Temple’s death, when Stella was in Ireland. Sir William left her a thousand pounds, and, it is said, declared to her her parentage. A writer in the _Gentleman’s Magazine_ for 1757, who knew Stella’s mother, and was otherwise well acquainted with facts, is urged, in indignation at the treacherous and spiteful narrative by Lord Orrery, to write a defence of the Dean. From this source, what others had indeed suspected is strongly asserted--that Swift was himself the natural son of Temple. He thus continues: “When Stella went to Ireland, a marriage between her and the Dean could not be foreseen; but when she thought proper to communicate to her friends the Dean’s proposal, and her approbation of it, it was then become absolutely necessary for that person, who alone knew the secret history of the parties concerned, to reveal what otherwise might have been buried in oblivion. But was the Dean to blame, because he was ignorant of his natural relation to Stella? or can he justly be censured because it was not made known to him before the day of the marriage? He admired her; he loved her; he pitied her; and when fate placed the everlasting barrier between them, their affection became a true Platonic love, if not something yet more exalted.... We are sometimes told, that upon the Hanoverian family succeeding to the throne of Great Britain, Swift renounced all hopes of farther preferment; and that his temper became more morose, and more intolerable every year. I acknowledge the fact in part; but it was not the loss of his hopes that soured Swift alone; this was the unlucky epocha of that discovery, that convinced the Dean that the only woman in the world who could make him happy as a wife, was the only woman in the world who could not be that wife.” Delany also entertained a suspicion in agreement with this account. The supposition would seem to throw light upon a mysterious passage in Swift’s life, and to be sufficient explanation of all his behaviour to Stella. “Immediately subsequent to the ceremony (the marriage) Swift’s state of mind,” says Scott, “appears to have been dreadful. Delany, as I have heard from a friend of his relict, being pressed to give his opinion on this strange union, said, that about the time it took place, he observed Swift to be extremely gloomy and agitated--so much so, that he went to Archbishop King to mention his apprehensions. On entering the library, Swift rushed out with a countenance of distraction, and passed him without speaking. He found the Archbishop in tears; and upon asking the reason, he said, ‘You have just met the most unhappy man on earth, but on the subject of his wretchedness you must never ask a question.’” Sir Walter Scott does not admit this story in the _Gentleman’s Magazine_, but we doubt if the reason of his doubt, or rejection of it, be quite satisfactory. “It is enough to say that Swift’s parents resided in Ireland from before 1665 until his birth in 1667, and that Temple was residing in Holland from April 1666 until January 1668. Lord Orrery says until 1670.” Dates, it appears, are not always accurately ascertained. We cannot determine that ambassadors have no latitude for a little ubiquity; but there is one very extraordinary circumstance with regard to Swift’s childhood, that seems to involve in it no small degree of mystery. “It happened, by whatever accident, that Jonathan was not suckled by his mother, but by a nurse, who was a native of Whitehaven; and when he was about a year old, her affection for him was become so strong, that, finding it necessary to visit a relation who was dangerously sick, and from whom she expected a legacy, she found means to convey the child on shipboard, without the knowledge of his mother or his uncle, and carried him with her to Whitehaven. At this place he continued near three years; for when the matter was discovered, his mother sent orders not to hazard a second voyage, till he should be better able to bear it. The nurse, however, gave other testimonies of her affection to Jonathan, for during his stay at Whitehaven she had him taught to spell, and when he was five years old he was able to read a chapter in the Bible.”