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to their knees in the nice cool mud all through the hot summer day (seen through the window while I was declining bonus in the Eton Grammar) these are visions which have long since faded, like other dreams of youth. I am not sure whether it is the development of my moral and æsthetic perceptions, or merely the force of habit, but I think I now do really prefer a silver fork to my fingers, and would rather go through bonus than the mud. Indeed, the march of improvement has reached even the lower animal life, which then seemed so enviable in its unfettered simplicity. Piggy is now (in our model farms) washed and scrubbed, and has his hair combed-though he is still, I believe, deficient in dinner-table observances; the sheep have little coats made to wear in cold weather after shearing; and the unhappy cow is tied up all day and stall-fed, and Miss Martineau (who has mesmerised cows, and is therefore acquainted with all their private feelings) declares that she likes it-and although Once a Week, in which the statement first appeared, is taken in I believe at all respectable dairies, no cow has hitherto ventured to come forward to contradict the assertion.

Nor is it a theory which finds much favour in my eyes, that the unsophisticated vices of the savage are more tolerable than the cultivated rascality of civilised communities. If one must be robbed and murdered, it is just as well to have it done civilly. A man may as well be poisoned to secure the insurance on his life, as be knocked on the head for the sake of a coveted tenpenny nail-unless, indeed, a very strong-minded philanthropist might take comfort from the thought that, in the latter case, his remains would probably be utilised-by being eaten. Nor is it really a harder case to lose your bank shares by the "unfortunate speculations" of a director (quite the gentleman), than to have all your next year's income-even if it

be only in blubber and train-oilappropriated by a hungry neighbour whose lawful fisheries have been less successful. It is possible that the loss, in the first case, may prevent you from sending your boys to Eton, as you had promised yourself, and as they had a right to expect; but it must be remembered that, on the latter hypothesis, those young gentlemen would be thrown altogether upon their own finding in a world in which there would be very little to be found, and where there would not be even a workhouse or a Refuge for the Destitute, far less any chance of "smart young men" being always wanted for her Majesty's service.

No; I am quite willing, in all these important points, to accept civilisation as it stands, with its good and its evil largely developed, but let us hope with the good taking longer strides than the evil. It is not the immoralities of modern refinement, but its inconveniences, of which I complain; it is the hope of getting rid of some of these which alone could make the chances of a second barbarian conquest tolerable. There are a great many inventions amongst us of which necessity was never the mother, and which we should be a great deal more comfortable without. The obstructive principle which is happily so active in the human mind, and tends to the rejection of all novelties as abominations, is a much more valuable element of human society than is commonly admitted. There was great and sublime wisdom in the principle which the world acted upon in what we call its dark ages, of burning a very prominent inventor occasionally, as a manifest disciple of the evil one; not that such a proceeding is desirable in actual practice, but it rested upon a basis of truth. One understands how Jabal, and Jubal, and TubalCain sprang from the loins of the first evil-doer. For after all, even in this estate of childhood, the world had sense enough to know its real friends. One class of in

ventors and discoverers, who introduced the real arts of life, were deified instead of being persecuted. Bacchus, and Triptolemus, and Orpheus or even, in another hemisphere, the mysterious Hiawathathose who brought true divine gifts, corn, and wine, and song-were voted seats in the halls of the gods. The genius of man is so prone to invention, that some decisive check upon it is imperatively demanded, to prevent human life from being strangled in an ingenious system of helps and contrivances. We affect to smile at the shortsightedness of the parliamentary committee who laughed at Stephenson and his railways; but it would be very well for us all if parliamentary and other committees never did any more foolish things. They were like the Roman college who condemned Galileo-they were wrong in the point of fact; but every wise man sees they were right in principle. Things had gone on very well and regularly, on the whole, under the Ptolemaic system, while the earth was supposed to stand still; and the notion of its moving about under one was certainly very uncomfortable-not rashly to be admitted, by any means. So, really, life was very enjoyable during the reign of stage-coaches: twelve miles an hour including stoppages was very pretty travelling; and the public were not going to be tied to the tail of teakettles, and whisked about at the rate of a mile in two minutes, without a fair amount of decent resistance. And there was, and still is, much to be said on both sides even in the matter of railways. Locomotion has been very much facilitated, no doubt; and as a consequence, a home-keeping Englishman, or English-woman, is become a very scarce article. But travelling, in any proper sense of the word, has been almost extinguished. There can be no possible enjoyment, even in the loveliest weather, in flying along between cuttings and through tunnels, afraid to keep the window open for the

black dust that chokes your nostrils and spoils your clothes, and afraid to shut them for fear of being stifled. The old exhilarating feeling of "the road" is gone. Even if you possessed enough of the good old principle to defy the rail and all its works, and stick to the turnpike, there are no longer any decent posters to draw you, or any decent inns to put up at; and the road itself is no longer the lively thoroughfare of old days: you will meet nothing in a run of ten miles better than a donkey-cart or a shabby railway omnibus. As to travelling by the rail itself, one may as well be a parcel for any pleasure that a rational being can find in that mode of conveyance. You are pretty safe to be delivered at your destination in due course, and that is the best that can be said of it. Indeed, it would be a great blessing to a good many bewildered passengers, male and female, and to the troubled officials who have to answer the same questions a thousand times a-day (and therefore not always in the politest manner), if they were treated as parcels in every respect, and not only booked but packed and directed-of course "With Care; this side upwards."

However, since the great object of human life at present seems to be to get from Manchester to London, and from London to the Land's End, in the shortest possible space of time, it must be conceded that the rail answers its purpose; and the private feelings of slow people like myself must be sacrificed under the wheels of the steam Juggernaut. The new Attila will come upon his march of regeneration no doubt by an express train. Nor let this feeble pen attempt any hopeless remonstrance against the atrocities of modern costume, though that alone cries aloud for an avenging Nemesis. Crinoline and pegtops shall here be sacred. In such matters, satire and sumptuary laws have always been found powerless alike. Not only decency and convenience, but even bodily danger, is bravely disregarded

in the march of fashion. A wellknown wit, protesting against the locking-up of passengers in a railway carriage, declared' that the practice would never be given up by the directors until some person of consequence a bishop at the very least -had been burnt as a martyr to the custom. But judging from facts, it would seem that a holocaust of the female aristocracy would not persuade the survivors to reduce an inch of skirt. It would have no more effect than the awful example recorded by Punch in a case of the opposite sex-of a young gentleman who had his head cut off by his 66 all-rounder."

Besides, it is not clear from what quarter one could hope for a purer taste in these matters to be imported into Europe. In such an immigration as I have been imagining, there would be some risk of the most desirable barbarians bringing with them private fancies of costume quite as inconvenient and indefensible. I confess for I have every wish to deal with the subject fairly and honestly-that the most objectionable form of hat or bonnet ever worn is preferable, as a headdressing, to the castor-oil which some "coloured" ladies consider the correct thing. So I could bear with a slight suspicion of rouge and pearl-powder, judiciously subdued, rather than with the remarkable ornament, universally worn in the first circles among the ladies of New Holland, of a large fish-bone through the cartilage of the nose, or a quarter-pound weight pendant from the lower lip. Even tattooing of the newest patterns seems to me a questionable addition to feminine attractions; unless, indeed, in cases of very remarkable ugliness, where it might perhaps be introduced with advantage. I had rather, as a matter of personal taste, that the lady I admire should pull her hair back from the roots in the most boldfaced Imperatrice fashion-if it was done every day-than that she should make it up once a-year into a solid mass with animal fat, and

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consider it then in a state of fulldress for the season, or, as in the case of the Natal beauties, for the term of their natural lives. something like this, however, we are fast coming in another direction; at this moment I see advertised, as "the ladies' friend to all those who study economy" (and dirt), the Sansplectum Skirt the Indispensable Jupon"-"can at all times be kept perfectly clean by the simple use of a wet sponge.' We know already there are to be "No more Wrinkles"-"No more Grey Hair"

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but here is an advertisement which should have been headed"No more Clean Linen!" A wet sponge, and a few of the new paper collars, will make our modern heroine quite independent of such luxuries, or even of Sir Charles Napier's "bit of soap;" and she will accomplish her travels, like the ladies of old romance, not, perhaps, exactly "simplex munditus," but without troubling her cavalier on the disputed point of baggage. There is certainly one style of costume, formerly prevalent under distinguished patronage (if the statues of Venus and the Graces may be depended upon as authentic), which is open to no such objections on the score of taste, and which the Dinka and Shillook ladies, by Mr Petherick's account, are prepared to introduce among us, and which may be described as the robe à l'innocence. It would ruin the milliners, no doubt-but that is a consummation to which we might devoutly submit, especially since we are assured, by the best political economists, that class interests are not for a moment to be considered when they come into collision with the public good; but its adoption (even with the addition which the Dinka elegantes make to it, of a string of glass beads round the neck and waist) implies too severe and classical a taste to be generally popular, and would require a modification of our climate, as well as in our ideas of propriety, which it must take a few geological ages to effect.

There is evidently a natural tendency in the female mind (with these remarkable exceptions) to disfigure the person. It may possibly have been implanted there for wise precautionary purposes, like the thorns upon the rose; and at any rate it is useless to contend against it. The follies and inconveniences of dress are plainly inherent evils in all human society, civilised or barbarous; and it would be almost sinful to rebel against the dispensation. Let us only hope that the anathema of the old preacher may never come true that if men would not be content to shape their clothes to their bodies, it might please Heaven to let their bodies grow to fit their misshapen clothes; which process of transformation, if it were to take place in our days, would add in a very unfair manner to the weight of the fairer sex in society.

But to deal merely with minor inventions which have from time to time been introduced to add to human discomfort. Supposing even that the exigencies of a locomotive age do compel even a quiet man to travel by railway, was it necessary to inflict upon him such a travelling companion as Bradshaw?-to insist upon a respectable father of a family, past his grand climacteric, going in for a new science at that time of life, or ignominously having recourse to a "crib," in the person of a pert young station-clerk, to enable him to extract some sense from the text put into his hands? Was it necessary to run the trains of rival companies in such ingenious relation to each other, that he should reach the terminus of the one precisely in time to see the last train by which he can possibly reach his destination the same evening just starting from the other, distant not a hundred yards, but with a barrier between? Does it contribute to his comfort to have the hours of starting changed about every three months, apparently in order to keep up the sale of the company's time-tables, and to drive to the station to meet the five o'clock express, with a good

five minutes to spare, on the first of April, to find that it has been put ten minutes earlier-an alteration which it was almost impossible to have ascertained beforehand? Must he have his nerves shaken at the important moment of starting, just as he has fought his way to the pigeon-hole where the tickets are given out, by having his attention drawn to a placard announcing "One Thousand Pounds in the event of DEATH OF MUTILATION "ONE person in every TWELVE injured yearly by ACCIDENT,”—and being exhorted to ask for his insurance ticket at the same time that he pays his fare? He is aware, of course, that accidents do happen even on the best regulated lines. But to have the truth thrust upon one in this cold-blooded formula - - Death or Mutilation!-the warning voice of the slave in the victor's chariot, even the skeleton of the Egyptian feasts -was a delicately-conveyed hint of mortality compared with this. And then, such an appraisement of one's value-One Thousand Pounds supposed to be a handsome equivalent in the event of "Death," and a few hundreds, probably, in a case of Mutilation! One Thousand Pounds! The Zoological Society give half the money for a desirable ape. Are my afflicted family to be consoled, to say nothing of the public loss sustained, by such an offer of compensation as that? And ought such torture to be permitted on a sensitive being at the moment of parting from his friends, as not only to hold before his eyes, in large capitals, the fate which probably awaits him upon his journey, but to prove to him at what a low figure they can afford to fill up the blank which he is about to leave in society?

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And when an unfortunate passenger from the country, defying insurance companies, lands at last safe in the great metropolis, is it reasonable, in a land of civilisation, that he should be pelted, as he sits in his cab, by a man who is stationed for the purpose at the railway gates,

with small books insisting that he shall immediately order a coat at £1, 10s., or the sixteen-shilling trousers or that, if he prefer to walk, it is not enough for him to submit contentedly to the inevitable defilement of his boots, but that a little boy at every street-corner-a ragged regiment positively "brigaded" for that service-should be encouraged to point out the fact, which he would gladly ignore, to the ladies who have just recognised him from their well-appointed brougham, and to suggest that he should take his stand upon a pedestal erected for the purpose, and be cleaned down, like a horse, in public? True, the little boys in the Abyssinian villages gathered round Mr Mansfield Parkyns, when he travelled there, and pointed to his legs, and even proceeded to feel them: but then it was not to make any disparaging remarks, but to express approbation of their condition; they cried "Wah! wah!" "Good, good!" Legs, to those innocent beings-especially white and wellto-do legs were a highly-prized article of consumption; and they were perfectly justified in inspecting for themselves the condition of the meat-market. Can the weakest mind take it as a compliment to be addressed at every third doorway in a public thoroughfare, by a bankrupt-looking person, and invited to step up and have his likeness taken -and in that style? Is it because I have a benevolent face that, when I am going into the city on business which I hate, I should be additionally harassed by being requested, almost as if it were a duty which I owed to society, to purchase by the way, and carry with me, a globe full of gold fish, a shaking doll, and a Chinese spider? Do I look as if I wanted a Chinese spider?

If I stay in the country (I have a little place in the country) matters are just as bad; I am constantly having some little innocent pleasure or convenience done away with by the ruthless hand of civilisation. They have run a branch railway

line through that pretty little wood that used to be my favourite walk, and was as good to me as part of my own estate, though it did not belong to me so that I have not even the melancholy satisfaction of handling the compensation-money. There is a station built just by the little waterfall, and it is called a great public convenience. It brings down, on Saturday and Sunday afternoons, a band of choice spirits, male and female, from that manufacturing town whose smoky chimneys used to form an object in my landscape distance. The enchantment which distance lent is gone. Philanthropists tell us these people bring out their wives and children for a little fresh air. That's all stuff; I am not a philanthropist, and I know better. They bring down their bull-dogs, and their gamecocks, and-there are women with them occasionally, and I daresay they are their wives, though they don't look at all like the model mechanic's wife in Cruickshank's pictures. I see no children. I saw a notice that the "Sloggerton Infant" was expected down one evening, and his friends were specially requested to meet him; but, from what I can understand, those who went found a young man of seventeen, with preternatural bone and muscle, open to fight any man of his weight and age in England. They have built a mill on my pet trout-stream (I don't know what they make there very likely artificial trout); and poor little Jim, who used to lie all day on the bank watching my proceedings with intense delight, and rejoicing in the chance of wading in for a penny to release my fly from any embarrassment amongst the fringe of hazels, works there now, he tells me, from six to six, "yearning his living" as he calls it-I should say, selling his young life for pottage. I would rather have seen him take to poaching, so long as he kept out of my water. I used in former days to take pleasure in my garden, and had a tolerably honest fellow to take care

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