THE COURT JOURNAL—A DIALOGUE
The Atlas.] [June 7, 1829.
M.—Have you seen the Court Journal?
G.—No: I only read some ‘Maxims on Love,’ which I seemed to have met with in some pre-existent work.
M.—Then you may tell C— from me it will not last three months. People of fashion do not want to read accounts of themselves, written by those who know nothing of the matter. This eternal babble about high life is an affront to every one else, and an impertinence with respect to those whom it is stupidly meant to flatter. What do those care about tiresome descriptions of satin ottomans and ormolu carvings, who are sick of seeing them from morning till night? No! they would rather read an account of Donald Bean Lean’s Highland cave, strewed with rushes, or a relation of a row in a night-cellar in St. Giles’s. What they and all mankind want, is to vary the monotonous round of their existence; to go out of themselves as much as possible; and not to have their own oppressive and idle pretensions served up to them again in a hash of mawkish affectation. They read Cobbett—it is like an electrical shock to them, or a plunge in a cold-bath: it braces while it jars their enervated fibres. He is a sturdy, blunt yeoman: the other is a foppish footman, dressed up in cast-off finery. Or if Lord L—— is delighted with a description (not well-done) of his own house and furniture, do you suppose that Lord H——, who is his rival in gewgaws and upholstery, will not be equally uneasy at it? As to the vulgar, what they like is to see fine sights and not to hear of them. They like to get inside a fine house, to see fine things and touch them if they dare, and not to be tantalized with a vapid inventory, which does not gratify their senses, and mortifies their pride and sense of privation. The exaggerated admiration only makes the exclusion more painful: it is like a staring sign to a show which one has not money in one’s pocket to pay for seeing. Mere furniture or private property can never be a subject to interest the public: the possessor is entitled to the sole benefit of it. If there were an account in the newspaper that all this finery was burnt to ashes, then all the world would be eager to read it, saying all the time how sorry they were, and what a shocking thing it was.
G.—Servants and country people always turn to the accidents and offences in a newspaper.
M.—And their masters and mistresses too. Did you never read the Newgate Calendar?
G.—Yes.
M.—Well, that is not genteel. This is what renders the Beggar’s Opera so delightful; you despise the actors in the scene, and yet the wit galls and brings down their betters from their airy flight with all their borrowed plumage, so that we are put absolutely at our ease for the time with respect to our own darling pretensions. G—— was here the other evening; he said he thought the Beggar’s Opera came after Shakspeare. I wonder who put that in his head; it was hardly his own discovery.
G.—It seems neither Lord Byron nor Burke liked the Beggar’s Opera.
M.—They were the losers by that opinion: but how do you account for it?
G.—Lord Byron was a radical peer, Burke an upstart plebeian; neither of them felt quite secure in the niche where they had stationed themselves from the random-shots that were flying on the stage. They could not say with Hamlet, ‘Our withers are unwrung.’ As to Lord Byron, he might not relish the point of Mrs. Peachum’s speech, ‘Married a highwayman! Why, hussey, you will be as ill-treated and as much neglected as if you had married a lord!’ Did you ever hear the story of Miss ——, when she was quite a girl, going to see Mrs. Siddons in the Fatal Marriage, and being taken out fainting into the lobby, and calling out, ‘Oh Biron, Biron!’—‘Egad!’ said the cool narrator of the story, ‘she has had enough of Byron since!’ With regard to Burke, there was a rotten core, a Serbonian bog in his understanding, in which not only Gay’s masterpiece but the whole of what modern literature, wit, and reason had done for the world, sunk and was swallowed up in a fetid abyss for ever! But I am sorry you think no better of the Court Journal. I was in hopes it might succeed, as a very old friend of mine has something to do with it.
M.—Oh! but mischief must be put a stop to. This is the most nauseous toad-eating, and it is as awkwardly done as it is ill-meant. There is a fulsome pretence set up in one paper that rank consists in birth and blood. It is at once to neutralise all the present race of fashion. The civil wars of York and Lancaster put an end to almost all the old nobility—there are none of the Plantagenets left now. Those who go to court think themselves lucky if they can trace as far back as the Nell Gwynns and Duchess of Clevelands in Charles the Second’s days. Besides, all this prejudice about nobility and ancestry should be understood and worshipped in silence and at a distance, not thrown in the teeth of such people, as if they had nothing else to boast of. They should be told of perfections which they have not, as you praise a wit for her beauty and a fool for her wit. Your friend should read Count Grammont to learn how to flatter and cajole. Does not Mr. C—— know enough from experience of the desire of lords and ladies to turn authors, and shine, not in a ballroom, but on his counter?
G.—He expects the K—— to write; nay, it was with difficulty he was dissuaded from offering a round sum.
M.—How much, pray?
G.—Five thousand guineas for half a page.
M.—It would not sell a single copy. People would think it was a hoax and would not buy it. Those who believed it would not read it. Oh! there is a letter of Louis XVIII. in a late number, on the death of some lady he was attached to: it is prettily done, but it is such good English, that I suspect it can hardly be a translation or an original. If they could procure curious documents of this kind, and had a magazine of the secrets, anecdotes, and correspondence of people of high rank, undoubtedly it would answer; but this would be another edition of the Jockey Club, and very different from its present insipidity. Even children will not be crammed with honey.
G.—I understand there is to be no scandal. All the great are to be supposed to be elegantly good, and to wear virtue with a grace peculiar to people of fashion.
M.—That will at any rate be new. And then I see there are criticisms on pictures: the writer is thrown into raptures with the portraits of Lord and Lady Castlereagh. And this is followed by a drawling, pitiable account of two little Corregios, as if they were miracles and had descended from heaven—the ‘Madonna’ and ‘Mercury teaching Cupid to read.’ They are well enough, though Sir Joshua has done the same thing better. But higher praise could not be lavished on the ‘St. Jerome’ or the ‘Night at Dresden,’ or the ‘Ceiling at Parma,’ which is his best, though it has fallen into decay.
G.—Collectors think one Corregio just as good as another; and it is to meet this feeling, probably, that the article is written.