Part 8
As our latter end comes about, we reason on and take stock of our friendships, chiefly those of our youth. Our statistics, accumulating with time, enable us to grasp the subject in its fulness.
People are apt to call their acquaintances their friends because it sounds more important, but this is a mistake; if I am known to have been on intimate terms with a man for twenty or thirty years and I speak of him as an old acquaintance, I have at least the satisfaction of telling the truth.
A community of interests may last a lifetime, and it may be as strong as that of the banks, which would argue efficiency. Such is the friendship of circumstance, but should the conditions change it would vanish.
It seems to be a moral law of our species that new friends, however gratefully they accept one’s services, so long as they are needed, have a disposition to drop off when they can no longer profit by them. Such friendships are like a fever which runs its course; a fever sometimes affecting a whole family, and then not leaving a symptom behind.
Nevertheless, a good acquaintance is a very pleasant thing, even though its benefits on both sides may balance and explain each other.
There are some who practice friendship quite naturally, others who are only skilled in it as a game. It would prove amusing to make a good classification of one’s friends, as is done of the animal kingdom, by dividing them into warm-blooded, (hæmatotherma) and cold-blooded friends (hæmatocrya). We are all too fond of forming friendships. I have often observed that nothing is more fatiguing than what is generally called a night’s rest, unless it be the dream and its final result, that we have made friends! Dreams are as laborious and realistic as realities; the nervous powers are put through walks and conversings with strangers, as well as acquaintances, some dead long ago. One has introductions, dialogues as with the living; but what is so amusing and ludicrous, many dream that they have made new friends, to find it was in their sleep!
Regarding friendship, how often it is only theoretic; intimacy without intercourse; instead of active only passive sympathy, the philosophical equivalent of cement, such as isinglass or glue! When friends have a common interest, how they stick to each other! There is still another kind of friendship of an agueish type, which one might call intermittent. It has some foundation in a community of nature, but is unable to sustain itself continuously, showing itself in fits. It is the most aggravating of all social alliances, and would be better extinct.
At Brighton I enjoyed the inestimable friendship of Sir David Scott, a leading magistrate there, of very high social rank—in fact, the most important personage of the place at a time when it needed men of influence to direct it towards its present unrivalled position.
As a young man, Sir David Scott succeeded to the baronetcy of Sir James Sibbald, of Sillwood Park, and he bore the addition of K.H.G., an order that was extinguished with the severance of Hanover from our ruling sovereigns, on the accession of Victoria. This order, the use of which has been very much replaced by that of the Bath, was conferred on Sir David by George the Fourth, whose life he probably saved by having a madman arrested at Brighton, who was provided with pistols to shoot the king. Sir David, a true gentleman without being a courtier, and therefore at home in all that related to good breeding, once gave me an amusing account of his interview with the “first gentleman in Europe,” telling with much gusto an anecdote of the king’s studied elegance even in taking a pinch of snuff. “I perceive, Sir David,” he said, “that you take snuff; allow me to offer you a pinch from my box.” This Sir David took, shaking his thumb and finger over the box, as one ordinarily does, not to waste any of the precious powder on withdrawing the hand.
This was the king’s opportunity of showing himself more advanced in gentility than his subject. He said, “Now, Sir David, permit me to try a pinch from your box.” The baronet drew forth his box and presented it to the king, who, having secured his pinch, withdrew his thumb and finger with careful rapidity, evidently lest any particles that had been touched should fall back into the box, and so render the remainder unfit for use.
Sir David gave me an amusing account of how the official who received him at court and introduced him to the king’s presence became the great man that he was. It was Sir William Knighton, who had accompanied the Marquis of Wellesley as his physician to Spain. It was said that Dr. Knighton would never draw his salary, which he evidently did not wish to be paid in money. So at the conclusion of his service the marquis sent him to the king with important documents, which exactly suited him for the exercise of his effrontery and self-assurance. The gentleman-in-waiting, having an appreciative and loyal mind, said, “You will be very much surprised when you come to see the king.” Dr. Knighton replied, “He will be very much surprised when he comes to see me!”
So it turned out. The king was very much struck with the physician’s manner and aptitude for affairs, and before long made him his “Privy Purse.”
At a time when the now proud town of Brighton was only half built, Sir David purchased the estate of an Oriental Company on the west cliff, facing the sea. A building that was already erected on it before the project failed, he converted into a mansion, which he called Sillwood House: this he occupied himself, with his family. On the ground in front were built two elegant streets, called Sillwood and Oriental Places. Later, on a portion of the ground, he erected for himself a villa with an entrance on the Western Road, and laid out a charming garden and shrubbery there, where he lived for many years, making his home the resort of a fashionable and cultured circle. He was often spoken of as the “King of Brighton,” and he certainly exercised great influence there as a Conservative leader. At the same time, he supported every charity in the place, and materially assisted the Rev. H. M. Wagner, the then all-powerful vicar, in planting the town with churches.
Sir David Scott had a pension given him by the Government for saving the king’s life; this the Liberal Parliament, on coming into power, withdrew—sorry, perhaps, that such a life had been saved.
XXXIV.
A very remarkable character who used to visit Brighton was the Countess de Montalembert, mother of the nobleman of that name who made himself known in France. She was the daughter and heiress of Mr. Forbes, whose “Oriental Memoirs” were much esteemed in his time. This lady had friends among all sorts of people. While chuckling over scandalous and not decent letters from Lady Aldeburgh, she would be receiving the visits of such uncontaminated beings as Lady Mary Pelham, and conferring with her on religion. In her invitations to me she would one day say, “I want you this evening to come and meet the religious set:” this would be such men as the Robert Andersons. Another time it would be the worldly set that she was to receive and I was to meet; and this was certainly the most pleasant set of the two.
She had great _naïveté_, and was full of fun, trenching often on those sources of humour which are forbidden to delicate minds. Her literary occupation at the time when I saw most of her (in 1837) was in writing a “Life of King David”—a work that she completed with great self-gratulation, and which, at her death, her executors burned without estimating its worth, the quicker to dispose of her numerous papers.
Her husband was a baron at Louis Philippe’s court, and received the higher title from that temporary king. His wife, being a Protestant, was not admissible at court—a difficulty which she readily overcame by crossing over the way to the Catholic faith; and this she quitted when it was no longer for her interest to remain in it.
She had two sons. She cared only for the elder one. He lived in Paris, and at her death inherited her fortune. She died of a quinsy at her house in Curzon Street, about a year after the time when I saw most of her.
She was sprinkled and crossed, at baptism, by the name of Rose, which name may have suited her well in her bloomy days, for late in life she had a pleasing face, full of lively expression, with a fine portly figure. She was fond of sketching herself seated on a music-stool, which she called a Rose sitting on a Thorn.
In the death of friends whom one sees from first to last, witnessing their gradual rise and fall simultaneously with our own, there is nothing striking; but how different the effect on our minds when we lose sight of them in their prime, and reflect that their sturdy figures, seeming to be still unobnoxious to change, lie prostrate in their graves! We recall them, and see them still in full activity; they appear to have only gone away! So was it with the kindest of men, my best of friends, Sir David Scott, whose name and goodness deserve a better monument. So it was with Mr. Wagner, whose quick limbs and upright pleasant face appear to be moving through the streets of Brighton at this hour! I see him now rapidly turning the corner of Castle Square into the Old Steyne! Then comes back into view the rapid step of Horace Smith, another celebrity of the place, with a pun almost out of his mouth before we were within hearing of each other! They all seem still alive!
Wagner walked through the streets as if they were his own, reviewing the people as he passed as a general would an army, now stopping, speaking, laughing, now pushing on again. He had been tutor in the Duke of Wellington’s family. The wonder is that, with his firmness of purpose and successful handling of men, he did not reach a bishopric up to that of Canterbury itself. He might have led even the House of Lords by the nose. But Brighton was to him an episcopal see. He enjoyed the patronage of nearly all the livings there, with the monopoly of marriages, births, and deaths; building church after church himself out of his own large resources and the pockets of willing or unwilling friends.
There was an abomination of doctors at Brighton in those days, potent firms, chiefly on the Steyne; but the class is soon forgotten, since they leave nothing behind them but their patients and their shops.
Among apothecaries, Newnham was prince. One saw him walking across the Steyne, then red-bricked for foot-passengers only, he wagging his head with a look of triumph, and in gaiter attire; his face nearly six feet above his shoes, with an expression on it of the miracles that may be achieved by salted senna alone, not to mention the openings artificially made in veins with the mere thumb and finger. But Newnham was a friendly, knowing character. I think often of the advice he tendered me as a young physician, “Never dine with a patient. Such has been my rule through life; for if you do, sooner or later you are sure to let out the fool!”
I must not omit the name, in these brief memorials, of my cultured friend, George Hall, a physician and still more than that, a gentleman. As travelling Redcliffe Fellow, he spent ten years in visiting Greek and Italian and Turkish cities, and the chief courts of Europe. He was too refined for a Brighton physician; few of his patients were to his taste. When summoned to those who suited him best, he passed hours with them instead of sharing his time fairly among all. He had some noble blood in him, according to rumour; but it was of a sinister strain. This held possession of him secretly, and influenced his life; but he found consolation in marrying Lady Hood, a peeress of very considerable fortune, and in retiring from the vulgarity of physic.
The pun sacrifices the sense and purport to the playful analogy. In the practice of this Horace Smith expended the conversational portions of his life. I told him, at one of Mrs. Smith’s evening receptions, that a man known to us had injured a limb while travelling in Norway. His reply was, “I suppose a bear came and Gnaw’wayed his arm.” His daughter, Miss Smith then, and I believe so for life, was a quick and clever match for her father in drawing him out. She had an open, good-tempered face, with the eyes well apart, to which her nose, following suit, owed a flatness. Most auditors must have observed that all whom Nature has favoured with a lying-down nose were let fall by their nurse when babies in arms. Thackeray was one of these. One would have thought they would have fallen on their backs; but no, they all fall on their noses.
The only authority for punning that I know of is Aristotle; he recommends it to a pleader. Horace Smith’s puns are yet remembered; the one on elder-flower water was his best.
The evening receptions at Brighton were pleasant pastimes, especially those of Lady Carhampton and the Hon. Mrs. Mostyn, daughter of Mr. Thrale, of Johnsonian memory. This lady, in Sillwood or Oriental Place, near the Horace Smiths, had a suite of receiving-rooms winding all round the mansion, hung with pictures. In one room was a couch enclosed by a silken canopy within a recess, above which was gilded in large letters, “MON REPOS.”
XXXV.
Any one who has enjoyed the help of an acute mind in life must have concluded that the human creature was not designed to be very intellectual. It has great faculties, but these can do little more than provide munificently for its wants. It solves with facility all the problems of luxury and amusement, but can for the most part no further go. Nevertheless, there are a few of an intellectual caste, living apart from the vulgar and ostentatious; these force their thoughts on unwilling recipients, and in what they produce give intimations of a higher race than that of man being still possible, though scarcely to be expected to spring from the few, since the grovellers have so immense a majority.
The clergy of Brighton were adapted more to the wants of the congregations than to those of religion. One likes the clergy. They have a good education up to the age of one or two and twenty, and their profession is gentlemanly. If they renewed their knowledge of science from time to time, they would not interpolate nature with dogma, the effect of which is more damaging than they can conceive. To the eye clarified by impartial thought, it is like a pimple on the face of a pretty girl; but it will run its little course.
While at Brighton I first knew Count Pepoli, the head of an illustrious Bolognese family. He was the author of some pleasant works, and wrote the opera of “I Puritani” for his friend Bellini, the composer who furnished the music. He was banished from his country, and had his estates put under forfeiture by Pius IX., whose utmost science could do no better than proclaim the dogma of an immaculate conception, and announce himself infallible, as occupying upon earth the rotten throne of an Almighty. Yet this gentleman, by the aid of his superstitious adherents, was able to expel the best families from Bologna, for not wishing to retain him in his place of civil chief—put into that place by those supernatural chemists, the cardinals, who, by mumbling cabalistic words over a drink of wine, could turn it into blood, and, by showing the whites of their eyes, could metamorphose a mouthful of dry bread into the flesh of Christ. They mean well, they administer to existing wants; but the drinking and the eating of these would be cannibalism of the worst description, and this they have not the imagination to perceive.
Pepoli reached England a poor man, though the owner of many palaces and lands. He supported himself by becoming, almost at once, Professor of the Italian Language, Literature, and Antiquities at the University of London, in Gower Street; and he retained this post for some twenty years. When the pope was shown the shortest cut out of Rome, Pepoli rushed back to Bologna, and got hold of his magnificent palaces once more, and recovered his lordly position.
Some twenty years after this, when I last visited Italy, on my way to Rome I stopped at Bologna, and inquired of my landlord, Pellagrini, the way to the Palazzo Pepoli, which I accordingly sought and found. It was a massive, ancient structure, and on inquiring of the janitor if the count was at home, was informed that his kinswoman, the Countess Maria Pepoli, lived there; and I was directed to his residence, which was a large building occupying one side of an open _Place_, and which seemed only to need a sentinel to complete its pretensions to being a royal palace.
Unfortunately for me, the count was at his country seat.
This nobleman, while in London, married a Scotch lady. My old friend, Mr. Plattnaur, kept up a constant correspondence with the count, informing him of all that happened to his English friends. Plattnaur was very intimate with Mr. and Mrs. Carlyle. The lady once asked when he would join them at dinner. He replied, “If you please, to-morrow.” “Yes,” she answered, “do come to-morrow: it will be the first day of the chicken.”
I have not spoken of Sir Matthew Tierney, a physician of Irish extraction, a good-looking plausible man, always equal to the occasion, whatever might fall in his way. He had the look of a baronet when once you knew he was one—a title that he won easily, by a stroke of worldly wisdom. When George No. 4 was a Brighton man, reposing under that Chinese umbrella, the Pavilion, he was surrounded by physicians, one of whom, Dr. Bankhead, I was intimately acquainted with in Italy during 1831 and 1832. Bankhead was a powerful-looking Scotchman, with a large red face and hair to match, living abroad for reasons, and practising among the English residents at Florence, by whom he was much liked and courted, and as little respected as many of them were respected by themselves. But all liked his anecdotes of life high and low, more especially so did the men after dinner, when the ladies had left the table.
He told me that he used to meet the king’s physicians every morning before visiting the royal patient, and that he and the others invariably passed away an hour in inventing scandalous stories about the aristocracy, calculated to give amusement and pleasure to their patient. He had been Lord Londonderry’s physician; with him he had lived in town and country, and so had become acquainted with the noblest in the land, and with all their foibles.
Bankhead knew the history of Tierney’s rise to the summit, which had a very humble beginning. The king, always self-indulgent, was of course always ill. At that time his favourite groom, who was suffering under circumstances similar to those of his master, and could get no attention from the medical men of the palace, consulted Tierney. That astute physician saw his chance, and giving the groom as much care as he would have bestowed on royalty itself, effected a cure, which, commending itself to the king, led to Tierney being summoned, and to his advice being followed with marked advantage.
Sir Matthew kept up a handsome house at Brighton, on the Grand Parade, where he resided in the season, living in London during the fashionable months. He was a favourite, and a man of very pleasant manners.
As to manners, they make the man more than doth the tailor, though he be a Stultz or a Poole. Sir Matthew had the manner of a man of mark, which consisted in his looking as if he had an answer ready to any question before it was asked. When he came into the committee-room of the hospital, it was as if he had entered to do all the business of the meeting, and to put everything right, taking it as granted that confusion was in the ascendant.
It was so with Sir David Scott. His quiet, pleasant face was a signal for all to look at him, and to feel that what he had to say would be more refreshing than anything they could utter themselves.
Horace Smith’s face was of that free, smileless expression, which clearly asked, “Do you want to laugh? for, if so, I’ll make you do so without further notice.”
As to Wagner’s face, it was one not easily defined. The expression was pleasing without being quite agreeable. It bore the candid threat of entering on some business transaction, useful in itself, but declining in interest the nearer it approached the amount of subscriptions still necessary to carry out as it deserved his beneficent scheme. Wagner in one thing only was unscrupulous and devoid of mercy—it was in ordering money out of one pocket into another for the general good, as if parting with it was the chief object in life, and to assist another in doing so was benevolence itself, such as few were capable of feeling towards a fellow-man.
How successful he was in taking every one into partnership with him in such matters!
XXXVI.
In those days Brighton was full of charm, more so than now by a long measure. There was no three-shilling railway; you went to and from London with blood horses, driven by those nimble whips, Sir St. Vincent Cotton one-half of the way, and by the Marquis of Worcester the other half, within five hours. A crowd saw your splendid equipage start, whether from Piccadilly or Castle Square. It was called “The Age,” and was a wonder of the age.
Brighton then had a season; November was the choicest month. The weather then was delicious, and the upper stratum of society, by a mild upheaval, was moved bodily from the metropolis to the sea, without even a dress being crumpled or a lace torn.
There were good angels in those days, as there are now; and if one was not privileged, as I was not, to see them under cover in such a conservatory as the mansion of the Duchess of St. Albans, one could meet them in full bloom out of doors on the esplanade.
That beneficent duchess and her worthy successor, Miss Burdett-Coutts, were constant visitors at Brighton during the autumn.
I had many inducements to be at Brighton. I was acquainted with all the medical profession there; Dr. Price and the skilful Mr. Taylor, Mr. Lawrence, Mr. Furner, were my particular friends, and I knew the principal residents of the place.
I undertook the work of the dispensary, to which I was physician for five years, and I joined the Committee of the Sussex County Hospital, which was the pet establishment of such men as Lords Egremont and Chichester and Munster, of the Duke of Devonshire and Mr. Lawrence Peel, all of whom would spend a pleasant gossiping hour in the committee-room from time to time; none of whom forgot the wants of the institution.
While I was chairman of the committee it fell to me to read out a letter from Mr. Lawrence Peel, announcing his gift of, I think, two thousand pounds, as a mark of gratitude for Lady Jane Peel’s recovery from illness.
When I see a portrait of Lord Hartington, the massive countenance brings the Duke of Devonshire back into my mind. I need no portraiture, but the name to bring the Earl of Munster back to memory. These great men were as much at home with us all as they were with each other, enjoying the chat and the laugh without mannerism or _hauteur_.
It is through manners that all our intercourse is carried on, and one would suppose that they strictly represented the person. It is not so to any great extent; fashion influences them, and they become modified by imitation, so that they cease to be anything very different from current coin; like it, having the different qualities of silvery, coppery, or golden; the same person expressing himself in all three to different sorts of men—a guinea’s worth to the physician, a shilling’s worth to the beggar.