Part 12

But, though a special divinity always hedged, as it still hedges, the travels of an Eldest Son, the more modest journeyings of his parents were not accomplished without considerable form and fuss. Lord and Lady Proudflesh or Mr. and Mrs. Goldmore travelled all over Europe in their own carriage. It was planted bodily on the deck of the steamer, so that its privileged occupants could endure the torments of the crossing in dignified seclusion; and, when once the solid shore of the Continent was safely reached, it was drawn by an endless succession of post-horses, ridden by postillions, with the valet and maid (like those who pertained to Sir Leicester and Lady Dedlock) "affectionate in the rumble." The inside of the carriage was a miracle of ingenuity. Space was economized with the most careful art, and all the appliances of travel--looking-glasses and luncheon-baskets, lamps and maps, newspapers and books--were bestowed in their peculiar and appropriate corners. I possess a "dining equipage" which made the tour of Europe not once but often in the service of a Diplomatist. It is shaped something like a large egg, and covered with shagreen. It contains a tumbler, a sandwich-box, and a silver-handled knife, fork, and spoon; the handle of each of these tools unscrews, and in their hollow interiors the Diplomatist carried his salt, sugar, and pepper. On the roof of the carriage was the more substantial luggage. A travelling-bath, though not unknown, was rather an exceptional luxury, and, according to our modern notions, it was painfully small. A silver tub which sufficed for the ablutions of the great Duke of Marlborough through the campaigns which changed the face of Europe now serves as a rose-bowl at the banquets of Spencer House.

The trunks, which were strapped to the roof of the travelling-carriage, were of a peculiar form--very shallow, and so shaped as to fit into one another and occupy every inch of space. These were called Imperials, and just now I referred to Tom Hughes's undeserved strictures on them. The passage fits neatly into our present subject: "I love vagabonds, only I prefer poor to rich ones. Couriers and ladies' maids, imperials and travelling-carriages, are an abomination unto me--I cannot away with them." To me, on the contrary, the very word "Imperial" (when divested of political associations) is pleasant. It appeals to the historic sense. It carries us back to Napoleon's campaigns, and to that wonderful house on wheels--his travelling-carriage--now enshrined at Madame Tussaud's. It even titillates the gastronomic instinct by recalling that masterly method of cooking a fowl which bears the name of Marengo. The great Napoleon had no notion of fighting his battles on an empty stomach, so, wherever he was, a portable kitchen, in the shape of a travelling-carriage, was close at hand. The cook and his _marmitons_ travelled inside, with the appliances for making a charcoal fire at a moment's notice, while the Imperials on the roof contained the due supply of chickens, eggs, bread, and Bordeaux. In the preparation of a meal under such conditions time was money--nay, rather, it was Empire. The highest honours were bestowed on the most expeditious method, and the method called after Marengo took exactly twenty minutes.

Here is testimony much more recent. Lady Dorothy Nevill, in the volume of "Reminiscences" which she has lately given to the world, thus describes her youthful journeys between her London and her Norfolk homes: "It took us two long days to get to Wolterton, and the cost must have been considerable. We went in the family coach with four post-horses, whilst two 'fourgons' conveyed the luggage." But travelling abroad was a still more majestic ceremonial: "We were a large party--six of ourselves, as well as two maids, a footman, and French cook; nor must I forget a wonderful courier, covered with gold and braid. He preceded our cavalcade and announced the imminent arrival of a great English Milord and his suite. We had two fourgons to hold the _batterie de cuisine_ and our six beds, which had to be unpacked and made up every night. We had, besides the family coach and a barouche, six saddle horses, and two attendant grooms."

Travel in those brave days of old was a dignified, a leisurely, and a comfortable process. How different is Travel in these degenerate times! For the young man rejoicing in his strength it means, as Tom Hughes said forty years ago, "getting over a couple of thousand miles for three-pound-ten; going round Ireland, with a return ticket, in a fortnight; dropping your copy of Tennyson on the top of a Swiss mountain, or pulling down the Danube in an Oxford racing-boat." For those who have reached maturer years it may mean a couple of nights in Paris, just to see the first performance of a new play and to test the merits of the latest restaurant, or it may mean a week in New York to study the bearings of the Presidential election and to gather fresh views of the Silver Question. Dr. Lunn kindly invites the more seriously minded to a Conference at Grindelwald, where we can combine the delights of Alpine scenery and undenominational religion; and "the son of a well-known member of the House of Lords" offers to conduct us personally through "A Lion and Rhinoceros Hunting Party in Somaliland," or "A Scientific Expedition to Central Africa, to visit the supposed cradle of the human race and the site of the Garden of Eden." Nothing of Travelling-carriages and Imperials here! No "maid and valet affectionate in the rumble." All the pomp and circumstance, all the ease and calm, of Travel have vanished, and with them all sense of independence and responsibility. The modern traveller is shot like a bullet through a tunnel, or hauled like a parcel up a hill. He certainly sees the world at very little cost, but he sees it under wonderfully uncomfortable conditions.

XXVIII

ACCOMPLISHMENTS

A pictorial critic, commending the water-colour painting of Mr. Arthur Rich, says that, after examining his firm and serious work, "it is impossible to think that there is anything trivial in the art of Aquarelle--that it is, as has been said, 'a thing Aunts do.'"

_A thing Aunts do._ I linger on the words, for they suggest deep thoughts. Many and mysterious are the tricks of language--not least so the subtle law by which certain relationships inevitably suggest peculiar traits. Thus the Grandmother stands to all time as the type of benevolent feebleness; the Stepmother was branded by classical antiquity as Unjust; and Thackeray's Mrs. Gashleigh and Mrs. Chuff are the typical Mothers-in-Law. The Father is commonly the "Heavy Father" of fiction and the drama. The Mother is always quoted with affection, as in "Mother-wit," our Mother-country, and our Mother-tongue. "A Brother," ever since the days of Solomon, "is born for adversity," and a Brother-officer implies a loyal friend. A Sister is the type of Innocence, with just a faint tinge or _nuance_ of pitying contempt, as when the Vainglorious Briton speaks of the "Sister Country" across St. George's Channel, or the hubristic Oxonian sniggers at the "Sister University" of Cambridge. Eldest and Younger Sons again, as I have before now had occasion to point out, convey two quite different sets of ideas, and this discrepancy has not escaped the notice of the social Poet, who observes that--

"Acres and kine and tenements and sheep Enrich the Eldest, while the Younger Sons Monopolize the talents and the duns."

"My Uncle," in colloquial phrase, signifies the merchant who transacts his business under the sign of the Three Golden Balls; and to these expressive relationships must be added Auntship. "A thing Aunts do," says the pictorial critic; and the contumelious phrase is not of yesterday, for in 1829 a secularly-minded friend complained that young Mr. William Gladstone, then an Undergraduate at Christ Church, had "mixed himself up so much with the St. Mary Hall and Oriel set, who are really, for the most part, only fit to live with maiden aunts and keep tame rabbits." To paint in water-colour and to keep tame rabbits are pursuits which to the superficial gaze have little in common, though both are, or were, characteristic of Aunts, and both are, in some sense, accomplishments, demanding natural taste, acquired skill, patience, care, a delicate touch, and a watchful eye. Perhaps these were the particular accomplishments in which the traditional Aunt "specialized," though she had never heard that bad word; but, if she chose to diffuse her energies more widely, the world was all before her where to choose; and, by a singular reversal of the law of progress, there were more "accomplishments" to solicit her attention a hundred years ago than there are to-day.

When the most fascinating of all heroines, Di Vernon, anticipated posterity by devoting her attention to politics, field sports, and classical literature, she enumerated, among the more feminine accomplishments which she had discarded, "sewing a tucker, working cross-stitch, and making a pudding"; and she instanced, among the symbols of orthodox femininity "a shepherdess wrought in worsted, a broken-backed spinet, a lute with three strings, rock-work, shell-work, and needle-work." We clear the century with a flying leap, and find ourselves in the company of a model matron, with surroundings substantially unchanged: "Mrs. Bayham-Badger was surrounded in the drawing-room by various objects indicative of her painting a little, playing the piano a little, playing the guitar a little, playing the harp a little, singing a little, working a little, reading a little, writing poetry a little, and botanizing a little. If I add to the little list of her accomplishments that she rouged a little, I do not mean that there was any harm in it." Miss Volumnia Dedlock's accomplishments, though belonging to the same period, were slightly different: "Displaying in early life a pretty talent for cutting ornaments out of coloured paper, and also singing to the guitar in the Spanish tongue and propounding French conundrums in country houses, she passed the twenty years of her existence between twenty and forty in a sufficiently agreeable manner. Lapsing then out of date, and being considered to bore mankind by her vocal performances in the Spanish language, she retired to Bath." Perhaps she had been educated by Miss Monflathers, "who was at the head of the head Boarding and Day Establishment in the town," and whose gloss on the didactic ditty of the Busy Bee so confounded the emissary from the Waxworks.

"In books, or work, or healthful play

is quite right as far as genteel children are concerned, and in their case 'work' means painting on velvet, fancy needle-work, or embroidery." Do even Aunts paint on velvet, or cut ornaments out of coloured paper, in this "so-called Twentieth Century"? I know no more pathetic passage in the Literature of Art than that in which Mrs. Gaskell enumerated Miss Matty's qualifications for the work of teaching:--

"I ran over her accomplishments. Once upon a time I had heard her say she could play 'Ah! vous dirai-je maman?' on the piano; but that was long, long ago; that faint shadow of musical acquirement had died out years before. She had also once been able to trace patterns very nicely for muslin embroidery, but that was her nearest approach to the accomplishment of drawing, and I did not think it would go very far. Miss Matty's eyes were failing her, and I doubted if she could discover the number of threads in a worsted-work pattern, or rightly appreciate the different shades required for Queen Adelaide's face, in the loyal wool-work now fashionable in Cranford."

The allusion to Queen Adelaide's face fixes the narrative between 1820 and 1830, and George Eliot was depicting the same unenlightened period when she described the accomplishments provided by Ladies' Schools as "certain small tinklings and smearings." Probably all of us can recall an Aunt who tinkled on the piano, or a First Cousin once Removed who smeared on Bristol Board. Lady Dorothy Nevill, whose invincible force and evergreen memory carry down into the reign of King Edward VII. the traditions of Queen Charlotte's Court, is a singularly accomplished Aunt, and she has just made this remarkable confession: "At different times I have attempted many kinds of amateur work, including book illumination, leather-working, wood-carving, and, of late years, a kind of old-fashioned paper-work, which consists in arranging little slips of coloured paper into decorative designs, as was done at the end of the eighteenth century. When completed, this work is made up into boxes, trays, or mounts for pictures." Surely in this accomplishment Miss Volumnia Dedlock lives again. And then Lady Dorothy, lapsing into reminiscent vein, makes this rather half-hearted apology for the domestic artistry of bygone days: "Years ago ladies used to spend much more of their time in artistic work of some kind or other, for there were not then the many distractions which exist to-day. Indeed, in the country some sort of work was a positive necessity; and though, no doubt, by far the greater portion of what was done was absolutely hideous, useless, and horrible, yet it served the purpose of passing away many an hour which otherwise would have been given up to insufferable boredom."

Yes, the fashions of the world succeed one another in perpetual change; but Boredom is eternally the enemy, and the paramount necessity of escaping from it begets each year some new and strange activity. The Aunt no longer paints in water-colours or keeps tame rabbits, flattens ferns in an album, or traces crude designs with a hot poker on a deal board. To-day she urges the impetuous bicycle, or, in more extreme cases, directs the murderous motor; lectures on politics or platonics, Icelandic art, or Kamschatkan literature. Perhaps she has a Cause or a Mission pleads for the legal enforcement of Vegetarian Boots, or tears down the knocker of a Statesman who refuses her the suffrage. Perhaps her enthusiasms are less altruistic, and then she may pillage her friends at Bridge, or supply the _New York Sewer_ with a weekly column of Classy Cuttings. "Are you the _Daily Mail_?" incautiously chirped a literary lady to an unknown friend who had rung her up on the telephone. "No, I'm not, but I always thought you were," was the reply; and so, in truth, she was.

XXIX

CIDER

An ingenious correspondent of mine has lately been visiting the Brewers' Exhibition, and has come away from it full of Cider. I mean "full" in the intellectual rather than the physical sense--full of the subject, though unversed in the beverage. He reminds me that Charles Lamb had his catalogue of "Books which are no books--_biblia a-biblia_," among which he reckoned Court Calendars, Directories, Pocket-books, Draughtboards bound and lettered on the back, Scientific Treatises, Almanacs, Statutes at Large, and Paley's Moral Philosophy. My correspondent suggests that, in a like spirit, a Brewer must have his catalogue of Drinks which are no drinks--_pota a-pota_--and that among them, if only the secret thoughts of his heart were known, he must reckon Cider. Yet at the Brewers' Exhibition there was a Literature of Cider, and that innocent-sounding beverage was quoted at a price per bottle at which Claret is not ashamed to be sold. That the men of Malt and Hops should thus officially recognize the existence of fermented apple-juice strikes my friend as an Economy of Truth; a suppression, or at least an evasion, of a deep-seated and absolute belief. They cannot really regard Cider as a drink, and yet they give it a place alongside that manly draught which has made old England what she is. I, on the other hand, who always like to regard the actions of my fellow-men in the most favourable light, prefer to think that the Brewers have been employing some portion of that enforced leisure, which the decay of their industry must have brought, in studying English literature, and that they have thus been made acquainted with the name and fame of Cider.

_Biblia a-biblia_ set me thinking of Lamb, and when once one begins recalling "Elia" one drifts along, in a kind of waking reverie, from one pleasant fantasy to another. _Biblia a-biblia_ led me on to "Dream Children," and Dream Children to Dream Riddles--a reverie of my own childhood, when we used to ask one another a pleasing conundrum which played prettily on _In Cider_ and _Inside her_. But it made light of an illustrious name and had better be forgotten.

Few, I fear, are the readers of John Philips, but, if such there be, they will no doubt recall the only poem which, as far as I know, has ever been devoted to the praise of Apple-wine. Philips was a patriotic son of Herefordshire, and in Hereford Cathedral he lies buried under bunches of marble apples which commemorate his poetical achievement:--

"What soil the apple loves, what care is due To Orchats, timeliest when to press the fruits, Thy gift, Pomona! in Miltonian verse, Adventurous, I presume to sing; of verse Nor skill'd nor studious; but my native soil Invites me, and the theme as yet unsung."

"Orchats" is good; but how far these lines can be justly called Miltonian is a question which my readers can decide for themselves. At any rate, the poem contains more than four thousand lines exactly like them, and they had the remarkable fortune to be translated into Italian under the title of "Il Sidro." Philips was a Cavalier in all his tastes and sympathies: but even the Puritans, whom he so cordially detested, admitted the merits of Cider. Macaulay, with his characteristic love of irrelevant particularity, insists on the fact that, through all the commotions of the Great Rebellion and the Civil War, "the cream overflowed the pails of Cheshire and the apple-juice foamed in the presses of Herefordshire." Nor was it only in his purple prose that the great rhetorician glorified the juice of the apple. Many a reader who has forgotten all about John Philips will recall Macaulay's rhymes on the garrulous country squire who had a habit of detaining people by the button, and who was especially addicted to the society of Bishops:--

"His Grace Archbishop Manners-Sutton Could not keep on a single button. As for Right Reverend John of Chester, His waistcoats open at the breasts are. Our friend has filled a mighty trunk With trophies torn from Bishop Monk, And he has really tattered foully The vestments of good Bishop Howley. No buttons could I late discern on The garments of Archbishop Vernon, And never had his fingers mercy Upon the garb of Bishop Percy; While buttons fly from Bishop Ryder Like corks that spring from bottled cyder."

From Macaulay and bottled Cyder (or Cider) the transition is easy to that admirable delineator of life and manners, Mrs. Sherwood; she was pretty much a contemporary of Macaulay's, and was a native of Worcestershire, which in its Cider-bearing qualities is not far removed from Herefordshire, beloved of Philips. Few but fit is the audience to which Mrs. Sherwood still appeals; yet they who were nurtured on "The Fairchild Family" still renew their youth as they peruse the adventures of Lucy, Emily, and little Henry: "The farmer and his wife, whose name was Freeman, were not people who lived in the fear of God, neither did they bring up their children well; on which account Mr. Fairchild had often forbidden Lucy, Emily, and Henry to go to their house." However, go they did, as soon as their parents' backs were turned; and Mrs. Freeman "gave them each a large piece of cake and something sweet to drink, which, she said, would do them good." But it turned out to be Cider, and did not do them good, for, "as they were never used to drink anything but water, it made them quite drunk for a little while."

The mention of Worcestershire as a cider-growing county aptly introduces my unfailing friend Lord Beaconsfield, for, though he is less precise than I could wish in praise of Cider, he compliments it indirectly in his pretty description of "a fair child, long-haired, and blushing like a Worcestershire orchard before harvest-time." Once, indeed, the lover of Disraelitish romance seems to find himself on the track of Cider. Harry Coningsby is overtaken by a thunderstorm in a forest, and, taking refuge in a sylvan inn, makes friends with a mysterious stranger. The two travellers agree to dine together, when this eminently natural dialogue ensues. "'But Ceres without Bacchus,' said Coningsby, 'how does that do? Think you, under this roof, we could invoke the god?'

"'Let us swear by his body that we will try,' said the stranger.

"Alas! the landlord was not a priest of Bacchus. But then these enquiries led to the finest Perry in the world." If only the Perry had been Cider, this quotation had been more apposite; but the themes, though not identical, are cognate.

We have traced the praise of Cider in poetry and in romance, but it also has its place in biography, and even in religious biography. One of the most delightful portraits of a saint which was ever drawn is Mrs. Oliphant's "Life of Edward Irving." In the autumn of 1834--the last autumn of his life--that Prophet and man of God made a kind of apostolic journey through Shropshire, Herefordshire, and Wales. From Kington, in Herefordshire, he wrote to his wife: "My dinner was ham and eggs, a cold fowl, an apple tart, and cheese; a tumbler of Cider, and a glass of Sicilian Tokay." And he adds a tender reference to "Ginger Wine in a long-necked decanter." It is always satisfactory to find the good things of this life not reserved exclusively for bad people.

Sydney Smith, though a Canon of St. Paul's, was scarcely a Saint and not at all a Prophet; and through the study-windows of his beautiful parsonage in Somersetshire, he gazed on the glories of the Cider-vintage with an eye more mundane than that of Edward Irving. In 1829 he wrote from Combe Florey--"the sacred valley of flowers," as he loved to call it: "I continue to be delighted with the country. The harvest is got in without any rain. The Cider is such an enormous crop that it is sold at ten shillings a hogshead; so a human creature may lose his reason for a penny."