Chapter 14

Biography is out of the question. Long before he has got through that account of the hero's great grandmother, from whom he inherited his talents, which is, it seems, indispensable to such works, he yawns, and devoutly wishing, notwithstanding its fatal consequences to the fourth generation, that that old woman had never been born, falls into fitful slumber.

Travels are in the same condemnation; he has not the patience to watch the traveller taking leave of his family at Pimlico, or to follow his cab as he drives through the streets to the railway station, or to share the discomforts of his cabin—all necessary, no doubt, to his eventual arrival in Abyssinia, but hardly necessary to be described. Moreover, the convalescent has probably travelled a good deal on his own account during the last few weeks, for the bed of fever carries one hither and thither with the velocity, though not the ease, of the enchanted carpet in the 'Arabian Nights.' The desire of the sick man is to escape from himself and all recent experiences.

He thinks he will try a little History. Alison? No, certainly not Alison. 'They will be proposing Lingard next,' he murmurs, and the little irritation caused by the well-meant suggestion throws him back for the next six hours. Presently he tries Macaulay, whom some flatterer has fulsomely called 'as good as a novel,' but, though the trial of Warren Hastings gives him a fillip, the rout of Sedgemoor does away with the effect of it, and, happening upon the character of Halifax, he suffers a severe relapse. As a bedfellow, Macaulay is too declamatory, though, at the same time, strange to say, he does not always succeed in keeping one awake. To the sick man Carlyle is preferable; not his 'Frederick,' of course, and still less his 'Sartor Resartus,' which has become a nightmare, without head or tail, but his 'French Revolution.' One lies and watches the amazing spectacle without effort, as though it were represented on the stage. The sea of blood rolls before our eyes, the roar of the mob sounds in our ears; we are carried along with the unhappy Louis to the very frontier, and just on the verge of escape are seized and brought back—King Coach—with him to Paris, in a cold perspiration.

Some people, when in health and of a sane mind (Mr. Matthew Arnold one _knows_ of, and there may be others), take great delight in 'Paradise Regained;' all we venture to say is that in sickness it does not suggest its title. It is said that barley-water goes well with everything; if so, the epic is the exception which proves the rule. Milton is tedious after rheumatic fever, Spencer is worse.

'"Not from the grand old masters, Not from the bards sublime, Whose distant footsteps echo Through the corridors of Time,"'

murmurs the invalid, 'I can't stand them.' He does not mean anything depreciatory, but merely that—

'Like strains of martial music Their mighty thoughts suggest Life's endless toil and endeavour,'

which he is not fit even to think of. He cannot read Keats's 'Nightingale,' but for quite another reason. What arouses 'thoughts too deep for tears' in the hale and strong is to the sick as the sinking for an artesian well. 'The Chelsea Waterworks,' as Mr. Samuel Weller observed of Mr. Job Trotter (at a time when the metropolitan water supply would seem to have been more satisfactory than at present), 'are nothing to him.' On the other hand, Shelley's 'Skylark,' and the 'Dramatic Fragments' of Browning, are as cordials to the invalid, while the poems of Walter Scott are like breezes from the mountains and the sea. In that admirable essay, 'Life in the Sick-room,' the authoress justly remarks, speaking of the advantage of objectivity in sick books, 'Nothing can be better in this view than Macaulay's "Lays," which carry us at full speed out of ourselves.'

But it is not always that the invalid can read the poets at all; like Mrs. Wititterley, his nerves are too delicately strung for the touch of the muse. His chief enjoyment lies in fiction, to the producers of which he can never feel too grateful. I remember, on one occasion when I was very reduced indeed, taking up 'Northanger Abbey,' and reading, with almost the same gusto as though I had been a novelist myself, Miss Austen's defence of her profession. She says:

'I will not adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom, so common with novel-writers, of degrading by their contemptuous censure the very performances to the number of which they are themselves adding, joining with their greatest enemies in bestowing the harshest epithets on such works, and scarcely even permitting them to be read by their own heroine, who, if she accidentally takes up a novel, is sure to turn from its insipid pages with disgust. Let us not desert one another; we are an injured body. Although our productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary corporation in the world, no species of composition has been so much decried. From pride, ignorance, or fashion, our foes are almost as many as our readers; and while the abilities of the nine-hundred-and-ninety-ninth abridger of the history of England are eulogised by a thousand pens, there seems a general agreement to slight the performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them.'

I had quite forgotten till I came upon this passage that Miss Austen had such 'a kick in her,' and I remember how I honoured her for it and sympathised with her sentiments. 'When pain and anguish wring the brow,' we all know who is the comforter; but next to her, and when the brow is getting a little better, we welcome the novelist.

With our face aslant on the pillow, we once more make acquaintance with the characters that have been the delight of our youth, and find they delight us still, but with a difference. The animal spirits of Smollett and Fielding are a little too much for us; there is not sympathy enough in them for our own condition; they seem to have been fellows who were never ill. Perhaps 'Humphrey Clinker,' though it drags at the end, and the political disquisitions are intolerable, is the funniest book that ever was written; but the faculty of appreciation for it is not now in us. We turn with relief to Scott, though not to 'Scott's Works,' in the sense in which the phrase is generally used, as though they were a foundry from which everything is issued of the same workmanship and excellence; whereas there is as much difference between them as there was in her Majesty's ships of old between the gallant seventy-four and the crazy troopship. The invalid, however, as I have said, is far from critical; he only knows what he likes. Judged by this fastidious standard, he finds 'Waverley' somewhat wearisome, and, as to the first part of it in particular, wonders, not that the Great Unknown should have kept it in his desk for years as a comparative failure, but that he should have ever taken it from that repository. 'The Antiquary,' which in health he used to admire, or think he did, exceedingly, has also a narcotic effect; but 'Rob Roy' revives him, and 'Ivanhoe' stirs him like a trumpet-call.

What is very curious, just as the favourite literature of a cripple is almost always that which treats of force and action, so upon our sick-bed we turn most gladly to scenes of heroism and adventure. The famous ride in 'Geoffrey Hamlyn,' where the fate of the heroine, threatened with worse than death from the bush-rangers, hangs upon the horse's speed, seems to us, as we lie abed, one of the finest episodes in fiction. 'Tom Cringle's Log,' too, becomes a great favourite, not more from its buoyancy and freshness than from the melodramatic scenes with which it is interspersed.

In some moods of the sick man's mind, his morbid appetite tends, strange to say, to horrors. He 'snatches a fearful joy' from the weird and supernatural. I have known those terrible tales of Le Fanu, entitled 'In a Glass Darkly,' which for dramatic power and eeriness no other novelist has ever approached, devoured greedily by those whose physical sustenance has been dry toast and arrowroot.

The works of Thackeray are too cynical for the convalescent; he is for the present in too good a humour with destiny and human nature to enjoy them. He prefers the more cheerful aspects of life, and resents the least failure of poetic justice.

Taking the tenants of the sick ward all round, indeed, I have little doubt that the large majority would give their vote for Dickens. His pathos, it is true, is too much for them. Their hearts are as waxen as though Mrs. Jarley herself had made them. They are just in the condition to be melted by 'Little Nell,' and overcome by the death of Paul Dombey. They read 'David Copperfield' with avidity, but are careful to avoid the catastrophe of Dora and even the demise of her four-footed favourite. The book that suits them best is 'Martin Chuzzlewit.' Its genial comedy, quite different from the violent delights of 'Pickwick,' is well adapted to their grasp; while its tragedy, the murder of Montague Tigg—the finest description of the breaking of the sixth commandment in the language—leaves nothing to be desired in the way of excitement. But here we stray beyond our bounds, for 'Martin Chuzzlewit' is not a 'sick book;' or rather, it is one of the very few productions of human genius on the merits of which the opinions of both Sick and Sound are at one.

WET HOLIDAYS.

Even poets when they are on their travels feel the depressing influence of bad weather. Those lines of the Laureate—

'But when we crossed the Lombard plain, Remember what a plague of rain— Of rain at Reggio, at Parma, At Lodi rain, Piacenza rain,'

are not among his best, but they evidently come from his very heart. When he used prose upon that journey his language was probably stronger. It is no wonder, then, that ordinary folks who have only a limited time in which to enjoy themselves, free from the fetters of toil, resent wet days. They are worst of all when we are touring on the Continent, where it is a popular fallacy to suppose the skies are always smiling, but at home they are bad enough. In Scotland, nobody but a Scotchman believes in fine weather, and consequently there is no disappointment; in England the Lake District is, perhaps, the most unfortunate spot for folks to be caught in by rain, because if there is no landscape there is nothing. _Spectare veniunt_, and when there are only the ribs and lining of their umbrellas to look at, their lot is hard indeed.

Wastwater is a charming place in sunshine—almost the only locality in England where things are still primitive and pastoral; but in rain! I hate exhibitions, but rather than Wastdale in wet weather, give me a panorama. Serious people may talk of 'the Devil's books,' but even a pack of cards, with somebody to play with you, is better under such circumstances than no book.

There is no limit to what human beings may be driven to by stress of weather, and especially by that 'clearing shower,' by which the dwellers in Lakeland are wont euphemistically to describe its continuous downpours. The Persians have another name for it—'the grandmother of all buckets.' I was once in Wastdale with a dean of the Church of England, respectable, sedate, and a D.D. It had poured for days without ceasing; the roads were under water, the passes were impassable, the mountains invisible; there was nothing to be seen but waterfalls, and those in the wrong place; there was no literature; the dean's guide-books were exhausted, and his Bible, it is but charitable and reasonable to suppose, he knew by heart. As for me, I had found three tourists who could play at whist, and was comparatively independent of the elements; but that poor ecclesiastic! For the first few days he occupied himself in remonstrating against our playing cards by daylight; but on the fourth morning, when we sat down to them immediately after breakfast, he began to take an enforced interest in our proceedings. Like a dove above the dovecot, he circled for an hour or two about the table—a deal one, such as thimble-riggers use, borrowed, under protest, from his own humble bedroom—and then, with a murmurous coo about the weather showing no signs of clearing up, he took a hand. Constant dropping—and it was much worse than dropping—will wear away a stone, and it is my belief if it had gone on much longer his reverence would have played on Sunday.

The spectacle that the roads of the district present at such a time is most melancholy. Everyone is in a closed car—a cross between a bathing machine and that convenient vehicle which carries both corpse and mourners; all the windows seem made of bottle glass, a phenomenon produced by the flattening of the noses of imprisoned tourists; and nothing shines except an occasional traveller in oilskin. In such seasons, indeed, oilskin (lined with patience) is your only wear. Ordinary waterproofs in such a climate become mere blotting paper, and with the best of them, without leggings and headgear to match, the poor Londoner might, I do not say just as well be in London (for that is his aspiration all day long), but just as well go to bed at once, and stop there. 'But why does he not go home?' it may be asked: a question to which there are several answers. In the first place (for one must take the average in such cases) because he is a fool. Secondly, like the rest of the well-to-do world, he has suffered the summer, wherein warmth and sunshine are really to be had, to slip by, and has only the fag end of it in which to take holiday. It is now or never—or at all events now or next year—with him. All his friends, too, are out of town, flattening _their_ noses against window panes; his club is under repair, his house in brown holland, his servants on board wages. Like the young gentleman in Locksley Hall, he is so absolutely at the end of his resources, that an 'angry fancy' is all that is left to him. Of course, under its influence he sits down and writes to the _Times_; but, if the humblest of its correspondents may venture to say so without offence, even that does not help him much. That suicides increase in wet autumns is notorious; but that murders should in these sequestered vales maintain the even tenor of their way is a feather in the cap of human nature. In lodgings, where the pent-up tourist has no one but his wife and family to speak to, where Dick and Tom _will_ romp in his only sitting-room, and Eliza Jane practises all day on the crazy piano, this forbearance is especially creditable.

Even in hotels, however, there is great temptation. On the north-eastern coast, in particular, when the weather has, as the phrase goes, 'broken up,' and the sky and sea have both become one durable drab, the best of women grow irritable, the men morose. At the _table d'hôte_, which even the most exclusive are driven to frequent for company, as sheep huddle together in storm, Dislike ripens to Hate with frightful rapidity. Our neighbour, who always—for it seems always—gets the last of the mushrooms at breakfast, or finishes the oyster sauce at dinner before our very eyes, we are very far, indeed, from loving as ourselves. Our _vis-à-vis_, the man on his honeymoon, is even still more offensive. We resent his happiness, which is apparently uninfluenced by the state of the weather, and our wife wonders what he could have seen in that chit of a girl to attract his attention. To ourselves she seems a great deal too good for him, and in our rare intervals of human feeling we regard her with the tenderest commiseration. The importance attached to meals, and the time we take over them, have no parallel save among the Esquimaux. The least incident that happens in the hotel is of more moment to us than the overthrow of Empires. The whispered news that a fellow guest has been taken seriously ill, and that a medical consultation has been held upon the case, is a matter to be deplored, of course, but one which is not without its consolations. 'Who is it? What is it? Nothing catching I do hope?' (this last uttered with genuine anxiety) are questions that are heard on every side. The general impression is that some lovely young lady of fashion on the drawing-room floor has been seized with pains in her limbs—and no wonder—from exposure to the elements. Her mother comes down every morning and selects dainties for the sick-room from the public breakfast table; those who are near enough to do so inquire in dulcet tones, 'How is your invalid this morning?' The reply is, 'Better, much better,' which somehow falls short of expectation. Even the most giddy and frivolous of girls has no excuse for frightening people for nothing.

At luncheon one day a very fat, strong boy makes his appearance, and is supplied with soup. All his neighbours who have no soup are wild with envy, though they are well acquainted with that soup at dinner, and know that it is bad. 'What is the meaning of it? Why this favouritism?' we inquire of the waiter furiously. 'Well, you see, sir, he is better now; but that is the invalid.' The delicate, attractive creature we have pictured to ourselves with pains in her limbs turns out, after all, to be a hulking schoolboy, probably bilious from over-eating. The public indignation is excessive, while the subject of it, quite unconscious of the fact, has another plate of soup.

The wild weather out of doors is not, of course, confined to the land, and the sea would be a fine sight if it was not invisible. The waves, indeed, are so high that the fishing-boats which have remained out all night are often warned off, or, as it is locally termed, 'burned off,' from the harbour bar. A tar barrel is lighted for this purpose on the headland, and it is the only thing which the eternal rain cannot utterly squelch and extinguish. Occasionally we venture down upon the pier to see the boats make the harbour, which, not a little to our disappointment, they never fail to do. There are huge buttresses of stone against the pier-head, behind which the new comer imagines he may crouch in perfect safety, till the third wave comes in and convinces him to the contrary. No one ever dreams of 'burning' _him_ off—giving him one word of warning of that unpleasant contingency; for to behold a fellow creature more drenched and dripping than ourselves is very soothing. As to the dangers of maritime life, we are all agreed that they are greatly overrated; and some sceptics even go so far as to suggest that the skeleton ship, half embedded in the sands, which so impresses visitors in fine weather, is not a genuine wreck at all, but has been placed there by the Town Corporation to delude the public.

Now and then we splash down to the quay to see a few million of herrings sold at four shillings a hundred, which will presently induce philanthropic fishmongers in London to advertise 'a glut this morning,' and to retail them at threepence apiece. At rare intervals we explore the dripping town. It is amazing what a fascination the small picture-shops, to which at home we should never give a glance, afford us; even the frontispieces to popular music have unwonted attractions; while the pottery-shops, full of ware made from clay 'peculiar to the locality,' are only too seductive to our wives, who purchase largely what they believe to be great bargains, till they find on their return home the identical articles in Oxford Street, at half the price. In London we never visit the British Museum itself, unless to escort some country cousin, but at Barecliff-on-Sea, in wet weather, the miserable little local Institute, with its specimens of strata, its calf with two heads in spirits, and its petrified toad, is an irresistible temptation. The great event of the day, however, is the wading down to the railway-station (which is in a quagmire) to meet the express train which brings more victims, 'unconscious of their doom,' to Barecliff, and who evidently flatter themselves that the pouring rain is an exceptional phenomenon; it also brings the London newspapers, for which we fight and struggle (the demand being greatly in excess of the supply) and think ourselves fortunate if we secure a supplement. It is true there is a _Times_ in the smoking-room of the hotel, but it is always engaged five deep, is the cause of terrible quarrels, and every afternoon we expect to see it imbrued in gore.

In the evening, when one does not mind the wet so much—'its tooth is not so keen because it is not seen'—there are dissipations at 'the Rooms by the Sea.' Amateur charitable concerts are given there, in which it is whispered that this and that lady at the _table d'hôte_ will take part, who become public characters and objects of immense interest in consequence. Thither, too, come 'the inimitable Jones,' from the Edgware Road Music Hall, with his 'unrivalled _répertoire_ of comic songs;' the Spring Board Family, who have been 'pronounced by the general consensus of the medical faculty in London to be unique,' as having neither joints nor backbone; and Herr von Deft, 'who will repeat the same astounding performances which have electrified the reigning families of Europe.' The serious people (for whom 'the glee-singers of Mesopotamia' are also suspected of dropping a line) are angled for by white-cravatted lecturers, who enhance their statistics of conversion by the exhibition of poisoned arrows, and of clubs, on which, with the microscope, may be detected the hairs of missionary martyrs. In fine weather, of course, these attractions would be advertised in vain; but the fact is, our whole community has been reduced by the cruelty of the elements to a sort of second childhood; the rain which permeates everything is softening our brain.

This is only too evident from the conversation in the hotel porch where the men meet every morning to discuss the topic of the day—the weather. A sullen gloom pervades them—the first symptom of mental aberration. Those, on the other hand, who express their opinion that it 'really seems to be clearing a little' are in more advanced stages. We who are less afflicted shake our heads, and murmur painfully, but also with a considerable touch of contempt, 'Poor fellows!'

The piano in the ladies' drawing-room is always going, but it excites no soothing influence; there is an impression in the hotel that the performers are foreigners, and should be discouraged. But there is one instrument hanging in the hall on which everyone plays, native or alien, and every note is discord. It is the barometer. People talk of the delicacy of scientific instruments; if they are right, the shocks which that barometer survives proves it to be an exception. Batter it as we may, and do, the faithful needle, with a determination worthy of a better cause, maintains its position at 'Much Rain.' The manager is appealed to vehemently, coarsely; he shrugs his shoulders, protests with humility that he cannot help the weather, or affirms it is unprecedented—which we do not believe. Other managers—in the Engadine, for example—the papers say, are providing excellent weather; what does he mean by it?

At last one morning, wetter than ever, some noble spirit, the Tell of our liberties, exclaims, 'Who would be free, himself must strike the blow.' His actual words (if one was not writing history) are, 'Hang me if I stand this any longer,' and they strike the keynote of everybody's thought. He goes away by the next train, and his departure is followed by the same effects as the tapping of a reservoir. The hotel company—I mean the inmates; the company goes into bankruptcy—stream off at once to their own homes. That journey through the pouring rain is the happiest day of our wet holiday. How beautiful looms soaking, soppy, smoky London! In that excellent town who cares for rain?

'Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow! You cataracts and hurricanoes spout.'

Pooh! pooh! Call a cab—call two!