Book: My Novel, Volume 6.

E >> Edward Bulwer Lytton >> My Novel, Volume 6.




There, too, on the whitewashed walls, were admitted the portraits of
ruder rivals in the arena of fame,--yet they, too, had known an applause
warmer than his age gave to Shakspeare; the Champions of the Ring,--Cribb
and Molyneux and Dutch Sam. Interspersed with these was an old print of
Newmarket in the early part of the last century, and sundry engravings
from Hogarth. But poets, oh, they were there too! poets who might be
supposed to have been sufficiently good fellows to be at home with such
companions,--Shakspeare, of course, with his placid forehead; Ben Jonson,
with his heavy scowl; Burns and Byron cheek by jowl. But the strangest
of all these heterogeneous specimens of graphic art was a full-length
print of William Pitt!---William Pitt, the austere and imperious. What
the deuce did he do there amongst prize-fighters and actors and poets?
It seemed an insult to his grand memory. Nevertheless there he was, very
erect, and with a look of ineffable disgust in his upturned nostrils.
The portraits on the sordid walls were very like the crambo in the minds
of ordinary men,--very like the motley pictures of the FAMOUS hung up in
your parlour, O my Public! Actors and prize-fighters, poets and
statesmen, all without congruity and fitness, all whom you have been to
see or to hear for a moment, and whose names have stared out in your
newspapers, O my public!

And the company? Indescribable! Comedians, from small theatres, out of
employ; pale, haggard-looking boys, probably the sons of worthy traders,
trying their best to break their fathers' hearts; here and there the
marked features of a Jew. Now and then you might see the curious puzzled
face of some greenhorn about town, or perhaps a Cantab; and men of grave
age, and grayhaired, were there, and amongst them a wondrous proportion
of carbuncled faces and bottle-noses. And when John Burley entered,
there was a shout that made William Pitt shake in his frame. Such
stamping and hallooing, and such hurrahs for "Burley John." And the
gentleman who had filled the great high leathern chair in his absence
gave it up to John Burley; and Leonard, with his grave, observant eye,
and lip half sad and half scornful, placed himself by the side of his
introducer. There was a nameless, expectant stir through the assembly,
as there is in the pit of the opera when some great singer advances to
the lamps, and begins, "Di tanti palpiti." Time flies. Look at the
Dutch clock over the door. Half-an-hour. John Burley begins to warm. A
yet quicker light begins to break from his Eye; his voice has a mellow
luscious roll in it.

"He will be grand to-night," whispered a thin man, who looked like a
tailor, seated on the other side of Leonard. Time flies,--an hour. Look
again at the Dutch clock. John Burley is grand, he is in his zenith, at
his culminating point. What magnificent drollery! what luxuriant humour!
How the Rabelais shakes in his easy-chair! Under the rush and the roar
of this fun (what word else shall describe it?) the man's intellect is as
clear as gold sand under a river. Such wit and such truth, and, at
times, such a flood of quick eloquence! All now are listeners,--silent,
save in applause.

And Leonard listened too. Not, as he would some nights ago, in innocent
unquestioning delight. No; his mind has passed through great sorrow,
great passion, and it comes out unsettled, inquiring, eager, brooding
over joy itself as over a problem. And the drink circulates, and faces
change; and there are gabbling and babbling; and Burley's head sinks in
his bosom, and he is silent. And up starts a wild, dissolute,
bacchanalian glee for seven voices. And the smoke-reek grows denser and
thicker, and the gaslight looks dizzy through the haze. And John
Burley's eyes reel.

Look again at the Dutch clock. Two hours have gone. John Burley has
broken out again from his silence, his voice thick and husky, and his
laugh cracked; and he talks, O ye gods! such rubbish and ribaldry; and
the listeners roar aloud, and think it finer than before. And Leonard,
who had hitherto been measuring himself in his mind against the giant,
and saying inly, "He soars out of my reach," finds the giant shrink
smaller and smaller, and saith to himself, "He is but of man's common
standard after all!"

Look again at the Dutch clock. Three hours have passed. Is John Burley
now of man's common standard? Man himself seems to have vanished from
the scene,--his soul stolen from him, his form gone away with the fumes
of the smoke, and the nauseous steam from that fiery bowl. And Leonard
looked round, and saw but the swine of Circe,--some on the floor, some
staggering against the walls, some hugging each other on the tables, some
fighting, some bawling, some weeping. The divine spark had fled from the
human face; the Beast is everywhere growing more and snore out of the
thing that had been Man. And John Burley, still unconquered, but clean
lost to his senses, fancies himself a preacher, and drawls forth the most
lugubrious sermon upon the brevity of life that mortal ever beard,
accompanied with unctuous sobs; and now and then in the midst of
balderdash gleams out a gorgeous sentence, that Jeremy Taylor might have
envied, drivelling away again into a cadence below the rhetoric of a
Muggletonian. And the waiters choked up the doorway, listening and
laughing, and prepared to call cabs and coaches; and suddenly some one
turned off the gaslight, and all was dark as pitch,--howls and laughter,
as of the damned, ringing through the Pandemonium. Out from the black
atmosphere stepped the boy-poet; and the still stars rushed on his sight,
as they looked over the grimy roof-tops.




CHAPTER XXII.

Well, Leonard, this is the first time thou hast shown that thou hast in
thee the iron out of which true manhood is forged and shaped. Thou hast
the power to resist. Forth, unebriate, unpolluted, he came from the
orgy, as yon star above him came from the cloud.

He had a latch-key to his lodgings. He let himself in and walked
noiselessly up the creaking wooden stair. It was dawn. He passed on to
his window and threw it open. The green elm-tree from the carpenter's
yard looked as fresh and fair as if rooted in solitude, leagues away from
the smoke of Babylon.

"Nature, Nature!" murmured Leonard, "I hear thy voice now. This stills,
this strengthens. But the struggle is very dread. Here, despair of
life,--there, faith in life. Nature thinks of neither, and lives
serenely on."

By and by a bird slid softly from the heart of the tree, and dropped on
the ground below out of sight. But Leonard heard its carol. It awoke
its companions; wings began to glance in the air, and the clouds grew red
towards the east.

Leonard sighed and left the window. On the table, near Helen's rose-
tree, which he bent over wistfully, lay a letter. He had not observed it
before. It was in Helen's hand. He took it to the light, and read it by
the pure, healthful gleams of morn:--

IVY LODGE.

Oh, my dear brother Leonard, will this find you well, and (more
happy I dare not say, but) less sad than when we parted? I write
kneeling, so that it seems to me as if I wrote and prayed at the
same time. You may come and see me to-morrow evening, Leonard. Do
come, do,--we shall walk together in this pretty garden; and there
is an arbour all covered with jessamine and honeysuckle, from which
we can look down on London. I have looked from it so many times,--
so many--trying if I can guess the roofs in our poor little street,
and fancying that I do see the dear elm-tree.

Miss Starke is very kind to me; and I think after I have seen you,
that I shall be happy here,--that is, if you are happy.

Your own grateful sister,

HELEN.

P. S.--Any one will direct you to our house; it lies to the left
near the top of the hill, a little way down a lane that is overhung
on one side with chestnut-trees and lilacs. I shall be watching for
you at the gate.

Leonard's brow softened, he looked again like his former self. Up from
the dark sea at his heart smiled the meek face of a child, and the waves
lay still as at the charm of a spirit.




CHAPTER XXIII.

"And what is Mr. Burley, and what has he written?" asked Leonard of Mr.
Prickett, when he returned to the shop.

Let us reply to that question in our own words, for we know more about
Mr. Burley than Mr. Prickett does.

John Burley was the only son of a poor clergyman, in a village near
Ealing, who had scraped and saved and pinched, to send his son to an
excellent provincial school in a northern county, and thence to college.
At the latter, during his first year, young Burley was remarked by the
undergraduates for his thick shoes and coarse linen, and remarkable to
the authorities for his assiduity and learning. The highest hopes were
entertained of him by the tutors and examiners. At the beginning of the
second year his high animal spirits, before kept down by study, broke
out. Reading had become easy to him. He knocked off his tasks with a
facile stroke, as it were. He gave up his leisure hours to Symposia by
no means Socratical. He fell into an idle, hard-drinking set. He got
into all kinds of scrapes. The authorities were at first kind and
forbearing in their admonitions, for they respected his abilities, and
still hoped he might become an honour to the University. But at last he
went drunk into a formal examination, and sent in papers, after the
manner of Aristophanes, containing capital jokes upon the Dons and Big-
wigs themselves. The offence was the greater and seemed the more
premeditated for being clothed in Greek. John Burley was expelled. He
went home to his father's a miserable man, for, with all his follies, he
had a good heart. Removed from ill example, his life for a year was
blameless. He got admitted as usher into the school in which he had
received instruction as a pupil. This school was in a large town. John
Burley became member of a club formed among the tradesmen, and spent
three evenings a week there. His astonishing convivial and
conversational powers began to declare themselves. He grew the oracle of
the club; and, from being the most sober, peaceful assembly in which
grave fathers of a family ever smoked a pipe or sipped a glass, it grew
under Mr. Burley's auspices the parent of revels as frolicking and
frantic as those out of which the old Greek Goat Song ever tipsily rose.
This would not do. There was a great riot in the streets one night, and
the next morning the usher was dismissed. Fortunately for John Burley's
conscience, his father had died before this happened,--died believing in
the reform of his son. During his ushership Mr. Burley had scraped
acquaintance with the editor of the county newspaper, and given him some
capital political articles; for Burley was, like Parr and Porson, a
notable politician. The editor furnished him with letters to the
journalists in London, and John came to the metropolis and got employed
on a very respectable newspaper. At college he had known Audley Egerton,
though but slightly: that gentleman was then just rising into repute in
parliament. Burley sympathized with some question on which Audley had
distinguished himself, and wrote a very good article thereon,--an article
so good that Egerton inquired into the authorship, found out Burley, and
resolved in his own mind to provide for him whenever he himself came into
office. But Burley was a man whom it was impossible to provide for. He
soon lost his connection with the news paper. First, he was so irregular
that he could never be depended upon. Secondly, he had strange, honest,
eccentric twists of thinking, that could coalesce with the thoughts of no
party in the long run. An article of his, inadvertently admitted, had
horrified all the proprietors, staff, and readers of the paper. It was
diametrically opposite to the principles the paper advocated, and
compared its pet politician to Catiline. Then John Burley shut himself
up and wrote books. He wrote two or three books, very clever, but not at
all to the popular taste,--abstract and learned, full of whims that were
caviare to the multitude, and larded with Greek. Nevertheless they
obtained for him a little money, and among literary men some reputation.
Now Audley Egerton came into power, and got him, though with great
difficulty,--for there were many prejudices against this scampish,
harum-scarum son of the Muses,--a place in a public office. He kept it
about a month, and then voluntarily resigned it. "My crust of bread and
liberty!" quoth John Burley, and he vanished into a garret. From that
time to the present he lived--Heaven knows how! Literature is a
business, like everything else; John Burley grew more and more incapable
of business. "He could not do task-work," he said; he wrote when the
whim seized him, or when the last penny was in his pouch, or when he was
actually in the spunging-house or the Fleet,--migrations which occurred
to him, on an average, twice a year. He could generally sell what he had
actually written, but no one would engage him beforehand. Editors of
magazines and other periodicals were very glad to have his articles, on
the condition that they were anonymous; and his style was not necessarily
detected, for he could vary it with the facility of a practised pen.
Audley Egerton continued his best supporter, for there were certain
questions on which no one wrote with such force as John Burley,--
questions connected with the metaphysics of politics, such as law reform
and economical science. And Audley Egerton was the only man John Burley
put himself out of the way to serve, and for whom he would give up a
drinking bout and do task-work; for John Burley was grateful by nature,
and he felt that Egerton had really tried to befriend him. Indeed, it
was true, as he had stated to Leonard by the Brent, that even after he
had resigned his desk in the London office, he had had the offer of an
appointment in Jamaica, and a place in India, from the minister. But
probably there were other charms then than those exercised by the one-
eyed perch that kept him to the neighbourhood of London. With all his
grave faults of character and conduct, John Burley was not without the
fine qualities of a large nature. He was most resolutely his own enemy,
it is true, but he could hardly be said to be any one else's. Even when
he criticised some more fortunate writer, he was good-humoured in his
very satire: he had no bile, no envy. And as for freedom from malignant
personalities, he might have been a model to all critics. I must except
politics, however, for in these he could be rabid and savage. He had a
passion for independence, which, though pushed to excess, was not without
grandeur. No lick-platter, no parasite, no toad-eater, no literary
beggar, no hunter after patronage and subscriptions; even in his dealings
with Audley Egerton, he insisted on naming the price for his labours. He
took a price, because, as the papers required by Audley demanded much
reading and detail, which was not at all to his taste, he considered
himself entitled fairly to something more than the editor of the journal
wherein the papers appeared was in the habit of giving. But he assessed
this extra price himself, and as he would have done to a bookseller. And
when in debt and in prison, though he knew a line to Egerton would have
extricated him, he never wrote that line. He would depend alone on his
pen,--dipped it hastily in the ink, and scrawled himself free. The most
debased point about him was certainly the incorrigible vice of drinking,
and with it the usual concomitant of that vice,--the love of low company.
To be King of the Bohemians, to dazzle by his wild humour, and sometimes
to exalt by his fanciful eloquence, the rude, gross natures that gathered
round him,--this was a royalty that repaid him for all sacrifice of solid
dignity; a foolscap crown that he would not have changed for an emperor's
diadem. Indeed, to appreciate rightly the talents of John Burley, it was
necessary to hear him talk on such occasions. As a writer, after all, he
was now only capable of unequal desultory efforts; but as a talker, in
his own wild way, he was original and matchless. And the gift of talk is
one of the most dangerous gifts a man can possess for his own sake,--the
applause is so immediate, and gained with so little labour. Lower and
lower and lower had sunk John Burley, not only in the opinion of all who
knew his name, but in the habitual exercise of his talents. And this
seemed wilfully--from choice. He would write for some unstamped journal
of the populace, out of the pale of the law, for pence, when he could
have got pounds from journals of high repute. He was very fond of
scribbling off penny ballads, and then standing in the street to hear
them sung. He actually once made himself the poet of an advertising
tailor, and enjoyed it excessively. But that did not last long, for John
Burley was a Pittite,--not a Tory, he used to say, but a Pittite. And if
you had heard him talk of Pitt, you would never have known what to make
of that great statesman. He treated him as the German commentators do
Shakspeare, and invested him with all imaginary meanings and objects,
that would have turned the grand practical man into a sibyl. Well, he
was a Pittite; the tailor a fanatic for Thelwall and Cobbett. Mr. Burley
wrote a poem wherein Britannia appeared to the tailor, complimented him
highly on the art he exhibited in adorning the persons of her sons; and
bestowing upon him a gigantic mantle, said that he, and he alone, might
be enabled to fit it to the shoulders of living men. The rest of the
poem was occupied in Mr. Snip's unavailing attempts to adjust this mantle
to the eminent politicians of the day, when, just as he had sunk down in
despair, Britannia reappeared to him, and consoled him with the
information that he had done all mortal man could do, and that she had
only desired to convince pigmies that no human art could adjust to THEIR
proportions the mantle of William Pitt. /Sic itur ad astra/,--she went
back to the stars, mantle and all! Mr. Snip was exceedingly indignant at
this allegorical effusion, and with wrathful shears cut the tie between
himself and his poet.

Thus, then, the reader has, we trust, a pretty good idea of John Burley,
--a specimen of his genus not very common in any age, and now happily
almost extinct, since authors of all degrees share in the general
improvement in order, economy, and sober decorum, which has obtained in
the national manners. Mr. Prickett, though entering into less historical
detail than we have done, conveyed to Leonard a tolerably accurate notion
of the man, representing him as a person of great powers and learning,
who had thoroughly thrown himself away.

Leonard did not, however, see how much Mr. Burley himself was to be
blamed for his waste of life; he could not conceive a man of genius
voluntarily seating himself at the lowest step in the social ladder. He
rather supposed he had been thrust down there by Necessity.

And when Mr. Prickett, concluding, said, "Well, I should think Burley
would cure you of the desire to be an author even more than Chatterton,"
the young man answered gloomily, "Perhaps," and turned to the book-
shelves.

With Mr. Prickett's consent, Leonard was released earlier than usual from
his task, and a little before sunset he took his way to Highgate. He was
fortunately directed to take the new road by the Regent's Park, and so on
through a very green and smiling country. The walk, the freshness of the
air, the songs of the birds, and, above all, when he had got half-way,
the solitude of the road, served to rouse him from his stern and sombre
meditations. And when he came into the lane overhung with chestnut-
trees, and suddenly caught sight of Helen's watchful and then brightening
face, as she stood by the wicket, and under the shadow of cool, murmurous
boughs, the blood rushed gayly through his veins, and his heart beat loud
and gratefully.




CHAPTER XXIV.

She drew him into the garden with such true childlike joy. Now behold
them seated in the arbour,--a perfect bower of sweets and blossoms; the
wilderness of roof-tops and spires stretching below, broad and far;
London seen dim and silent, as in a dream.

She took his hat from his brows gently, and looked him in the face with
tearful penetrating eyes.

She did not say, "You are changed." She said, "Why, why did I leave
you?" and then turned away.

"Never mind me, Helen. I am man, and rudely born; speak of yourself.
This lady is kind to you, then?"

"Does she not let me see you? Oh, very kind,--and look here."

Helen pointed to fruits and cakes set out on the table. "A feast,
brother."

And she began to press her hospitality with pretty winning ways, more
playful than was usual to her, and talking very fast, and with forced,
but silvery, laughter.

By degrees she stole him from his gloom and reserve; and though he could
not reveal to her the cause of his bitterest sorrow, he owned that he had
suffered much. He would not have owned that to another living being.
And then, quickly turning from this brief confession, with assurances
that the worst was over, he sought to amuse her by speaking of his new
acquaintance with the perch-fisher. But when he spoke of this man with a
kind of reluctant admiration, mixed with compassionate yet gloomy
interest, and drew a grotesque, though subdued, sketch of the wild scene
in which he had been spectator, Helen grew alarmed and grave.

"Oh, brother, do not go there again,--do not see more of this bad man."

"Bad!--no! Hopeless and unhappy, he has stooped to stimulants and
oblivion--but you cannot understand these things, my pretty preacher."

"Yes, I do, Leonard. What is the difference between being good and bad?
The good do not yield to temptations, and the bad do."

The definition was so simple and so wise that Leonard was more struck
with it than he might have been by the most elaborate sermon by Parson
Dale.

"I have often murmured to myself since I lost you, 'Helen was my good
angel; '--say on. For my heart is dark to myself, and while you speak
light seems to dawn on it."

This praise so confused Helen that she was long before she could obey the
command annexed to it. But, by little and little, words came to both
more frankly. And then he told her the sad tale of Chatterton, and
waited, anxious to hear her comments.

"Well," he said, seeing that she remained silent, "how can I hope, when
this mighty genius laboured and despaired? What did he want, save birth
and fortune and friends and human justice?"

"Did he pray to God?" asked Helen, drying her tears. Again Leonard was
startled. In reading the life of Chatterton he had not much noted the
scepticism, assumed or real, of the ill-fated aspirer to earthly
immortality. At Helen's question, that scepticism struck him forcibly.
"Why do you ask that, Helen?"

"Because, when we pray often, we grow so very, very patient," answered
the child. "Perhaps, had he been patient a few months more, all would
have been won by him, as it will be by you, brother, for you pray, and
you will be patient."

Leonard bowed his head in deep thought, and this time the thought was not
gloomy. Then out from that awful life there glowed another passage,
which before he had not heeded duly, but regarded rather as one of the
darkest mysteries in the fate of Chatterton.

At the very time the despairing poet had locked himself up in his garret,
to dismiss his soul from its earthly ordeal, his genius had just found
its way into the light of renown. Good and learned and powerful men were
preparing to serve and save him. Another year--nay, perchance another
month--and he might have stood acknowledged sublime in the foremost ranks
of his age.

"Oh, Helen!" cried Leonard, raising his brows, from which the cloud had
passed, "why, indeed, did you leave me?"

Helen started in her turn as he repeated this regret, and in her turn
grew thoughtful. At length she asked him if he had written for the box
which had belonged to her father and been left at the inn.

And Leonard, though a little chafed at what he thought a childish
interruption to themes of graver interest, owned, with self-reproach,
that he had forgotten to do so. Should he not write now to order the box
to be sent to her at Miss Starke's?

"No; let it be sent to you. Take care of it. I should like to know that
something of mine is with you; and perhaps I may not stay here long."

"Not stay here? That you must, my dear Helen,--at least as long as Miss
Starke will keep you, and is kind. By and by" (added Leonard, with
something of his former sanguine tone) "I may yet make my way, and we
shall have our cottage to ourselves. But--oh, Helen!--I forgot--you
wounded me; you left your money with me. I only found it in my drawers
the other day. Fie! I have brought it back."

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