ASMODEUS IN LONDON.
(From the New Monthly Magazine.)
I was alone with Sleep.
I woke with a singular sense of feebleness and exhaustion, and turning my dizzy eyes—-beheld the walls and furniture of my own chamber in London. Asmodeus was seated by my side reading a Sunday newspaper—his favourite reading.
"Ah!" said I, stretching myself with so great an earnestness, that I believed at first my stature had been increased by the malice of the Wizard, and that I stretched from one end of the room to the other—"Ah! dear Asmodeus, how pleasant it is to find myself on earth again! After all, these romantic wonders only do for a short time. Nothing like London when one has been absent from it upon a Syntax search after the Picturesque!"
"London is indeed a charming place,"—said the Devil—"all our fraternity are very fond of it—it is the custom for the Parisians to call it dull. What an instance of the vanity of patriotism—there is vice enough in it to make any reasonable man cheerful."
"Yes: the gaiety of Paris is really a delusion. How poor its shops—how paltry its equipages—how listless its crowds—compared with those of London! If it was only for the pain in walking their accursed stones, sloping down to a river in the middle of the street—all sense of idle enjoyment would be spoilt. But in London—'the hum, the stir, the din of men'—the activity and flush of life everywhere—the brilliant shops—the various equipages—the signs of luxury, wealth, restlessness, that meet you on all sides—give a much more healthful and vigorous bound to the spirits, than the indolent loungers of the Tuileries, spelling a thrice-read French paper which contains nothing, or sitting on chairs by the hour together, unwilling to stir because they have paid a penny for the seat—ever enjoy. O! if London would seem gay after Paris, how much more so after a visit to the interior of the Earth. And what is the news, my Asmodeus?"
"The Theatres have re-opened. Apropos of them—I will tell you a fine instance of the futility of human ambition. Mr. Monck Mason took the King's Theatre, saith report—(which is the creed of devils)—in order to bring out an opera of his own, which Mr. Laporte, with a very uncourteous discretion, had thought fit to refuse. The season passes—and Mr. Monck Mason has ruined himself without being able to bring out his opera after all! What a type of speculation. A speculator is one who puts a needle in a hay-stack, and then burns all his hay without finding the needle. It is hard to pay too dear for one's whistle—but still more hard if one never plays a tune on the whistle one pays for. Still the world has lost a grand pleasure in not seeing damned an Opera written by the Manager of the Opera-house,—it would have been such a consolation to all the rejected operatives,—it would have been the prettiest hardship entailed on a great man ever since the time of that speaker who was forced himself to put the question whether he had been guilty of bribery, and should be expelled the House, and had the pleasure of hearing the Ayes predominate. Je me mête with the affairs of the Theatre—they are in my diabolic province, you know. But if the stage be the fosterer of vice, as you know it is said, vice just at this moment in England has very unattractive colours."
"Ah, wait till we break the monopoly. But even now have we not the 'Hunchback?'
"Yes; the incarnation of the golden mediocre: a stronger proof, by the hyperbolic praise it receives, of the decline of the drama than even the abundance of trash from which it gleams. Anything at all decent from a new dramatic author will obtain success far more easily than much higher merit, in another line; literary rivalship not having yet been directed much towards the stage, there are not literary jealousies resolved and united against a dramatist's as against a poet's or a novelist's success. Every one can praise those pretensions, however humble, which do not interfere with his own."
"It is very true; there is never any very great merit, at least in a new author, when you don't hear the abuse louder than the admiration. And now, Asmodeus, with your leave, I will prepare for breakfast, and our morning's walk."
"Oh, dear, dear London, dear even in October! Regent-street, I salute you!—Bond-street, my good fellow, how are you? And you, O beloved Oxford-street! whom the 'Opium Eater' called 'stony-hearted,' and whom I, eating no opium, and speaking as I find, shall ever consider the most kindly and maternal of all streets—the street of the middle classes—busy without uproar, wealthy without ostentation. Ah, the pretty ancles that trip along thy pavement! Ah, the odd country cousin-bonnets that peer into thy windows, which are lined with cheap yellow shawls, price £1. 4s. marked in the corner! Ah, the brisk young lawyers flocking from their quarters at the back of Holborn! Ah, the quiet old ladies, living in Duchess-street, and visiting thee with their eldest daughters in the hope of a bargain! Ah, the bumpkins from Norfolk just disgorged by the Bull and Mouth—the soldiers—the milliners—the Frenchmen—the swindlers, the porters with four-post beds on their back, who add the excitement of danger to that of amusement! The various, shifting, motley group, that belong to Oxford-street, and Oxford-street alone. What thoroughfares equal thee in variety of human specimens! in the choice of objects—for remark—satire—admiration! Beside the other streets seem chalked out for a sect,—narrow-minded and devoted to a coterie. Thou alone art Catholic—all receiving. Regent-street belongs to foreigners, cigars, and ladies in red silk, whose characters are above scandal. Bond-street belongs to dandies and picture-buyers. St. James's to club-loungers, and young men in the Guards, with mustachios properly blackened by the cire of Mr. Delcroix; but thou, Oxford-street, what class can especially claim thee as its own? Thou mockest at oligarchies; thou knowest nothing of select orders! Thou art liberal as air—a chartered libertine! accepting the homage of all, and retaining the stamp of none. And to call thee stony-hearted!—certainly thou art so to beggars—to people who have not the WHEREWITHAL; but thou wouldst not be so respectable if thou wert not capable of a certain reserve to paupers. Thou art civil enough, in all conscience, to those who have a shilling in their pocket;—those who have not, why do they live at all?"
"That's not exactly what surprises me," said Asmodeus; "I don't wonder why they live, but where they live: for I perceive boards in every parish proclaiming that no vagrant—that is, no person who is too poor to pay for his lodging—will be permitted to stay there. Where then does he stay?—every parish unites against him—not a spot of ground is lawful for him to stand on. At length he is passed on to his own parish; the meaning of which is, that not finding a decent livelihood in one place, the laws prevent his seeking it at any other. By the way, it would not be a bad plan to substitute a vagrant for a fox, and, to hunt him regularly, you might hunt him with a pack of respectable persons belonging to the middle class, and eat him when he's caught. That would be the shortest way to get rid of the race. You might proclaim a reward for every vagrant's head: it would gain the King more honour with the rate-payers than clearing the country of wolves won to his predecessor. What wolf eats so much as a beggar? What wolf so troublesome, so famished, and so good for nothing? People are quite right in judging a man's virtue by his wealth; for when a man has not a shilling he soon grows a rogue. He must live on his wits, and a man's wits have no conscience when his stomach is empty. We are all very poor in Hell—very; if we were rich, Satan says, justly, that we should become idle."
I know not how it is, but my frame is one peculiarly susceptible to ennui. There's no man so instantaneously bored. What activity does this singular constitution in all cases produce! All who are sensitive to ennui do eight times the work of a sleek, contented man. Anything but a large chair by the fireside, and a family circle! Oh! the bore of going every day over the same exhausted subjects, to the same dull persons of respectability; yet that is the doom of all domesticity. Then pleasure! A wretched play—a hot opera, under the ghostly fathership of Mr. Monck Mason—a dinner of sixteen, with such silence or such conversation!—a water-party to Richmond, to catch cold and drink bad sauterne—a flirtation, which fills all your friends with alarm, and your writing-desk with love-letters you don't like to burn, and are afraid of being seen; nay, published, perhaps, one fine day, that you may go by some d——d pet name ever afterwards!—hunting in a thick mist—shooting in furze bushes, that "feelingly persuade you what you are"—"the bowl," as the poets call the bottles of claret that never warm you, but whose thin stream, like the immortal river,—
"Flows and as it flows, for ever may flow on;"
or the port that warms you indeed: yes, into a bilious headach and a low fever. Yet all these things are pleasures!—parts of social enjoyment! They fill out the corners of the grand world—they inspire the minor's dreams—they pour crowds into St. James's, Doctors' Commons, and Melton Mowbray—they——Oh! confound them all!—it bores one even to write about them.
Only just returned to London, and, after so bright a panegyric on it, I already weary of the variety of its samenesses. Shall I not risk the fate of Faust, and fall in love—ponderously and bonâ fide? Or shall I go among the shades of the deceased, and amuse myself with chatting to Dido and Julius Caesar? Verily, reader, I leave you for the present to guess my determination.