CHAPTER XXII. AN UPTONIAN DESPATCH
British Legation, Naples. My dear Harcourt,—It would seem that a letter of mine to you must have miscarried,—a not unfrequent occurrence when entrusted to our Foreign Office for transmission. Should it ever reach you, you will perceive how unjustly you have charged me with neglecting your wishes. I have ordered the Sicilian wine for your friend; I have obtained the Royal leave for you to shoot in Calabria; and I assure you it is rather a rare incident in my life to have forgotten nothing required of me! Perhaps you, who know me well, will do me this justice, and be the more grateful for my present promptitude.
It was quite a mistake sending me here; for anything there is to be done, Spencer or Lonsdale would perfectly suffice. I ought to have gone to Vienna,—and so they know at home; but it's the old game played over again. Important questions! why, my dear friend, there is not a matter between this country and our own that rises above the capacity of a Colonel of Dragoons. Meanwhile really great events are preparing in the East of Europe,—not that I am going to inflict them upon you, nor ask you to listen to speculations which even those in authority turn a deaf ear to.
It is very kind of you to think of my health. I am still a sufferer; the old pains rather aggravated than relieved by this climate. You are aware that, though warm, the weather here has some exciting property, some excess or other of a peculiar gas in the atmosphere, prejudicial to certain temperaments. I feel it greatly; and though the season is midsummer, I am obliged to dress entirely in a light costume of buckskin, and take Marsalla baths, which refresh me, at least for the while. I have also taken to smoke the leaves of the nux vomica, steeped in arrack, and think it agrees with me. The King has most kindly placed a little villa at Ischia at my disposal; but I do not mean to avail myself of the politeness. The Duke of San Giustino has also offered me his palace at Baia; but I don't fancy leaving this just now, where there is a doctor, a certain Luigi Buffeloni, who really seems to have hit off my case. He calls it arterial arthriticis,—a kind of inflammatory action of one coat of the arterial system; his notion is highly ingenious, and wonderfully borne out by the symptoms. I wish you would ask Brodie, or any of our best men, whether they have met with this affection; what class it affects, and what course it usually takes? My Italian doctor implies that it is the passing malady of men highly excitable, and largely endowed with mental gifts. He may, or may not, be correct in this. It is only nature makes the blunder of giving the sharpest swords the weakest scabbards. What a pity the weapon cannot be worn naked!
You ask me if I like this place. I do, perhaps, as well as I should like anywhere. There is a wonderful sameness over the world just now, preluding, I have very little doubt, some great outburst of nationality from all the countries of Europe,—just as periods of Puritanism succeed intervals of gross licentiousness.
Society here is, therefore, what you see it in London or Paris; well-bred people, like Gold, are current everywhere. There is really little peculiar to observe. I don't perceive that there is more levity than elsewhere. The difference is, perhaps, that there is less shame about it, since it is under the protection of the Church.
I go out very little; my notion is, that the Diplomatist, like the ancient Augur, must not suffer himself to be vulgarized by contact. He can only lose, not gain, by that mixed intercourse with the world. I have a few who come when I want them, and go in like manner. They tell me “what is going on,” far better and more truthfully than paid employees, and they cannot trace my intentions through my inquiries, and hasten off to retail them at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Of my colleagues I see as little as possible, though, when we do meet, I feel an unbounded affection for them. So much for my life, dear Harcourt; on the whole, a very tolerable kind of existence, which if few would envy, still fewer would care to part with.
I now come to the chief portion of your letter. This boy of Glencore's, I rather like the account you give of him, better than you do yourself. Imaginative and dreamy he may be, but remember what he was, and where we have placed him. A moonstruck, romantic youth at a German University. Is it not painting the lily?
I merely intended he should go to Göttingen to learn the language,—always a difficulty, if not abstracted from other and more dulcet sounds. I never meant to have him domesticated with some rusty Hochgelehrter, eating sauer-kraut in company with a green-eyed Fraulein, and imbibing love and metaphysics together. Let him “moon away,” as you call it, my dear Harcourt. It is wonderfully little consequence what any one does with his intellect till he be three or four and twenty. Indeed, I half suspect that the soil might be left quietly to rear weeds till that time; and as to dreaminess, it signifies nothing if there be a strong “physique.” With a weak frame, imagination will play the tyrant, and never cease till it dominates over all the other faculties; but where there is strength and activity, there is no fear of this.
You amuse me with your account of the doctor; and so the Germans have actually taken him for a savant, and given him a degree “honoris causa.” May they never make a worse blunder. The man is eminently remarkable,—with his opportunities, miraculous. I am certain, Harcourt, you never felt half the pleasure on arriving at a region well stocked with game, that he did on finding himself in a land of Libraries, Museums, and Collections. Fancy the poor fellow's ecstasy at being allowed to range at will through all ancient literature, of which hitherto a stray volume alone had reached him. Imagine his delight as each day opened new stores of knowledge to him, surrounded as he was by all that could encourage zeal and reward research. The boy's treatment of him pleases me much; it smacks of the gentle blood in his veins. Poor lad, there is something very sad in his case.
You need not have taken such trouble about accounts and expenditure; of course, whatever you have done I perfectly approve of. You say that the boy has no idea of money or its value. There is both good and evil in this. And now as to his future. I should have no objection whatever to having him attached to my Legation here, and perhaps no great difficulty in effecting his appointment; but there is a serious obstacle in his position. The young men who figure at embassies and missions are all “cognate numbers.” They each of them know who and what the other is, whence he came, and so on. Now, our poor boy could not stand this ordeal, nor would it be fair he should be exposed to it. Besides this, it was never Glencore's wish, but the very opposite to it, that he should be brought prominently forward in life. He even suggested one of the Colonies as the means of withdrawing him at once, and forever, from public gaze.
You have interested me much by what you say of the boy's progress. His tastes, I infer, lie in the direction which, in a worldly sense, are least profitable; but, after all, Harcourt, every one has brains enough, and to spare, for any career. Let us only decide upon that one most fitted for him, and, depend upon it, his faculties will day by day conform to his duties, and his tastes be merely dissipations, just as play or wine is to coarser natures.
If you really press the question of his coming to me, I will not refuse, seeing that I can take my own time to consider what steps subsequently should be adopted. How is it that you know nothing of Glencore,—can he not be traced?
Lord Selby, whom you may remember in the Blues formerly, dined here yesterday, and mentioned a communication he had received from his lawyer with regard to some property entail, which, if Glencore should leave no heir male, devolved upon him. I tried to find out the whereabouts and the amount of this heritage; but, with the admirable indifference that characterizes him, he did not know or care.
As to my Lady, I can give you no information whatever. Her house at Florence is uninhabited, the furniture is sold off; but no one seems even to guess whither she has betaken herself. The fast and loose of that pleasant city are, as I hear, actually houseless since her departure. No asylum opens there with fire and cigars. A number of the destitute have come down here in half despair, amongst the rest Scaresby,—Major Scaresby, an insupportable nuisance of flat stories and stale gossip; one of those fellows who cannot make even malevolence amusing, and who speak ill of their neighbors without a single spark of wit. He has left three cards upon me, each duly returned; but I am resolved that our inter-change of courtesies shall proceed no farther.
I trust I have omitted nothing in reply to your last despatch, except it be to say that I look for you here about September, or earlier, if as convenient to you; you will, of course, write to me, however, meanwhile.
Do not mention having heard from me, at the clubs or in society. I am, as I have the right to be, on the sick list, and it is as well my rest should remain undisturbed.
I wish you had any means of making it known that the article in the “Quarterly,” on our Foreign relations, is not mine. The newspapers have coolly assumed me to be the author, and of course I am not going to give them the éclat of a personal denial. The fellow who wrote it must be an ass; since had he known what he pretends, he had never revealed it. He who wants to bag his bird, Colonel, never bangs away at nothing. I have now completed a longer despatch to you than I intend to address to the Noble Secretary at F. O., and am yours, very faithfully,
Horace Upton.
Whose Magnesia is it that contains essence of Bark? Tripley's or Chipley's, I think. Find it out for me, and send me a packet through the office; put up Fauchard's pamphlet with it, on Spain, and a small box of those new blisters,—Mouches they are called; they are to be had at Atkinson's. I have got so accustomed to their stimulating power that I never write without one or two on my forehead. They tell me the cautery, if dexterously applied, is better; but I have not tried it.