Part 11

On another marriage he writes, 16 November 1851, “Your mother had a full and particular account of the wedding the day after.... I have often heard of throwing an old shoe after a new married couple to wish them good luck. I never knew it practised in Moreton but once, and then [the bride’s father] ran out in the street and threw an old shoe after the carriage. It did not carry luck with it, for that was an unfortunate marriage, so the story was he ought to have thrown more. To obviate all that, they threw shoes by the dozen: all the old shoes were looked up and thrown after and about the carriage like grape shot. Well, I hope they will be happy.”

As he thought all this worth mentioning, he might as well have gone to see it for himself, and also gone to see much else; but that was not his way. He writes on 9 June 1862, “This is Whitmonday, and the bells are ringing for two weddings that are solemnized today, so Lustleigh will be gay in addition to the usual holyday for the labourers and the children. I see nothing of it, but generally hear a squall of children and the hoarse voice of the men at the skittle playing. I give something to set the children a-running and something for the fiddler.” A younger man, of great ability, told my sister what he thought about it all, 11 October 1870, “He thought living in this remote part enough to rust the brains of any clever man, as you might pass a month without meeting anyone who could talk on any subject above pigs and cows.”

Flocks and herds, or pigs and cows, are not bad themes for talk, if anyone can handle themes judiciously and keep them in their place--flocks and herds are not like golf. But in reality they may be burdensome. My grandfather notes with pleasure, 13 December 1841, “My cows are regularly fed, three times a day, unlike farmer’s cows which catch what they can,” and then rather wearily, 10 August 1869, “My farm is a trouble and expense.” And the lesson is, never have a hobby that you cannot cast aside. You want no needless worries at a time when you have one foot in the grave and then get the gout in the other one.

In my father’s diary of his first visit to London he speaks of pictures at the Royal Academy and National Gallery and elsewhere, but the only artist whom he mentions by name is Benjamin West. This was in 1832, and West had died in 1820; he had been President of the Academy for nearly thirty years and was still in high repute. There are two wash drawings here signed, ‘B. West, 1785’ and ‘B. West, Windsor, 1788.’ The latter is one of his designs for the friezes at the Queen’s Lodge, built by George the Third and since destroyed. It is four feet long and seven inches high, with thirty-three figures personifying arts and sciences; the fine arts in the middle, the peaceful arts and sciences on one side and the warlike on the other. The earlier drawing is of Segestes giving his daughter to Germanicus as a hostage for Arminius. This was a favourite subject then, and West painted several pictures of it, the earliest in 1772.

West’s drawings are generally a great deal better than his paintings, and Galt gives the reason in his _Life of West_, II. 204.--In drawing and colouring he was one of the greatest artists of his age, but his powers of conception were far higher; “and it is this wonderful force of conception which renders his sketches so much more extraordinary than his finished pictures.” West is in oblivion now with most of the Academicians of his time, except the portrait painters. (There is a picture by one of those Academicians in Teign Grace church, a Madonna by James Barry, quite unnoticed now.) But repute depends on fashion, not on merit; and many artists of less merit are extolled.

Rustic critics judge things in a different way. Two large oil paintings here were praised--“There bain’t no other’n like’n in this parish, no, nor yet the next: look at their size and finish.” A portrait was praised also as a speaking likeness--“Why, any blind man could tell ‘twere he.” (Portraits, I may note, are known as photos here, even portraits of old ancestors; and ‘photos’ is coming to include all kinds of pictures, as ‘pictures’ now means movies.) I brought a very good Persian carpet down from London, and the criticism was--“Well, and if you’d got that old bit by you, I d’esay it were all so well as buyin’ a new’n.”

A friend of my mother’s writes to her from Brighton, 28 October 1841, “I have been twice to be charmed though not mesmerized by that delightful pet of yours Jullien and his helps (at the Town Hall) and a very grand affair they made of it. After beautiful Overtures, Waltzes and a capital set of Irish Quadrilles by Jullien, they gave us the Storming of St Jean d’Acre in perfection. The piece commenced with a slow movement of ‘God save the Queen,’ and after sundry descriptive morceaux the attack began and Jullien was in all his glory. Bombs, cannon, musquetry, bells tolling, shouts of victory, etc., and lots of blue lights, Roman Candles and last (though not least in effect) that beautiful rich crimson light that you saw last year.” And one of my great-aunts who liked all that, complained in later years that Wagner was so noisy.

Jullien brought Berlioz to England. My father was at the Opera, 25 June 1853, for the first night of _Benvenuto Cellini_, and was impressed by it, or rather by the final scene, the casting of the statue. And it might be more impressive now with better stage machinery for it--the furnace, the molten metal running down into the mould, and then the breaking of the mould revealing the great figure of Perseus still aglow with heat.--The real statue is said to be Cellini’s masterpiece; but I do not agree. I think myself that he surpassed it in the relief of Perseus and Andromeda on the pedestal below.

On first hearing Boito’s _Mefistofele_ I recognized the chirruping of the angels as a familiar sound, but could not recollect where I had heard it. I had really heard it in expresses between Paris and Marseilles. Some of the P.L.M. carriages had wheels, or springs, or something, which gave forth just that sound when they were running fast; and it may be heard on some of the G.W.R. carriages, but with a different rhythm and pitch. A railwayman assures me that the English engines talk and (being foul-mouthed creatures) use unseemly words. Since learning this from him, I have distinctly heard an engine saying, “blów and blást it, fétch anóther,” when sent off up these gradients here with load enough for two; and then, quite cheerfully, “nów I’ve dóne it, nów I’ve dóne it,” when it has reached the top.

Writing from Teignmouth on 3 August 1854, my grandfather says, “There is nothing new here, but a ship of this place has just arrived literally gutted by the Greek pirates. She was laden with raisins. The crew were obliged to beg for their lives, they had but three biscuits left on coming to Falmouth. That must be put stop to somehow.” Greece was a nuisance then: the coast had been blockaded by the English fleet, and French and English troops were landed at the Piræus in May to stop the Greeks from siding with the Russians in the Crimean war. He writes on 2 April, “As war is declared, the papers will be interesting. I fancy people have been too sanguine.”

After the Coup d’état he writes from here, 7 December 1851, “Well, the President is taking very high ground, and no doubt he will make himself Emperor, if he can keep the Army on his side,” and further on 26 January, “What a scoundrel that President is.” But he went astray in saying that the President would not become Emperor “without a desperate struggle,” and still further astray on 12 October 1851 in generalizing from some undesirables whom he had seen, “America must now be made up of outcasts and rogues of all nations.”

In one of his letters--it looks just like the rest--he says on 17 December 1843, “I can scarcely tell if I am not writing plainer and more legibly than usual, as it is by candle, but I fancy so. I am writing with a metal pen. When at Moreton last, I bought some and am much pleased with them, for my sight is so bad that even with the assistance of glasses I cannot make a pen by candle light and very badly by daylight.” Twenty years after that, I was taught to make a pen (that is, to cut a quill into a point) as one of the things that every child must learn. Metal pens did not come into common use until after 1840, though introduced some years before, and many people still despised them. A friend of my father’s writes to him, 13 September 1856, “I hope you will be able to read my letter, but as I write with a steel pen, I am not quite certain of it.” Few people now could write so neatly with a quill; and his writing here is just as neat as ever.

Old letters and diaries can be trusted when they are recording facts; but they have never been revised, and may contain opinions which the writers would have modified on second thoughts. My father writes to my sister from Perugia, 17 September 1876, “This is the most curious and romantic place I ever saw: Laon is nothing to it.” Curious and romantic places generally had bad hotels, and Perugia had a good one; and I suspect this made him view the place benignantly and give it this excessive praise. He notes in his diary, 24 August 1874, “Elbe scenery rather fine, tho’ not equal to the Danube, Rhine or Moselle, but better than the Meuse or Loire.” He wrote this at Dresden, just after coming down the Elbe from Schandau; and I imagine he was thinking of the scenery there, forgetting other parts.

I have a letter of 14 February 1911 from Henry Montagu Butler, then Master of Trinity, but headmaster at Harrow at the time when I was there; and in this letter he says, “You and Arthur Evans are, I think, the chief antiquarians of our Harrow generation, Hastings Rashdall and Charles Gore our most learned and original theologians, Walter Sichel and George Russell our most fertile writers in general literature.” I do not know whether that was a considered opinion or only a passing thought: in either case I offer Sir Arthur my condolences on being mentioned in the same breath with me. As for the two theologians, here is something that Dean Rashdall lately wrote--“I am sure that on no subject but theology could Bishop Gore have been so blind to the requirement of ordinary fairness and straight dealing between man and man.” I suggested that he could have put it better in schoolboy diction with words like liar and sneak, but he informs me that he thinks those terms too strong.

It was rather a shock to me when a former fag of mine was made a Bishop--not Gore, of course--but you can never tell how fellows will turn out. Another fellow, in the same house, was sacked for getting drunk and disorderly in Harrow town. He succeeded to a Peerage and was a huge success as a Colonial Governor; and I believe his secret of success was giving the Colonials a finer Cognac, and more of it, than any Governor had given them before.

In his Harrow holidays down here my brother was telling one of my great-aunts such yarns that my sister wrote off to my father, 12 August 1862, “He teazes her dreadfully, and tells her the most extraordinary things about the Exhibition. When she asked him if all the boys dined together at school, he told her that half dined at the King’s Head and the other half at the Turk’s, and those that were not hungry could have a chop and bottle of stout in their rooms.” It was not so: at any rate, in my time.

He usually was very accurate, feeling that exaggeration spoiled a narrative of facts. Keep strictly to the facts, or launch out boldly into fiction. On the same principle he would not give a sixpence to relieve a case of destitution; but if the case was put before him and he was asked for twenty pounds, he might perhaps give the twenty, feeling that it might do good where sixpences were wasted. He did not often waste his money; but one evening on coming out of a theatre he meant to throw a sixpence to a man who found a hansom for us, and threw him a half-sovereign by mistake, and I heard the man say fervently, “Thank God, all the Gentlemen aren’t dead.”

With his prodigious memory my brother could have written books of this sort far better than I have written these; and I am sorry I did not oftener make sure of things by asking him. (He died five-and-twenty years ago.) As it is, I have left out things of which I am not sure; and some of these things were quite worth saying, if true; but I wished to keep as closely as I could to facts.

I once was telling a man a thing I thought would interest him; and he stopped me short--“I heard that from your brother, and shan’t forget it. I was out in Kensington Gardens with my wife, before we married, and he came up and told us that; and I didn’t want it then. I had just that moment proposed to her, and she had not had time to reply.” I hope I have not said anything here that has been heard before, like that.

End of Project Gutenberg's Small Talk at Wreyland. Third Series, by Cecil Torr