be indescribably astonished by the secrets they disclose. It is
probable that we have all three committed murders and hidden
bodies. It is pretty certain that we have all desperately wanted
to cry out, and have had no voice; that we have all gone to the
play and not been able to get in; that we have all dreamed much
more of our youth than of our later lives; that - I have lost it!
The thread's broken.
And up I go. I, lying here with the night-light before me, up I
go, for no reason on earth that I can find out, and drawn by no
links that are visible to me, up the Great Saint Bernard! I have
lived in Switzerland, and rambled among the mountains; but, why I
should go there now, and why up the Great Saint Bernard in
preference to any other mountain, I have no idea. As I lie here
broad awake, and with every sense so sharpened that I can
distinctly hear distant noises inaudible to me at another time, I
make that journey, as I really did, on the same summer day, with
the same happy party - ah! two since dead, I grieve to think - and
there is the same track, with the same black wooden arms to point
the way, and there are the same storm-refuges here and there; and
there is the same snow falling at the top, and there are the same
frosty mists, and there is the same intensely cold convent with its
menagerie smell, and the same breed of dogs fast dying out, and the
same breed of jolly young monks whom I mourn to know as humbugs,
and the same convent parlour with its piano and the sitting round
the fire, and the same supper, and the same lone night in a cell,
and the same bright fresh morning when going out into the highly
rarefied air was like a plunge into an icy bath. Now, see here
what comes along; and why does this thing stalk into my mind on the
top of a Swiss mountain!
It is a figure that I once saw, just after dark, chalked upon a
door in a little back lane near a country church - my first church.
How young a child I may have been at the time I don't know, but it
horrified me so intensely - in connexion with the churchyard, I
suppose, for it smokes a pipe, and has a big hat with each of its
ears sticking out in a horizontal line under the brim, and is not
in itself more oppressive than a mouth from ear to ear, a pair of
goggle eyes, and hands like two bunches of carrots, five in each,
can make it - that it is still vaguely alarming to me to recall (as
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I have often done before, lying awake) the running home, the
looking behind, the horror, of its following me; though whether
disconnected from the door, or door and all, I can't say, and
perhaps never could. It lays a disagreeable train. I must resolve
to think of something on the voluntary principle.
The balloon ascents of this last season. They will do to think
about, while I lie awake, as well as anything else. I must hold
them tight though, for I feel them sliding away, and in their stead
are the Mannings, husband and wife, hanging on the top of Horsemonger
Lane Jail. In connexion with which dismal spectacle, I
recall this curious fantasy of the mind. That, having beheld that
execution, and having left those two forms dangling on the top of
the entrance gateway - the man's, a limp, loose suit of clothes as
if the man had gone out of them; the woman's, a fine shape, so
elaborately corseted and artfully dressed, that it was quite
unchanged in its trim appearance as it slowly swung from side to
side - I never could, by my uttermost efforts, for some weeks,
present the outside of that prison to myself (which the terrible
impression I had received continually obliged me to do) without
presenting it with the two figures still hanging in the morning
air. Until, strolling past the gloomy place one night, when the
street was deserted and quiet, and actually seeing that the bodies
were not there, my fancy was persuaded, as it were, to take them
down and bury them within the precincts of the jail, where they
have lain ever since.
The balloon ascents of last season. Let me reckon them up. There
were the horse, the bull, the parachute, - and the tumbler hanging
on - chiefly by his toes, I believe - below the car. Very wrong,
indeed, and decidedly to be stopped. But, in connexion with these
and similar dangerous exhibitions, it strikes me that that portion
of the public whom they entertain, is unjustly reproached. Their
pleasure is in the difficulty overcome. They are a public of great
faith, and are quite confident that the gentleman will not fall off
the horse, or the lady off the bull or out of the parachute, and
that the tumbler has a firm hold with his toes. They do not go to
see the adventurer vanquished, but triumphant. There is no
parallel in public combats between men and beasts, because nobody
can answer for the particular beast - unless it were always the
same beast, in which case it would be a mere stage-show, which the
same public would go in the same state of mind to see, entirely
believing in the brute being beforehand safely subdued by the man.
That they are not accustomed to calculate hazards and dangers with
any nicety, we may know from their rash exposure of themselves in
overcrowded steamboats, and unsafe conveyances and places of all
kinds. And I cannot help thinking that instead of railing, and
attributing savage motives to a people naturally well disposed and
humane, it is better to teach them, and lead them argumentatively
and reasonably - for they are very reasonable, if you will discuss
a matter with them - to more considerate and wise conclusions.
This is a disagreeable intrusion! Here is a man with his throat
cut, dashing towards me as I lie awake! A recollection of an old
story of a kinsman of mine, who, going home one foggy winter night
to Hampstead, when London was much smaller and the road lonesome,
suddenly encountered such a figure rushing past him, and presently
two keepers from a madhouse in pursuit. A very unpleasant creature
indeed, to come into my mind unbidden, as I lie awake.
- The balloon ascents of last season. I must return to the
balloons. Why did the bleeding man start out of them? Never mind;
if I inquire, he will be back again. The balloons. This
particular public have inherently a great pleasure in the
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contemplation of physical difficulties overcome; mainly, as I take
it, because the lives of a large majority of them are exceedingly
monotonous and real, and further, are a struggle against continual
difficulties, and further still, because anything in the form of
accidental injury, or any kind of illness or disability is so very
serious in their own sphere. I will explain this seeming paradox
of mine. Take the case of a Christmas Pantomime. Surely nobody
supposes that the young mother in the pit who falls into fits of
laughter when the baby is boiled or sat upon, would be at all
&n
bsp; diverted by such an occurrence off the stage. Nor is the decent
workman in the gallery, who is transported beyond the ignorant
present by the delight with which he sees a stout gentleman pushed
out of a two pair of stairs window, to be slandered by the
suspicion that he would be in the least entertained by such a
spectacle in any street in London, Paris, or New York. It always
appears to me that the secret of this enjoyment lies in the
temporary superiority to the common hazards and mischances of life;
in seeing casualties, attended when they really occur with bodily
and mental suffering, tears, and poverty, happen through a very
rough sort of poetry without the least harm being done to any one -
the pretence of distress in a pantomime being so broadly humorous
as to be no pretence at all. Much as in the comic fiction I can
understand the mother with a very vulnerable baby at home, greatly
relishing the invulnerable baby on the stage, so in the Cremorne
reality I can understand the mason who is always liable to fall off
a scaffold in his working jacket and to be carried to the hospital,
having an infinite admiration of the radiant personage in spangles
who goes into the clouds upon a bull, or upside down, and who, he
takes it for granted - not reflecting upon the thing - has, by
uncommon skill and dexterity, conquered such mischances as those to
which he and his acquaintance are continually exposed.
I wish the Morgue in Paris would not come here as I lie awake, with
its ghastly beds, and the swollen saturated clothes hanging up, and
the water dripping, dripping all day long, upon that other swollen
saturated something in the corner, like a heap of crushed over-ripe
figs that I have seen in Italy! And this detestable Morgue comes
back again at the head of a procession of forgotten ghost stories.
This will never do. I must think of something else as I lie awake;
or, like that sagacious animal in the United States who recognised
the colonel who was such a dead shot, I am a gone 'Coon. What
shall I think of? The late brutal assaults. Very good subject.
The late brutal assaults.
(Though whether, supposing I should see, here before me as I lie
awake, the awful phantom described in one of those ghost stories,
who, with a head-dress of shroud, was always seen looking in
through a certain glass door at a certain dead hour - whether, in
such a case it would be the least consolation to me to know on
philosophical grounds that it was merely my imagination, is a
question I can't help asking myself by the way.)
The late brutal assaults. I strongly question the expediency of
advocating the revival of whipping for those crimes. It is a
natural and generous impulse to be indignant at the perpetration of
inconceivable brutality, but I doubt the whipping panacea gravely.
Not in the least regard or pity for the criminal, whom I hold in
far lower estimation than a mad wolf, but in consideration for the
general tone and feeling, which is very much improved since the
whipping times. It is bad for a people to be familiarised with
such punishments. When the whip went out of Bridewell, and ceased
to be flourished at the carts tail and at the whipping-post, it
began to fade out of madhouses, and workhouses, and schools and
families, and to give place to a better system everywhere, than
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cruel driving. It would be hasty, because a few brutes may be
inadequately punished, to revive, in any aspect, what, in so many
aspects, society is hardly yet happily rid of. The whip is a very
contagious kind of thing, and difficult to confine within one set
of bounds. Utterly abolish punishment by fine - a barbarous
device, quite as much out of date as wager by battle, but
particularly connected in the vulgar mind with this class of
offence - at least quadruple the term of imprisonment for
aggravated assaults - and above all let us, in such cases, have no
Pet Prisoning, vain glorifying, strong soup, and roasted meats, but
hard work, and one unchanging and uncompromising dietary of bread
and water, well or ill; and we shall do much better than by going
down into the dark to grope for the whip among the rusty fragments
of the rack, and the branding iron, and the chains and gibbet from
the public roads, and the weights that pressed men to death in the
cells of Newgate.
I had proceeded thus far, when I found I had been lying awake so
long that the very dead began to wake too, and to crowd into my
thoughts most sorrowfully. Therefore, I resolved to lie awake no
more, but to get up and go out for a night walk - which resolution
was an acceptable relief to me, as I dare say it may prove now to a
great many more.
THE GHOST OF ART
I AM a bachelor, residing in rather a dreary set of chambers in the
Temple. They are situated in a square court of high houses, which
would be a complete well, but for the want of water and the absence
of a bucket. I live at the top of the house, among the tiles and
sparrows. Like the little man in the nursery-story, I live by
myself, and all the bread and cheese I get - which is not much - I
put upon a shelf. I need scarcely add, perhaps, that I am in love,
and that the father of my charming Julia objects to our union.
I mention these little particulars as I might deliver a letter of
introduction. The reader is now acquainted with me, and perhaps
will condescend to listen to my narrative.
I am naturally of a dreamy turn of mind; and my abundant leisure -
for I am called to the Bar - coupled with much lonely listening to
the twittering of sparrows, and the pattering of rain, has
encouraged that disposition. In my 'top set' I hear the wind howl
on a winter night, when the man on the ground floor believes it is
perfectly still weather. The dim lamps with which our Honourable
Society (supposed to be as yet unconscious of the new discovery
called Gas) make the horrors of the staircase visible, deepen the
gloom which generally settles on my soul when I go home at night.
I am in the Law, but not of it. I can't exactly make out what it
means. I sit in Westminster Hall sometimes (in character) from ten
to four; and when I go out of Court, I don't know whether I am
standing on my wig or my boots.
It appears to me (I mention this in confidence) as if there were
too much talk and too much law - as if some grains of truth were
started overboard into a tempestuous sea of chaff.
All this may make me mystical. Still, I am confident that what I
am going to describe myself as having seen and heard, I actually
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did see and hear.
It is necessary that I should observe that I have a great delight
in pictures. I am no painter myself, but I have studied pictures
and written about them. I have seen all the most famous pictures
in the world; my education and reading have been sufficiently
&
nbsp; general to possess me beforehand with a knowledge of most of the
subjects to which a Painter is likely to have recourse; and,
although I might be in some doubt as to the rightful fashion of the
scabbard of King Lear's sword, for instance, I think I should know
King Lear tolerably well, if I happened to meet with him.
I go to all the Modern Exhibitions every season, and of course I
revere the Royal Academy. I stand by its forty Academical articles
almost as firmly as I stand by the thirty-nine Articles of the
Church of England. I am convinced that in neither case could there
be, by any rightful possibility, one article more or less.
It is now exactly three years - three years ago, this very month -
since I went from Westminster to the Temple, one Thursday
afternoon, in a cheap steamboat. The sky was black, when I
imprudently walked on board. It began to thunder and lighten
immediately afterwards, and the rain poured down in torrents. The
deck seeming to smoke with the wet, I went below; but so many
passengers were there, smoking too, that I came up again, and
buttoning my pea-coat, and standing in the shadow of the paddlebox,
stood as upright as I could, and made the best of it.
It was at this moment that I first beheld the terrible Being, who
is the subject of my present recollections.
Standing against the funnel, apparently with the intention of
drying himself by the heat as fast as he got wet, was a shabby man
in threadbare black, and with his hands in his pockets, who
fascinated me from the memorable instant when I caught his eye.
Where had I caught that eye before? Who was he? Why did I connect
him, all at once, with the Vicar of Wakefield, Alfred the Great,
Gil Blas, Charles the Second, Joseph and his Brethren, the Fairy
Queen, Tom Jones, the Decameron of Boccaccio, Tam O'Shanter, the
Marriage of the Doge of Venice with the Adriatic, and the Great
Plague of London? Why, when he bent one leg, and placed one hand
upon the back of the seat near him, did my mind associate him
wildly with the words, 'Number one hundred and forty-two, Portrait
of a gentleman'? Could it be that I was going mad?
I looked at him again, and now I could have taken my affidavit that
he belonged to the Vicar of Wakefield's family. Whether he was the
Vicar, or Moses, or Mr. Burchill, or the Squire, or a
conglomeration of all four, I knew not; but I was impelled to seize
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