No. XIV.—TO SWAGGER.
I approach you with fear and trembling. Somewhere in the Cave of the Winds you have your home. The ancient Authors, to their discredit, make no mention of your existence there, but the fact is as I have stated it. The East wind blows into your gaping mouth, and forth you go, puffing and swelling with an alien importance, to do your hateful work. You hover over a second-rate Statesman, who has attracted the applause of a Party by an opportune speech, compiled by the industry of a humble Secretary. From that moment his nature changes. Though he may have been simple and beloved, yet, through you, he shall become pompous, and abhorred. His fellow-creatures are thenceforth mere material for his trampling feet; he swells into regions to which no criticism can reach; he covers himself in a triple hide of vanity, ostentation, and disdain; he hails himself continually as the unaided Saviour of his country, and dies in the odour of braggadocio, without a genuine friend to mourn his loss.
Or, again, you select some common, smug-faced Clergyman, capable, no doubt, if he were left alone, of guiding his flock quietly into the strait paths of goodness and humility. You turn him into a loud-voiced Clerical quack, vending his wretched patent medicines of salvation in a style of offensive denunciation that would have ruined a host of Dulcamaras, trained in the insinuating methods of the ordinary trade. But on this the Clergyman thrives, and weak women fall prostrate before his roaring insincerity.
Nor do you neglect the young. Heavens! I remember I was once favoured with the confidences of WILLIAM JOSKINS BACON, an Undergraduate, generally known to his intimates as "Side of Bacon." I shudder to recollect how that amazing creature discoursed to me about his popularity, his influence, his surprising deeds both of valour and of discretion. With one nod—and, as he spoke, he gave me an illustration of his Olympian method—he had awed his Head-master—a present ornament of the Bench of Bishops—into a terrified silence, from which he recovered only to bless the name of JOSKINS, and hold him up as a pattern to his schoolfellows. At a single phrase of scorn from those redoubtable lips, his College Tutor had withered into acquiescence, and had never dared to refuse him an exeat from that day forth. "I can't help pitying the beggar," said JOSKINS—"but I had to do it. You must make these fellows feel you're their master, or they'll never give you a moment's peace. Halloa!" he continued, as a brawny athlete sauntered into the room, "how's the boat going, BULLEN? Not very well, eh? Well, remember I'm ready to lend you a hand, and pull you through when things get desperate." The smile with which this offer was received had no effect upon my companion. He took it rather as a tribute to the subtle humour which, as he believed, lay lurking in his simplest utterances. "Always make 'em laugh," he observed, with pride. "It keeps up the spirits of these poor devils of rowing-men; and old BULLEN knows I'm all there when I'm wanted." But I had heard enough, and departed from him, feeling as though a steam-roller had passed over my moral nature, and flattened out my self-respect.
Then there was CHEPSTOWE, the poet. I am old enough to remember him; and it pleases me sometimes to call back to my mind this paltry and forgotten little literary Bombastes. As I write, I have before me some of the reviews that greeted his boisterous invasion of the regions of song. "Mr. CHEPSTOWE," said one, "has struck a note which is destined to vibrate so long as the English language is spoken in civilised lands. He is no ordinary rhymester, struggling feebly in the bonds of convention. With a bold and masterful on-rush, he cleaves his way unhesitatingly to the very heart of things, tears it out, and lays it, palpitating and bleeding, before the eyes of humanity. We have only space for a few lines from the magnificent Ode to Actuality:—
"'Prone in the caverns of the vasty deep
I lay,
And slept not, though I seemed to sleep.
The day
Pierced not with sullen eyes of pallid scorn
The dark,
Unplumbed abyss, where, girt with red limbs torn.
The shark
Sported, and eyeless monsters crawled in slime—'
"No extract can, however, convey an adequate idea of this grand poem, on which, as on the bed rock, Mr. CHEPSTOWE's fame is established for ever, SHAKSPEARE himself might have been proud to have written it." I may remark, parenthetically, that in his "Ode" CHEPSTOWE pictured himself as a sort of animate skeleton:—
"Sockets where light once shone grinned emptiness;
The teeth
Were fallen from the gaping, gumless jaws; nathless
Beneath
The cold smooth skull, the brain retained her throne."
Amid these uncomfortable surroundings CHEPSTOWE described himself as penetrated with raptures of fierce joy at having shaken himself free from the world and its puling insincerities to dwell amid "Unpitying shapes of death's dread twin despair," where "Rapine and slaughter raged, and none rebuked." Another reviewer observed that "The soul of ARCHER's, the tavern-brawler's glorious victim, KIT MARLOWE, has taken again a habitation of clay. She speaks trumpet-tongued by the mouth of Mr. CHEPSTOWE. We note in these outpourings of dramatic passion an audacity, an energy, an enthusiasm, that are calculated to shake Peckham Rye to its centre, and make Balham tremble in its ridiculous carpet slippers. Who—to take only one example—but Mr. CHEPSTOWE or MARLOWE could have written thus of 'Rapture'?—
'Not in the mouths of prating men who deem
That God dwells in the senseless clay they mould,
Who live their little lives and die their deaths,
Lapped in a smug respectability;
Who never dreamt of breaking puny laws
Formed for a puny race of grovellers;
But in the blood-stained track of flaming swords,
Wielded by knotty arms in Man's despite,
Or on the wings of crashing battle-balls,
Bone-shattering dealers of a thousand wounds,
The roaring heralds of indignant God,
There rapture dwells, and there I too would dwell.'
"Here is power that would furnish forth a whole legion of the poetasters who crawl through our effete literature!" But I cannot pursue these memories. They are too painful. For who speaks of CHEPSTOWE now? Who cares to cumber his bookshelves with the volumes in which this inflated arm-chair prophet of the tin pots delivered his shrieking message? His very name has flickered out; and when I spoke of him the other day, I was asked, by a person of some intelligence, if I referred to CHEPSTOWE who had just made 166 playing cricket for the Gentlemen against the Players. Not even the lion and the lizard keep his courts, and yet JAMSHYD CHEPSTOWE gloried and drank deep in his day. He blustered through many editions, he bellowed his contempt at a shrinking world, he outraged conventionality, he swung himself by the aid of newly-fashioned metres to lofty peaks of poetic daring, and to-day the dust lies thick upon his books, and his name is confounded with that of an eminent cricket-player!
My excellent SWAGGER, it was meanly done. If you meant to wipe him out so swiftly, why did you ever exalt him?
Farewell for a space. I may have to write to you again.
Yours, DIOGENES ROBINSON.
"USED UP."—Lord BRASSEY requested several papers last week to publish his denial as to having the finest collection of stamps in the world. His Lordship, it appears, "doesn't take the smallest interest in foreign stamps." Fortunate for Lord BRASSEY. There are some excellent people who can't get up any interest, or capital either, at all without a stamp of some sort. Lord BRASSEY wished it further known, that he was not a collector of curios, and had no curiosity of any kind. Lord BRASSEY must be a later edition of L'Homme Blasé, to whom the world was round like an indiarubber-ball and "nothing in it."
"IN NUBIBUS."—If the new Sky-signs with which we are threatened, viz., advertisements reflected in the clouds, become the fashion, the aspect of the heavens by daylight will be as delightful and artistic as are the walls of our hoardings and Railway-stations. The anthem of "The Heavens are Telling" will have to be adapted for large towns. Perhaps pictures may be projected on the nebulous back-ground. If so, some of our best Artists may not object to taking a good sum, and then having their work "Sky'd."