Book: Blackwood\'s Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX.

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If there is one thing that endears London to men of superior order--to
true aristocrats, no matter of what species, it is that universal
equality of outward condition, that republicanism of everyday life,
which pervades the vast multitudes who hum, and who drone, who gather
honey, and who, without gathering, consume the products of this gigantic
hive. Here you can never be extinguished or put out by any overwhelming
interest.

Neither are we in London pushed to the wall by the two or three hundred
great men of every little place. We are not invited to a main of small
talk with the cock of his own dung-hill; we are never told, as a great
favour, that Mr Alexander Scaldhead, the phrenologist, is to be there,
and that we can have our "bumps" felt for nothing; or that the Chevalier
Doembrownski (a London pickpocket in disguise) is expected to recite a
Polish ode, accompanying himself on the Jew's harp; we are not bored
with the misconduct of the librarian, who _never_ has the first volume
of the last new novel, or invited to determine whether Louisa Fitzsmythe
or Angelina Stubbsville deserves to be considered the heroine; we are
not required to be in raptures because Mrs Alfred Shaw or Clara Novello
are expected, or to break our hearts with disappointment because they
didn't come: the arrival, performances, and departure, of Ducrow's
horses, or Wombwell's wild beasts, affect us with no extraordinary
emotion; even Assizes time concerns most of us nothing.

Then, again, how vulgar, how commonplace in London is the aristocracy of
wealth; of Mrs Grub, who, in a provincial town, keeps her carriage, and
is at once the envy and the scandal of all the Ladies who have to
proceed upon their ten toes, we wot not the existence. Mr Bill Wright,
the banker, the respected, respectable, influential, twenty per cent
Wright, in London is merely a licensed dealer in money; he visits at
Camberwell Hill, or Hampstead Heath, or wherever other tradesmen of his
class delight to dwell; his wife and daughters patronize the Polish
balls, and Mr Bill Wright, jun., sports a stall at the (English) opera;
we are not overdone by Mr Bill Wright, overcome by Mrs Bill Wright, or
the Misses Bill Wright, nor overcrowed by Mr Bill Wright the younger: in
a word, we don't care a crossed cheque for the whole Bill Wrightish
connexion.

What are carriages, or carriage-keeping people in London? It is not
here, as in the provinces, by their carriages shall you know them; on
the contrary, the carriage of a duchess is only distinguishable from
that of a _parvenu_, by the superior expensiveness and vulgarity of the
latter.

The vulgarity of ostentatious wealth with us, defeats the end it aims
at. That expense which is lavished to impress us with awe and
admiration, serves only as a provocative to laughter, and inducement to
contempt; where great wealth and good taste go together, we at once
recognize the harmonious adaptation of means and ends; where they do
not, all extrinsic and adventitious expenditure availeth its disbursers
nothing.

What animal on earth was ever so inhumanly preposterous as a lord
mayor's footman, and yet it takes sixty guineas, at the least, to make
that poor lick-plate a common laughing-stock?

No, sir; in London we see into, and see through, all sorts of
pretension: the pretension of wealth or rank, whatever kind of quackery
and imposture. When I say _we_, I speak of the vast multitudes forming
the educated, discriminating, and thinking classes of London life. We
pass on to _what_ a man _is_, over _who_ he is, and what he _has_; and,
with one of the most accurate observers of human character and nature to
whom a man of the world ever sat for his portrait--the inimitable La
Bruyere--when offended with the hollow extravagance of vulgar riches, we
exclaim--"_Tu te trompes, Philemon, si avec ce carrosse brillant, ce
grand nombre de coquins qui te suivent, et ces six betes qui te
trainent, tu penses qu'on t'en estime d'avantage: ou ecarte tout cet
attirail qui t'est etranger, pour penetrer jusq'a toi qui n'es qu'un
fat_."

In London, every man is responsible for himself, and his position is the
consequence of his conduct. If a great author, for example, or artist,
or politician, should choose to outrage the established rules of society
in any essential particular, he is neglected and even shunned in his
private, though he may be admired and lauded in his public capacity.
Society marks the line between the _public_ and the _social_ man; and
this line no eminence, not even that of premier minister of England,
will enable a public man to confound.

Wherever you are invited in London to be introduced to a great man, by
any of his parasites or hangers-on, you may be assured that your great
man is no such thing; you may make up your mind to be presented to some
quack, some hollow-skulled fellow, who makes up by little arts, small
tactics, and every variety of puff, for the want of that inherent
excellence which will enable him to stand alone. These gentlemen form
the Cockney school proper of art, literature, the drama, every thing;
and they go about seeking praise, as a goatsucker hunts insects, with
their mouths wide open; they pursue their prey in troops, like Jackals,
and like them, utter at all times a melancholy, complaining howl; they
imagine that the world is in a conspiracy not to admire them, and they
would bring an action against the world if they could. But as that is
impossible, they are content to rail against the world in good set
terms; they are always puffing in the papers, but in a side-winded way,
yet you can trace them always at work, through the daily, weekly,
monthly periodicals, in desperate exertion to attract public attention.
They have at their head one sublime genius, whom they swear by, and they
admire him the more, the more incomprehensible and oracular he appears
to the rest of mankind.

These are the men who cultivate extensive tracts of forehead, and are
deeply versed in the effective display of depending ringlets and
ornamental whiskers; they dress in black, with white _chokers_, and you
will be sure to find a lot of them at evening parties of the middling
sort of doctors, or the better class of boarding-houses.

This class numbers not merely literary men, but actors, artists,
adventuring politicians, small scientifics, and a thousand others, who
have not energy or endurance to work their way in solitary labour, or
who feel that they do not possess the power to go alone.

Public men in London appear naked at the bar of public opinion; laced
coats, ribands, embroidery, titles, avail nothing, because these things
are common, and have the common fate of common things, to be cheaply
estimated. The eye is satiated with them, they come like shadows, so
depart; but they do not feed the eye of the mind; the understanding is
not the better for such gingerbread; we are compelled to look out for
some more substantial nutriment, and we try the inward man, and test his
capacity. Instead of measuring his bumps, like a landsurveyor, we
dissect his brain, like an anatomist; we estimate him, whether he be
high or low, in whatever department of life, not by what he says he can
do, or means to do, but by what he _has_ done. By this test is every man
of talent tried in London; this is his grand, his formal difficulty, to
get the opportunity of showing what he can do, of being put into
circulation, of having the chance of being tested, like a shilling, by
the _ring_ of the customer and the _bite_ of the critic; for the
opportunity, the chance to edge in, the chink to _wedge_ in, the
_purchase_ whereon to work the length of his lever, he must be ever on
the watch; for the sunshine blink of encouragement, the April shower of
praise, he must await the long winter of "hope deferred" passing away.
Patience, the _courage_ of the man of talent, he must exert for many a
dreary and unrewarded day; he must see the quack and the pretender lead
an undiscerning public by the nose, and say nothing; nor must he exult
when the too-long enduring public at length kicks the pretender and the
quack into deserved oblivion. From many a door that will hereafter
gladly open for him, he must be content to be presently turned away.
Many a scanty meal, many a lonely and unfriended evening, in this vast
wilderness, must he pass in trying on his armour, and preparing himself
for the fight that he still believes _will_ come, and in which his
spirit, strong within him, tells him he must conquer. While the night
yet shrouds him he must labour, and with patient, and happily for him,
if, with religious hope, he watch the first faint glimmerings of the
dawning day; for his day, if he is worthy to behold it, will come, and
he will yet be recompensed "by that time and chance which happeneth to
all." And if his heart fails him, and his coward spirit turns to flee,
often as he sits, tearful, in the solitude of his chamber, will the
remembrance of the early struggles of the immortals shame that coward
spirit. The shade of the sturdy Johnson, hungering, dinnerless, will
mutely reproach him for sinking thus beneath the ills that the
"scholar's life assail." The kindly-hearted, amiable Goldsmith, pursued
to the gates of a prison by a mercenary wretch who fattened upon the
produce of that lovely mind, smiling upon him, will bid him be of good
cheer. A thousand names, that fondly live in the remembrance of our
hearts, will he conjure up, and all will tell the same story of early
want, and long neglect, and lonely friendlessness. Then will reproach
himself, saying, "What am I, that I should quail before the misery that
broke not minds like these? What am I, that I should be exempt from the
earthly fate of the immortals?"

Nor marvel, then, that men who have passed the fiery ordeal, whose power
has been tried and not found wanting, whose nights of probation,
difficulty, and despair are past, and with whom it is now noon, should
come forth, with deportment modest and subdued, exempt from the insolent
assumption of vulgar minds, and their yet more vulgar hostilities and
friendships: that such men as Campbell and Rogers, and a thousand others
in every department of life and letters, should partake of that quietude
of manner, that modesty of deportment, that compassion for the
unfortunate of their class, that unselfish admiration for men who,
successful, have deserved success, that abomination of cliques,
coteries, and _conversaziones_, and all the littleness of inferior fry:
that such men should have parasites, and followers, and hangers-on; or
that, since men like themselves are few and far between, they should
live for and with such men alone.

But thou, O Vanity! thou curse, thou shame, thou sin, with what tides of
_pseudo_ talent hast thou not filled this ambitious town? Ass, dolt,
miscalculator, quack, pretender, how many hast thou befooled, thou
father of multifarious fools? Serpent, tempter, evil one, how many hast
thou seduced from the plough tail, the carpenter's bench, the
schoolmaster's desk, the rural scene, to plunge them into misery and
contempt in this, the abiding-place of their betters, thou unhanged
cheat? Hence the querulous piping against the world and the times, and
the neglect of genius, and appeals to posterity, and damnation of
managers, publishers, and the public; hence cliques, and _claqueurs_,
and coteries, and the would-if-I-could-be aristocracy of letters; hence
bickerings, quarellings, backbitings, slanderings, and reciprocity of
contempt; hence the impossibility of literary union, and the absolute
necessity imposed upon the great names of our time of shunning, like a
pestilence, the hordes of vanity-struck individuals who would tear the
coats off their backs in desperate adherence to the skirts. Thou, too, O
Vanity! art responsible for greater evils:--Time misspent, industry
misdirected, labour unrequited, because uselessly or imprudently
applied: poverty and isolation, families left unprovided for, pensions,
solicitations, patrons, meannesses, subscriptions!

True talent, on the contrary, in London, meets its reward, if it lives
to be rewarded; but it has, of its own right, no _social_ pre-eminence,
nor is it set above or below any of the other aristocracies, in what we
may take the liberty of calling its private life. In this, as in all
other our aristocracies, men are regarded not as of their set, but as of
themselves: they are _individually_ admired, not worshipped as a
congregation: their social influence is not aggregated, though their
public influence may be. When a man, of whatever class, leaves his
closet, he is expected to meet society upon equal terms: the scholar,
the man of rank, the politician, the _millionaire_, must merge in the
gentleman: if he chooses to individualize his aristocracy in his own
person, he must do so at home, for it will not be understood or
submitted to any where else.

The rewards of intellectual labour applied to purposes of remote, or not
immediately appreciable usefulness, as in social literature, and the
loftier branches of the fine arts, are, with us, so few, as hardly to be
worth mentioning, and pity 'tis that it should be so. The law, the
church, the army, and the faculty of physic, have not only their fair
and legitimate remuneration for independent labour, but they have their
several prizes, to which all who excel, may confidently look forward
when the time of weariness and exhaustion shall come; when the pressure
of years shall slacken exertion, and diminished vigour crave some haven
of repose, or, at the least, some mitigated toil, with greater security
of income: some place of honour with repose--the ambition of declining
years. The influence of the great prize of the law, the church, and
other professions in this country, has often been insisted upon with
great reason: it has been said, and truly said, that not only do these
prizes reward merit already passed through its probationary stages, but
serve as inducements to all who are pursuing the same career. It is not
so much the example of the prize-holder, as the _prize_, that stimulates
men onward and upward: without the hope of reaching one of those
comfortable stations, hope would be extinguished, talent lie fallow,
energy be limited to the mere attainment of subsistence; great things
would not be done, or attempted, and we would behold only a dreary level
of indiscriminate mediocrity. If this be true of professions, in which,
after a season of severe study, a term of probation, the knowledge
acquired in early life sustains the professor, with added experience of
every day, throughout the rest of his career, with how much more force
will it apply to professions or pursuits, in which the mind is
perpetually on the rack to produce novelties, and in which it is
considered derogatory to a man to reproduce his own ideas, copy his own
pictures, or multiply, after the same model, a variety of characters and
figures!

A few years of hard reading, constant attention in the chambers of the
conveyancer, the equity craftsman, the pleader, and a few years more of
that disinterested observance of the practice of the courts, which is
liberally afforded to every young barrister, and indeed which many enjoy
throughout life, and he is competent, with moderate talent, to protect
the interests of his client, and with moderate mental labour to make a
respectable figure in his profession. In like manner, four or five years
sedulous attendance on lectures, dissections, and practice of the
hospitals, enables your physician to see how little remedial power
exists in his boasted art; knowing this, he feels pulses, and orders a
recognized routine of draughts and pills with the formality which makes
the great secret of his profession. When the patient dies, nature, of
course, bears the blame; and when nature, happily uninterfered with,
recovers his patient, the doctor stands on tiptoe. Henceforward his
success is determined by other than medical sciences: a pillbox and
pair, a good house in some recognized locality, Sunday dinners, a bit of
a book, grand power of head-shaking, shoulder-shrugging, bamboozling
weak-minded men and women, and, if possible, a religious connexion.

For the clergyman, it is only necessary that he should be orthodox,
humble, and pious; that he should on no occasion, right or wrong, set
himself in opposition to his ecclesiastical superiors; that he should
preach unpretending sermons; that he should never make jokes, nor
understand the jokes of another: this is all that he wants to get on
respectably. If he is ambitious, and wishes one of the great prizes, he
must have been a free-thinking reviewer, have written pamphlets, or made
a fuss about the Greek particle, or, what will avail him more than all,
have been tutor to a minister of state.

Thus you perceive, for men whose education is _intellectual_, but whose
practice is more or less _mechanical_, you have many great,
intermediate, and little prizes in the lottery of life; but where, on
the contrary, are the prizes for the historian, transmitting to
posterity the events, and men, and times long since past; where the
prize of the analyst of mind, of the dramatic, the epic, or the lyric
poet, the essayist, and all whose works are likely to become the
classics of future times; where the prize of the public journalist, who
points the direction of public opinion, and, himself without place,
station, or even name, teaches Governments their duty, and prevents
Ministers of State becoming, by hardihood or ignorance, intolerable
evils; where the prize of the great artist, who has not employed himself
making faces for hire, but who has worked in loneliness and isolation,
living, like Barry, upon raw apples and cold water, that he might
bequeath to his country some memorial worthy the age in which he lived,
and the art _for_ which he lived? For these men, and such as these, are
no prizes in the lottery of life; a grateful country sets apart for them
no places where they can retire in the full enjoyment of their fame;
condemned to labour for their bread, not in a dull mechanical routine of
professional, official, or business-like duties, but in the most severe,
most wearing of all labour, _the labour of the brain_, they end where
they begun. With struggling they begin life, with struggling they make
their way in life, with struggling they end life; poverty drives away
friends, and reputation multiplies enemies. The man whose thoughts will
become the thoughts of our children, whose minds will be reflected in
the mirror of _his_ mind, who will store in their memories his household
words, and carry his lessons in their hearts, dies not unwillingly, for
he has nothing in life to look forward to; closes with indifference his
eyes on a prospect where no gleam of hope sheds its sunlight on the
broken spirit; he dies, is borne by a few humble friends to a lowly
sepulchre, and the newspapers of some days after give us the following
paragraph:--

"We regret to be obliged to state that Dr ----, or ---- ----, Esq. (as
the case may be) died, on Saturday last at his lodgings two pair back in
Back Place, Pimlico, (or) at his cottage (a miserable cabin where he
retired to die) at Kingston-upon-Thames. It is our melancholy duty to
inform our readers that this highly gifted and amiable man, who for so
many years delighted and improved the town, and who was a most strenuous
supporter of the (Radical or Conservative) cause, (_it is necessary to
set forth this miserable statement to awaken the gratitude of faction
towards the family of the dead_,) has left a rising family totally
unprovided for. We are satisfied that it is only necessary to allude to
this distressing circumstance, in order to enlist the sympathies, &c.
&c., (in short, _to get up a subscription_)."

We confess we are at a loss to understand why the above advertisement
should be kept stereotyped, to be inserted with only the interpolation
of name and date, when any man dies who has devoted himself to pursuits
of a purely intellectual character. Nor are we unable to discover in the
melancholy, and, as it would seem, unavoidable fates of such men,
substantial grounds of that diversion of the aristocracy of talent to
the pursuit of professional distinction, accompanied by profit, of which
our literature, art, and science are now suffering, and will continue to
suffer, the consequences.

In a highly artificial state of society, where a command, not merely of
the essentials, but of some of the superfluities of life are requisite
as passports to society, no man will willingly devote himself to
pursuits which will render him an outlaw, and his family dependent on
the tardy gratitude of an indifferent world. The stimulus of fame will
be inadequate to maintain the energies even of _great_ minds, in a
contest of which the victories are wreaths of barren bays. Nor will any
man willingly consume the morning of his days in amassing intellectual
treasures for posterity, when his contemporaries behold him dimming with
unavailing tears his twilight of existence, and dying with the worse
than deadly pang, the consciousness that those who are nearest and
dearest to his heart must eat the bread of charity. Nor is it quite
clear to our apprehension, that the prevalent system of providing for
merely intellectual men, by a State annuity or pension, is the best that
can be devised: it is hard that the pensioned aristocracy of talent
should be exposed to the taunt of receiving the means of their
subsistence from this or that minister, upon suppositions of this or
that ministerial assistance which, whether true or false, cannot fail to
derogate from that independent dignity of mind which is never
extinguished in the breast of the true aristocrat of talent, save by
unavailing struggles, long-continued, with the unkindness of fortune.

We wish the aristocracy of power to think over this, and so very
heartily bid them farewell.

* * * * *




THE LOST LAMB.

BY DELTA.

A shepherd laid upon his bed,
With many a sigh, his aching head,
For him--his favourite boy--on whom
Had fallen death, a sudden doom.
"But yesterday," with sobs he cried,
"Thou wert, with sweet looks, at my side,
Life's loveliest blossom, and to-day,
Woes me! thou liest a thing of clay!
It cannot be that thou art gone;
It cannot be, that now, alone,
A grey-hair'd man on earth am I,
Whilst thou within its bosom lie?
Methinks I see thee smiling there,
With beaming eyes, and sunny hair,
As thou were wont, when fondling me,
To clasp my neck from off my knee!
Was it thy voice? Again, oh speak,
My boy, or else my heart will break!"

Each adding to that father's woes,
A thousand bygone scenes arose;
At home--a field--each with its joy,
Each with its smile--and all his boy!
Now swell'd his proud rebellious breast,
With darkness and with doubt opprest;
Now sank despondent, while amain
Unnerving tears fell down like rain:
Air--air--he breathed, yet wanted breath--
It was not life--it was not death--
But the drear agony between,
Where all is heard, and felt, and seen--
The wheels of action set ajar;
The body with the soul at war.
'Twas vain, 'twas vain; he could not find
A haven for his shipwreck'd mind;
Sleep shunn'd his pillow. Forth he went--
The noon from midnight's azure tent
Shone down, and, with serenest light,
Flooded the windless plains of night;
The lake in its clear mirror show'd
Each little star that twinkling glow'd;
Aspens, that quiver with a breath,
Were stirless in that hush of death;
The birds were nestled in their bowers;
The dewdrops glitter'd on the flowers;
Almost it seem'd as pitying Heaven
A while its sinless calm had given
To lower regions, lest despair
Should make abode for ever there;
So tranquil--so serene--so bright--
Brooded o'er earth the wings of night.

O'ershadow'd by its ancient yew,
His sheep-cot met the shepherd's view;
And, placid, in that calm profound,
His silent flocks lay slumbering round:
With flowing mantle, by his side,
Sudden, a stranger he espied,
Bland was his visage, and his voice
Soften'd the heart, yet bade rejoice.--
"Why is thy mourning thus?" he said,
"Why thus doth sorrow bow thy head?
Why faltereth thus thy faith, that so
Abroad despairing thou dost go?
As if the God who gave thee breath,
Held not the keys of life and death!
When from the flocks that feed about,
A single lamb thou choosest out,
Is it not that which seemeth best
That thou dost take, yet leave the rest?
Yes! such thy wont; and, even so,
With his choice little ones below
Doth the Good Shepherd deal; he breaks
Their earthly bands, and homeward takes,
Early, ere sin hath render'd dim
The image of the seraphim!"

Heart-struck, the shepherd home return'd;
Again within his bosom burn'd
The light of faith; and, from that day,
He trode serene life's onward way.

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