key of it. I think of some honest Othello pausing over this very sentence
in a railroad carriage, and stealthily gazing at Desdemona opposite to
him, innocently administering sandwiches to their little boy--I am trying
to turn off the sentence with a joke, you see--I feel it is growing too
dreadful, too serious.
And to what, pray, do these serious, these disagreeable, these almost
personal observations tend? To this simply, that Charles Honeyman, the
beloved and popular preacher, the elegant divine to whom Miss Blanche
writes sonnets, and whom Miss Beatrice invites to tea; who comes with
smiles on his lip, gentle sympathy in his tones, innocent gaiety in his
accent; who melts, rouses, terrifies in the pulpit; who charms over the
tea-urn and the bland bread-and-butter: Charles Honeyman has one or two
skeleton closets in his lodgings, Walpole Street, Mayfair; and many a
wakeful night, whilst Mrs. Ridley, his landlady, and her tired husband,
the nobleman's major-domo, whilst the lodger on the first floor, whilst
the cook and housemaid and weary little bootboy are at rest (mind you,
they have all got their closets, which they open with their
skeleton-keys); he wakes up, and looks at the ghastly occupant of that
receptacle. One of the Reverend Charles Honeyman's grisly night-haunters
is--but stop; let us give a little account of the lodgings, and of some
of the people frequenting the same.
First floor, Mr. Bagshot, Member for a Norfolk borough. Stout jolly
gentleman;--dines at the Carlton Club; greatly addicted to Greenwich and
Richmond, in the season: bets in a moderate way: does not go into
society, except now and again to the chiefs of his party, when they give
great entertainments; and once or twice to the houses of great country
dons who dwell near him in the country. Is not of very good family; was,
in fact, an apothecary: married a woman with money, much older than
himself, who does not like London, and stops at home at Hummingham, not
much to the displeasure of Bagshot; gives every now and then nice little
quiet dinners, which Mrs. Ridley cooks admirably, to exceedingly stupid
jolly old Parliamentary fogies, who absorb, with much silence and
cheerfulness, a vast quantity of wine. They have just begun to drink '24
claret now, that of '15 being scarce, and almost drunk up. Writes daily,
and hears every morning from Mrs. Bagshot; does not read her letters
always: does not rise till long past eleven o'clock of a Sunday, and has
John Bull and Bell's Life, in bed: frequents the Blue Posts sometimes;
rides a stout cob out of his county, and pays like the Bank of England.
The house is a Norfolk house. Mrs. Ridley was housekeeper to the great
Squire Bayham, who had the estate before the Conqueror, and who came to
such a dreadful crash in the year 1825, the year of the panic. Bayhams
still belongs to the family, but in what a state, as those can say who
recollect it in its palmy days! Fifteen hundred acres of the best
land in England were sold off: all the timber cut down as level as a
billiard-board. Mr. Bayham now lives up in one corner of the house, which
used to be filled with the finest company in Europe. Law bless you! the
Bayhams have seen almost all the nobility of England come in and go out,
and were gentlefolks when many a fine lord's father of the present day
was sweeping a counting-house.
The house will hold genteelly no more than these two inmates; but in the
season it manages to accommodate Miss Cann, who too was from Bayhams,
having been a governess there to the young lady who is dead, and who now
makes such a livelihood as she can best raise, by going out as a daily
teacher. Miss Cann dines with Mrs. Ridley in the adjoining little
back-parlour. Ridley but seldom can be spared to partake of the family
dinner, his duties in the house and about the person of my Lord Todmorden
keeping him constantly near that nobleman. How little Miss Cann can go on
and keep alive on the crumb she eats for breakfast, and the scrap she
picks at dinner, du astonish Mrs. Ridley, that it du! She declares that
the two canary-birds encaged in her window (whence is a cheerful prospect
of the back of Lady Whittlesea's Chapel) eat more than Miss Cann. The two
birds set up a tremendous singing and chorussing when Miss Cann, spying
the occasion of the first-floor lodger's absence, begins practising her
music-pieces. Such trills, roulades, and flourishes go on from the birds
and the lodger! it is a wonder how any fingers can move over the jingling
ivory so quickly as Miss Cann's. Excellent a woman as she is, admirably
virtuous, frugal, brisk, honest, and cheerful, I would not like to live
in lodgings where there was a lady so addicted to playing variations. No
more does Honeyman. On a Saturday, when he is composing his valuable
sermons (the rogue, you may be sure, leaves his work to the last day, and
there are, I am given to understand, among the clergy many better men
than Honeyman, who are as dilatory as he), he begs, he entreats with
tears in his eyes, that Miss Cann's music may cease. I would back little
Cann to write a sermon against him, for all his reputation as a popular
preacher.
Old and weazened as that piano is, feeble and cracked her voice, it is
wonderful what a pleasant concert she can give in that parlour of a
Saturday evening, to Mrs. Ridley, who generally dozes a good deal, and to
a lad, who listens with all his soul, with tears sometimes in his great
eyes, with crowding fancies filling his brain and throbbing at his heart,
as the artist plies her humble instrument. She plays old music of Handel
and Haydn, and the little chamber anon swells into a cathedral, and he
who listens beholds altars lighted, priests ministering, fair children
swinging censers, great oriel windows gleaming in sunset, and seen
through arched columns and avenues of twilight marble. The young fellow
who hears her has been often and often to the opera and the theatres. As
she plays Don Juan, Zerlina comes tripping over the meadows, and Masetto
after her, with a crowd of peasants and maidens: and they sing the
sweetest of all music, and the heart beats with happiness, and kindness,
and pleasure. Piano, pianissimo! the city is hushed. The towers of the
great cathedral rise in the distance, its spires lighted by the broad
moon. The statues in the moonlit place cast long shadows athwart the
pavement: but the fountain in the midst is dressed out like Cinderella
for the night, and sings and wears a crest of diamonds. That great sombre
street all in shade, can it be the famous Toledo?--or is it the Corso?--
or is it the great street in Madrid, the one which leads to the Escurial
where the Rubens and Velasquez are? It is Fancy Street--Poetry Street--
Imagination Street--the street where lovely ladies look from balconies,
where cavaliers strike mandolins and draw swords and engage, where long
processions pass, and venerable hermits, with long beards, bless the
kneeling people: where the rude soldiery, swaggering through the place
with flags and halberts, and fife and dance, seize the slim wai
sts of the
daughters of the people, and bid the pifferari play to their dancing.
Blow, bagpipes, a storm of harmony! become trumpets, trombones,
ophicleides, fiddles, and bassoons! Fire, guns sound, tocsins! Shout,
people! Louder, shriller and sweeter than all, sing thou, ravishing
heroine! And see, on his cream-coloured charger Massaniello prances in,
and Fra Diavolo leaps down the balcony, carabine in hand; and Sir Huon of
Bordeaux sails up to the quay with the Sultan's daughter of Babylon. All
these delights and sights, and joys and glories, these thrills of
sympathy, movements of unknown longing, and visions of beauty, a young
sickly lad of eighteen enjoys in a little dark room where there is a bed
disguised in the shape of a wardrobe, and a little old woman is playing
under a gas-lamp on the jingling keys of an old piano.
For a long time Mr. Samuel Ridley, butler and confidential valet to the
Right Honourable John James Baron Todmorden, was in a state of the
greatest despair and gloom about his only son, the little John James,--a
sickly and almost deformed child "of whom there was no making nothink,"
as Mr. Ridley said. His figure precluded him from following his father's
profession, and waiting upon the British nobility, who naturally require
large and handsome men to skip up behind their rolling carriages, and
hand their plates at dinner. When John James was six years old his father
remarked, with tears in his eyes, he wasn't higher than a plate-basket.
The boys jeered at him in the streets--some whopped him, spite of his
diminutive size. At school he made but little progress. He was always
sickly and dirty, and timid and crying, whimpering in the kitchen away
from his mother; who, though she loved him, took Mr. Ridley's view of his
character, and thought him little better than an idiot until such time as
little Miss Cann took him in hand, when at length there was some hope of
him.
"Half-witted, you great stupid big man," says Miss Cann, who had a fine
spirit of her own. "That boy half-witted! He has got more wit in his
little finger than you have in all your great person! You are a very good
man, Ridley, very good-natured I'm sure, and bear with the teasing of a
waspish old woman: but you are not the wisest of mankind. Tut, tut, don't
tell me. You know you spell out the words when you read the newspaper
still, and what would your bills look like if I did not write them in my
nice little hand? I tell you that boy is a genius. I tell you that one
day the world will hear of him. His heart is made of pure gold. You think
that all the wit belongs to the big people. Look at me, you great tall
man! Am I not a hundred times cleverer than you are? Yes, and John James
is worth a thousand such insignificant little chits as I am; and he is as
tall as me too, sir. Do you hear that! One day I am determined he shall
dine at Lord Todmorden's table, and he shall get the prize at the Royal
Academy, and be famous, sir--famous!"
"Well, Miss C., I wish he may get it; that's all I say," answers Mr.
Ridley. "The poor fellow does no harm, that I acknowledge; but I never
see the good he was up to yet. I wish he'd begin it; I du wish he would
now." And the honest gentleman relapses into the study of his paper.
All those beautiful sounds and thoughts which Miss Cann conveys to him
out of her charmed piano, the young artist straightway translates into
forms; and knights in armour, with plume, and shield, and battle-axe; and
splendid young noblemen with flowing ringlets, and bounteous plumes of
feathers, and rapiers, and russet boots; and fierce banditti with crimson
tights, doublets profusely illustrated with large brass buttons, and the
dumpy basket-hilted claymores known to be the favourite weapon with which
these whiskered ruffians do battle; wasp-waisted peasant girls, and young
countesses with oh, such large eyes and the lips!--all these splendid
forms of war and beauty crowd to the young draughtsman's pencil, and
cover letter-backs, copybooks, without end. If his hand strikes off some
face peculiarly lovely, and to his taste, some fair vision that has shone
on his imagination, some houri of a dancer, some bright young lady of
fashion in an opera-box, whom he has seen, or fancied he has seen (for
the youth is short-sighted, though he hardly as yet knows his
misfortune)--if he has made some effort extraordinarily successful, our
young Pygmalion hides away the masterpiece, and he paints the beauty with
all his skill; the lips a bright carmine, the eyes a deep, deep cobalt,
the cheeks a dazzling vermilion, the ringlets of a golden hue; and he
worships this sweet creature of his in secret, fancies a history for her;
a castle to storm, a tyrant usurper who keeps her imprisoned, and a
prince in black ringlets and a spangled cloak, who scales the tower, who
slays the tyrant, and then kneels gracefully at the princess's feet, and
says, "Lady, wilt thou be mine?"
There is a kind lady in the neighbourhood, who takes in dressmaking for
the neighbouring maid-servants, and has a small establishment of
lollipops, theatrical characters, and ginger-beer for the boys in Little
Craggs Buildings, hard by the Running Footman public-house, where father
and other gentlemen's gentlemen have their club: this good soul also
sells Sunday newspapers to the footmen of the neighbouring gentry; and
besides, has a stock of novels for the ladies of the upper servants'
table. Next to Miss Cann, Miss Flinders is John James's greatest friend
and benefactor. She has remarked him when he was quite a little man, and
used to bring his father's beer of a Sunday. Out of her novels he has
taught himself to read, dull boy at the day-school though he was, and
always the last in his class, there. Hours, happy hours, has he spent
cowering behind her counter, or hugging her books under his pinafore when
he had leave to carry them home. The whole library has passed through his
hands, his long, lean, tremulous hands, and under his eager eyes. He has
made illustrations to every one of those books, and been frightened at
his own pictures of Manfroni or the One-handed Monk, Abellino the
Terrific Bravo of Venice, and Rinaldo Rinaldini Captain of Robbers. How
he has blistered Thaddeus of Warsaw with his tears, and drawn him in his
Polish cap, and tights, and Hessians! William Wallace, the Hero of
Scotland, how nobly he has depicted him! With what whiskers and bushy
ostrich plumes!--in a tight kilt, and with what magnificent calves to his
legs, laying about him with his battle-axe, and bestriding the bodies of
King Edward's prostrate cavaliers! At this time Mr. Honeyman comes to
lodge in Walpole Street, and brings a set of Scott's novels, for which he
subscribed when at Oxford; and young John James, who at first waits upon
him and does little odd jobs for the reverend gentleman, lights upon the
volumes, and reads them with such a delight and passion of pleasure as
all the delights of future days will scarce equal. A fool, is he?--an
idle feller, out of whom no good will ever come, as his father says.
&nb
sp; There was a time when, in despair of any better chance for him, his
parents thought of apprenticing him to a tailor, and John James was waked
up from a dream of Rebecca and informed of the cruelty meditated against
him. I forbear to describe the tears and terror, and frantic desperation
in which the poor boy was plunged. Little Miss Cann rescued him from that
awful board, and Honeyman likewise interceded for him, and Mr. Bagshot
promised that, as soon as his party came in, he would ask the Minister
for a tide-waitership for him; for everybody liked the solemn,
soft-hearted, willing little lad, and no one knew him less than his
pompous and stupid and respectable father.
Miss Cann painted flowers and card-screens elegantly, and "finished"
pencil-drawings most elaborately for her pupils. She could copy prints,
so that at a little distance you would scarcely know that the copy in
stumped chalk was not a bad mezzotinto engraving. She even had a little
old paint-box, and showed you one or two ivory miniatures out of the
drawer. She gave John James what little knowledge of drawing she had, and
handed him over her invaluable recipes for mixing water-colours--"for
trees in foregrounds, burnt sienna and indigo"--"for very dark foliage,
ivory black and gamboge"--"for flesh-colour," etc. etc. John James went
through her poor little course, but not so brilliantly as she expected.
She was forced to own that several of her pupils' "pieces" were executed
much more dexterously than Johnny Ridley's. Honeyman looked at the boy's
drawings from time to time, and said, "Hm, ha!--very clever--a great deal
of fancy, really." But Honeyman knew no more of the subject than a deaf
and dumb man knows of music. He could talk the art cant very glibly, and
had a set of Morghens and Madonnas as became a clergyman and a man of
taste; but he saw not with eyes such as those wherewith Heaven had
endowed the humble little butler's boy, to whom splendours of Nature were
revealed to vulgar sights invisible, and beauties manifest in forms,
colours, shadows of common objects, where most of the world saw only what
was dull, and gross, and familiar. One reads in the magic story-books of
a charm or a flower which the wizard gives, and which enables the bearer
to see the fairies. O enchanting boon of Nature, which reveals to the
possessor the hidden spirits of beauty round about him! spirits which the
strongest and most gifted masters compel into painting or song. To others
it is granted but to have fleeting glimpses of that fair Art-world; and
tempted by ambition, or barred by faint-heartedness, or driven by
necessity, to turn away thence to the vulgar life-track, and the light of
common day.
The reader who has passed through Walpole Street scores of times, knows
the discomfortable architecture of all, save the great houses built in
Queen Anne's and George the First's time; and while some of the
neighbouring streets, to wit, Great Craggs Street, Bolingbroke Street,
and others, contain mansions fairly coped with stone, with little
obelisks before the doors, and great extinguishers wherein the torches of
the nobility's running footmen were put out a hundred and thirty or forty
years ago:--houses which still remain abodes of the quality, and where
you shall see a hundred carriages gather of a public night; Walpole
Street has quite faded away into lodgings, private hotels, doctors'
houses, and the like; nor is No. 23 (Ridley's) by any means the best
house in the street. The parlour, furnished and tenanted by Miss Cann as
has been described; the first floor, Bagshot, Esq., M.P.; the second
floor, Honeyman; what remains but the garrets, and the ample staircase
and the kitchens? and the family being all put to bed, how can you
imagine there is room for any more inhabitants?
And yet there is one lodger more, and one who, like almost all the other
personages mentioned up to the present time (and some of whom you have no
The Newcomes Page 18
