Chapter 7

And, once cured of fuddling, he turned out a most worthy and efficient fellow. He lacked the dash of Andreas, but he was as true as steel. In the attack on Ali Musjid, in the throat of the Khyber Pass, the native groom, who was leading my horse behind me, became demoralised by the rather heavy fire of big cannon balls from the fort, and skulked to the rear with the horse. John had no call to come under fire, since the groom was specially paid for doing so; but abusing the latter for a coward in the expressive vernacular of India, he laid hold of the reins, and was up right at my back just as the close musketry fighting began. He took his chances through it manfully, had my pack pony up within half an hour after the fighting was over, and before the darkness fell had cooked a capital little dinner for myself and a comrade, whose commissariat had gone astray. Next morning the fort was found evacuated. I determined to ride back down the pass to the field telegraph post at its mouth. The General wrote in my notebook a telegram announcing the good news to the Commander-in-Chief; and poor Cavagnari, the political officer, who was afterwards massacred at Cabul, wrote another message to the same effect to the Viceroy. I expected to have to walk some distance to our bivouac of the night; but lo! as I turned to go, there was John with my horse, close up.

In one of the hill expeditions, the advanced section of the force I accompanied had to penetrate a narrow and gloomy pass which was beset on either side by swarms of Afghans, who slated us severely with their long-range jezails. With this leading detachment there somehow was no surgeon, and as men were going down and something had to be done, it devolved upon me, as having some experience in this kind of work in previous campaigns, to undertake a spell of amateur surgery. John behaved magnificently as my assistant. With his light touch and long lissom hands, the fellow seemed to have a natural instinct for successful bandaging. I was glad that we could do no more than bandage, and that we had no instruments, else I believe that John would not have hesitated to undertake a capital operation. As for the Afghan bullets, he did not shrink as they splashed on the stones around him; he did not treat them with disdain; he simply ignored them. The soldiers swore that he ought to have the war medal for the good and plucky work he was doing; and a Major protested that if his full titles, which John always gave in full when his name was asked, had not been so confoundedly long, he would have asked the General to mention the Goa man in despatches.

John liked war, but he was not fond of the rapid changes of temperature up on the "roof of the world" in Afghanistan. During one twenty-four hours at Jellalabad, we had one man killed by a sunstroke, and another frozen to death on sentry duty in the night. On Christmas morning, when I rose at sunrise, the thermometer was far below freezing point; the water in the brass basin in my tent was frozen solid, and I was glad to wrap myself in furs. At noon the thermometer was over a hundred in the shade, and we were all so hot as to wish with Sydney Smith that we could take off our flesh and sit in our bones. John was delighted when, as there seemed no immediate prospect of further hostilities in Afghanistan, I departed therefrom to pay a visit to King Thebaw, of Burmah, who has since been disestablished. When in his capital of Mandalay, there came to me a telegram from England informing me of the massacre by the Zulus of a thousand British soldiers at Isandlwana, in South Africa, and instructing me to hurry thither with all possible speed. John had none of the Hindoo dislike to cross the "dark water," and he accompanied me to Aden, where we made connection with a potty little steamer, which called into every paltry and fever-smelling Portuguese port all along the east coast of Africa, and at length dropped us at Durban, the seaport of the British colony of Natal, in South Africa, and the base of the warlike operations against the Zulus.

There are many Hindoos engaged on the Natal sugar plantations, and in that particularly one-horse Colony, every native of India is known indiscriminately by the term of "coolie." John, it is true, was a native of India, but he was no "coolie"; he could read, write, and speak English, and was altogether a superior person. I would not take him up country to be bullied and demeaned as a "coolie," and I made for him an arrangement with the proprietor of my hotel that during my absence John should help to wait in his restaurant. During the Zulu campaign I was abominably served by a lazy Africander and a lazier St. Helena boy. When Ulundi was fought, and Cetewayo's kraal was burned, I was glad to return to Durban, and take passage for India. John, I found, had during my absence become one of the prominent inhabitants of Durban. He had now the full charge of the hotel restaurant--he was the centurion of the dinner-table, with men under him, to whom he said "do this," and they did it. His skill in dishes new to Natal, especially in curries, had crowded the restaurant, and the landlord had taken the opportunity of raising his tariff. He came to me privily, and said frankly that John was making his fortune for him, that he was willing to give him a share in his business in a year's time if he would but stay, and meantime was ready to pay him a stipend of twenty dollars a week. The wages at which John served me, and I had been told I was paying him extravagantly, was eleven dollars a month. I told the landlord that I should not think of standing in the way of my man's prosperity, but would rather influence him in favour of an opportunity so promising. Then I sent for John, explained to him the hotel-keeper's proposal, and suggested that he should take time to think the matter over. John wept. "I no stay here, master, not if it was hundred rupees a day! I go with master; I no stop in Durban!" Nothing would shake his resolve, and so John and I came to England together.

The only thing John did not like in England was that the street boys insisted on regarding him as a Zulu, and treating him contumeliously accordingly. His great delight was when I went on a round of visits to country houses, and took him with me as valet. Then he was the hero of the servants' hall. I will not say that he lied, but from anecdotes of him that occasionally came to my ears, it would seem he created the impression that he habitually waded in knee-deep gore, and that he was in the habit of contemplating with equanimity battle-fields littered with the slaughtered combatants. John was quite the small lion of the hour. He had very graceful ways, and great skill in making tasteful bouquets. These he would present to the ladies of the household when they came downstairs of a morning, with a graceful salaam, and the expression of a hope that they had slept well. The spectacle of John, seen from the drawing-room windows of Chevening, Lord Stanhope's seat in Kent, as he swaggered across the park to church one Sunday morning in frock coat and silk hat, with a buxom cook on one arm and a tall and lean lady's maid on the other, will never be effaced from the recollection of those who witnessed it with shrieks of laughter.

In those days I lived in a flat, my modest establishment consisting of an old female housekeeper and John. For the most part my two domestics were good friends, but there were periods of estrangement during which they were not on speaking terms; and then they sat on opposite sides of the kitchen table, and communicated with each other exclusively by written notes of an excessively formal character, passed across the table. This stiffness of etiquette had its amusing side, but was occasionally embarrassing, since neither was uniformly intelligible with the pen. The result was that sometimes I got no dinner at all, and at other times, when I was dining alone, the board groaned with the profusion, and when I had company there would not be enough to go round; these awkwardnesses arising from the absence of a good understanding between my two domestics. I could not part with the old female servant, and I began rather to tire of John, whose head had become considerably swollen because of the notice which had been taken of him. It was all very well to be in a position to gratify ladies who were giving dinner parties, and who wrote me little notes asking for the loan for a few hours of John, to make that wonderful prawn curry of which he had the sole recipe. But John used to return from that culinary operation very late, and with indications that his beverage during his exertions had not been wholly confined to water. To my knowledge he had a wife in Goa, yet I feared he had his flirtations here in London. Once I charged him with inconstancy to the lady in Goa, but he repudiated the aspersion with the quaint denial: "No, master, many ladies are loving me, but I don't love no ladies!"

However, I had in view to spend a winter in the States, and resolved to send John home. He wept copiously when I told him of this resolve, and professed his anxiety to die in my service. But I remained firm, and reminded him that he had not seen his wife in Goa for nearly three years. That argument appeared to carry little weight with him; but he tearfully submitted to the inevitable. I made him a good present, and obtained for him from the Peninsular and Oriental people a free passage to Bombay, and wages besides in the capacity of a saloon steward. I saw him off from Southampton; at the moment of parting he emitted lugubrious howls. He never fulfilled his promise of writing to me, and I gave up the expectation of hearing of him any more.

Some two years later, I went to Australia by way of San Francisco and New Zealand. At Auckland I found letters and newspapers awaiting me from Sydney and Melbourne. Among the papers was a Melbourne illustrated journal, on a page of which I found a full-length portrait of the redoubtable John, his many-syllabled name given at full length, with a memoir of his military experiences, affixed to which was a fac-simile of the certificate of character which I had given him when we parted. It was further stated that "Mr. Compostella de Crucis" was for the present serving in the capacity of butler to a financial magnate in one of the suburbs of Melbourne, but that it was his intention to purchase the goodwill of a thriving restaurant named. Among the first to greet me on the Melbourne jetty was John, radiant with delight, and eager to accompany me throughout my projected lecture tour. I dissuaded him in his own interest from doing so; and when I finally quitted the pleasant city by the shore of Hobson's Bay, John was running with success the "Maison Dore" in Burke Street. I fear, if she is alive, that his wife in Goa is a "grass widow" to this day.

[Sidenote: Dr. Parker says It depends upon the health of the artist.]

Is the artistic temperament a blessing or a curse? We should first decide what the artistic temperament means. Artistic is a large word. It includes painting, acting, poetry, music, literature, preaching. Whether the temperament is a blessing or a curse largely depends upon the health of the artist. If De Quincey was an artist, the artistic temperament was a curse. So also with Thomas Carlyle. So also with Charles Lamb. The artistic temperament is creative, sympathetic, responsive; it sees everything, feels everything, realises everything, on a scale of exaggeration. It is in quest of ideals, and all ideals are more or less in the clouds, and not seldom at the tip-top of the rainbow. Those who undertake such long journeys are subject to disappointment and fatigue by the way; if ever they do come to the end of their journey it is probably in a temper of fretfulness and exasperation. A sudden knock at the door may drive an artist into hysterics. He is always working at the end of his tether. There is nothing more tantalising than an eternal quest after the ideal; like the horizon, it recedes from the traveller; like the mirage, it vanishes before the claims of hunger and thirst. On the other hand, it has enjoyments all its own. The idealist is always face to face with a great expectation. Perhaps to-night he may realise it; certainly in the morning it will be much nearer; and as for the third day, it will be realised in some great festival of delight. There is, too, a subtle selfishness in this quest after the ideal--the Holy Grail of the imagination. The artist keeps the secret from his brother artists until he can startle them with some gracious surprise. He almost pities them, as he thinks of the revelation that is about to dawn upon unsuspecting and slumberous minds. Postponement of this surprise is a torment to the mind which had planned its dazzling disclosure. The greatest pain of all to the artistic temperament is that it lives in the world of the Impossible and the Unattainable. That arm must be very weary which for a lifetime has been stretched out towards the horizon. Then think of the cross-lights, the mingled colours, the uncalculated relations which enter into the composition of the dreamer's life, and say whether that life is not more of a chaos than a cosmos. If the artistic temperament came within the range of our own choice and will, possibly we could do something with it; but inasmuch as it is ours by heredity, and not by adoption, we must do the best we can with the stubborn fatality.

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[Sidenote: Mrs. Lynn Linton thinks it depends upon ourselves.]

If to feel keenly be a nobler state than to drone with blunt edges through that thicket of myrtle and nightshade we call life, then is the artistic temperament a blessing. If the oyster be more enviable than the nightingale, then is it a curse. It all depends on our angle, and the colours we most prefer in the prism. He who has the artistic temperament knows depths and heights such as Those Others cannot even imagine. The feet that spring into the courts of heaven by a look or a word--by the glory of the starry night or the radiance of the dawn--stray down into the deepest abysses of hell, when Love has died or Nature forgets to smile. To the artistic temperament there is but little of the mean of things. The "Mezzo Cammin" is a line too narrow for their eager steps. Proportion is the one quality in emotional geometry which is left out of their lesson of life. Their grammar deals only with superlatives; and the positive seems to them inelastic, dead and common-place. Imaginative sympathy colours and transforms the whole picture of existence. By this sympathy the artistic of temperament knows the secrets of souls, and understands all where Those Others see nothing. And herein lies one source of those waters of bitterness which so often flood his heart. Feeling for and with his kind, as accurately as the mirror reflects the object held before it, he finds none to share the pain, the joy, the indignation he endures by this sympathy, which is reflection. He visits the Grundyite, who says "Shocking," "Not nice," when human nature writhes in its agony and cries aloud for that drop of water which he, the virtuous conformist, refuses. He goes to the flat-footed and broad-waisted; those who plod along the beaten highway, and turn neither to the right hand nor to the left, neither to the hills nor the hollows. But he speaks a foreign language, and they heed him not. The iron-bound care nought. Does that cry of suffering raise the price of stocks or lower that of grain? Tush! let it pass. To each back its own burden. So he carries the piteous tale whereby his heart is aching for sympathy, and Those Others give him stones for bread and a serpent for a fish. Then he looks up to heaven, and asks if there be indeed a God to suffer all this wrong; or if there be, How long, O Lord, how long! The artistic temperament is not merely artistic perception, with which it is so often confounded. You may be steeped to the lips in that temperament, and yet not be able to arrange flowers with deftness, draw a volute, or strike a true chord. And you may be able to do all these, and yet be dead in heart and cold in brain--a mere curly-wigged poodle doing its clever tricks with dexterity, and obedient to the hand that feeds it. The artistic temperament is not this, but something far different. Would you know what it is, and what it brings? It is the Key of Life, without which no one can understand the mysteries nor hear the secret music; and it plants a dagger in the flesh, with the handle outward. And at this handle, the careless, the brutal, the malicious, and the dense witted--all Those Others--lunge, pull, and twist by turns. But they do not see the blood trickling from the wound; and they would neither care nor yet desist if they did.

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[Sidenote: Rutland Barrington regards it as a mixed blessing.]

The artistic temperament is a most decidedly "mixed" blessing, and the more artistic the more mixed! This is strongly demonstrated to me personally in the person of a _friend_ of my school days who has become in later years an _acquaintance_ only; a falling away, due entirely to the abnormal development of his artistic temperament, which will not allow him to see any good in anything or anybody that does not come up to his ideal, the artistic temperament in _his_ case taking the form of a kind of mental yellow jaundice! Of course, I consider that I myself possess this temperament, and am willing to admit that the natural friction caused by the meeting with a less highly developed temperament (?) than his own may have led to the feeling of mental and artistic superiority which has convinced _one_ of us that association with the _other_ is undesirable! I fancy that the two classes most strongly influenced by this temperament are the painters and the actors, who display characteristics of remarkable resemblance, as, for instance, all painters (I use the word "painters" because "artists" is applied equally to both classes) are fully alive to the beauties of Nature in all her varied moods, but, when those beauties are depicted on the canvasses of _others_, are somewhat prone to discover a comprehension of those beauties inferior to their own! So, too, with actors, the majority of whom possess the feeling, though they may not always express it, that, although Mr. Garrick Siddons's efforts were distinctly _good_, there _are_ people, not a hundred miles off, who _might_ have shone to more advantage in the part! There is no doubt that the artistic temperament magnifies all the pleasures of one's life by the infusion of a keener zest for enjoyment, the natural outcome of such temperament, but the reverse of the medal is equally well cut, and the misfortunes and disappointments of life are the more keenly felt in consequence of the possession of this temperament! Whether the balance is equally maintained or not is a question only to be answered by the individual, but I incline to the belief that life is smoother to the phlegmatic than the artistic temperament!--though I should not believe it would be possible to find any person possessing the latter who would be willing to renounce it, in spite of its disadvantages, so I must perforce conclude it to be a blessing! _Q.E.D._

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[Sidenote: Miss Helen Mathers looks upon it as a curse.]

If the artistic temperament will enable a man to be rendered profoundly happy by one of those trifles that Nature strews each day in our path--say a salmon-pink sunset seen through the lacing of tall black boles of leafless trees, or a flower, happed upon unexpectedly, that reads you a half-forgotten lesson in "country art"--that same man will be reduced to abject misery and real suffering by a dirty tablecloth, a vulgar, uncongenial companion, or even the presence of a bright blue gown in a chamber subdued to utmost harmonies in gold and yellow. The curse with him follows all too swiftly on the blessing of enjoyment--and lasts longer. And in matters of love, the artistic temperament is a doubtful blessing. The shape of a man's nose will turn a woman's eyes away from the goodness of his character, and a badly-fitting coat so outrage her beauty-loving propensities, that she is provoked into mistaking her mind's approval for real heart affection, and she chooses the artistic man, only to find, probably, that, like the O'Flaherty, one cannot comfortably worship a lily, without a considerable amount of mutton chops as well--and in the end she may sigh for the tasteless man who yet had the taste to love her.

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[Sidenote: We worship the "beautiful" too much.]

I think most of us carry this tendency to worship the beautiful too far, and our scorn for the physically unsatisfactory is one of our cruellest and most glaring latter-day faults. It is true we are equally cordially hard on ourselves, and hate our vile bodies, when their aches and pains intrude themselves between us and our soul's delight--for it is from the Pagan, not the Christian, point of view that most lovers of beauty regard life. And if a man's taste require costly gratification of it, say by pictures, by marbles, by the thousand and one sumptuous trifles that go to make the modern house beautiful, then that man is not possessed of true taste, and he will be poorer in his palace than if he dwelt ragged in Nature's lap, with all her riches, and those of his own mind, at his disposal. For the true artistic sense impels one to work always--and always to better and not worsen, what it touches. The artistic sense that lazes, and lets other people work to gratify it, is a bastard one, more, it is immoral, and neither bestows, nor receives, grace. It cannot be fashioned, it may not be bought, this strange sense of the inward beauty of things; nor a man's wife, nor his own soul, nor his beautiful house shall teach it him, and he will never be one with the Universe, with God, understanding all indeed, but not by written word or speech, but by what was born in him. And though he may suffer through it too, though to the ugly, the deaf, and the afflicted, such a gift may seem bestowed in cruellest irony, still when all is said and done I can think of no better summary of the whole than that given by Philip Sydney's immortal lines on love. You all know them--

"He who for love hath undergone The worst that can befall Is happier thousandfold than he Who ne'er hath loved at all ... For in his soul a grace hath reigned That nothing else could bring."

[Sidenote: Alfred C. Calmour is doubtful.]

The artistic temperament is both a blessing and a curse. It is a blessing when it lifts a man's soul out of the slough of vulgar commonplace, and turns his thoughts to the contemplation of noble things, while at the same time it enables him to give something to the world which it would not willingly lose, and for which he can obtain adequate remuneration. But it (the artistic temperament) is a curse when it tempts a man from that honest employment which provides him with bread and butter, and leaves him a defeated, disappointed, and heartbroken wretch, unable to return to that humble course of life which had happily supplied his daily wants.

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[Sidenote: Mrs. Panton considers it a fantastic demon.]