Rustic critics judge things in a different way. Two large oil paintings here were praised—“There bain’t no other’n like’n in this parish, no, nor yet the next: look at their size and finish.” A portrait was praised also as a speaking likeness—“Why, any blind man could tell ‘twere he.” (Portraits, I may note, are known as photos here, even portraits of old ancestors; and ‘photos’ is coming to include all kinds of pictures, as ‘pictures’ now means movies.) I brought a very good Persian carpet down from London, and the criticism was—“Well, and if you’d got that old bit by you, I d’esay it were all so well as buyin’ a new’n.”
A friend of my mother’s writes to her from Brighton, 28 October 1841, “I have been twice to be charmed though not mesmerized by that delightful pet of yours Jullien and his helps (at the Town Hall) and a very grand affair they made of it. After beautiful Overtures, Waltzes and a capital set of Irish Quadrilles by Jullien, they gave us the Storming of St Jean d’Acre in perfection. The piece commenced with a slow movement of ‘God save the Queen,’ and after sundry descriptive morceaux the attack began and Jullien was in all his glory. Bombs, cannon, musquetry, bells tolling, shouts of victory, etc., and lots of blue lights, Roman Candles and last (though not least in effect) that beautiful rich crimson light that you saw last year.” And one of my great-aunts who liked all that, complained in later years that Wagner was so noisy.
Jullien brought Berlioz to England. My father was at the Opera, 25 June 1853, for the first night of Benvenuto Cellini, and was impressed by it, or rather by the final scene, the casting of the statue. And it might be more impressive now with better stage machinery for it—the furnace, the molten metal running down into the mould, and then the breaking of the mould revealing the great figure of Perseus still aglow with heat.—The real statue is said to be Cellini’s masterpiece; but I do not agree. I think myself that he surpassed it in the relief of Perseus and Andromeda on the pedestal below.
On first hearing Boito’s Mefistofele I recognized the chirruping of the angels as a familiar sound, but could not recollect where I had heard it. I had really heard it in expresses between Paris and Marseilles. Some of the P.L.M. carriages had wheels, or springs, or something, which gave forth just that sound when they were running fast; and it may be heard on some of the G.W.R. carriages, but with a different rhythm and pitch. A railwayman assures me that the English engines talk and (being foul-mouthed creatures) use unseemly words. Since learning this from him, I have distinctly heard an engine saying, “blów and blást it, fétch anóther,” when sent off up these gradients here with load enough for two; and then, quite cheerfully, “nów I’ve dóne it, nów I’ve dóne it,” when it has reached the top.
Writing from Teignmouth on 3 August 1854, my grandfather says, “There is nothing new here, but a ship of this place has just arrived literally gutted by the Greek pirates. She was laden with raisins. The crew were obliged to beg for their lives, they had but three biscuits left on coming to Falmouth. That must be put stop to somehow.” Greece was a nuisance then: the coast had been blockaded by the English fleet, and French and English troops were landed at the Piræus in May to stop the Greeks from siding with the Russians in the Crimean war. He writes on 2 April, “As war is declared, the papers will be interesting. I fancy people have been too sanguine.”
After the Coup d’état he writes from here, 7 December 1851, “Well, the President is taking very high ground, and no doubt he will make himself Emperor, if he can keep the Army on his side,” and further on 26 January, “What a scoundrel that President is.” But he went astray in saying that the President would not become Emperor “without a desperate struggle,” and still further astray on 12 October 1851 in generalizing from some undesirables whom he had seen, “America must now be made up of outcasts and rogues of all nations.”
In one of his letters—it looks just like the rest—he says on 17 December 1843, “I can scarcely tell if I am not writing plainer and more legibly than usual, as it is by candle, but I fancy so. I am writing with a metal pen. When at Moreton last, I bought some and am much pleased with them, for my sight is so bad that even with the assistance of glasses I cannot make a pen by candle light and very badly by daylight.” Twenty years after that, I was taught to make a pen (that is, to cut a quill into a point) as one of the things that every child must learn. Metal pens did not come into common use until after 1840, though introduced some years before, and many people still despised them. A friend of my father’s writes to him, 13 September 1856, “I hope you will be able to read my letter, but as I write with a steel pen, I am not quite certain of it.” Few people now could write so neatly with a quill; and his writing here is just as neat as ever.
Old letters and diaries can be trusted when they are recording facts; but they have never been revised, and may contain opinions which the writers would have modified on second thoughts. My father writes to my sister from Perugia, 17 September 1876, “This is the most curious and romantic place I ever saw: Laon is nothing to it.” Curious and romantic places generally had bad hotels, and Perugia had a good one; and I suspect this made him view the place benignantly and give it this excessive praise. He notes in his diary, 24 August 1874, “Elbe scenery rather fine, tho’ not equal to the Danube, Rhine or Moselle, but better than the Meuse or Loire.” He wrote this at Dresden, just after coming down the Elbe from Schandau; and I imagine he was thinking of the scenery there, forgetting other parts.
I have a letter of 14 February 1911 from Henry Montagu Butler, then Master of Trinity, but headmaster at Harrow at the time when I was there; and in this letter he says, “You and Arthur Evans are, I think, the chief antiquarians of our Harrow generation, Hastings Rashdall and Charles Gore our most learned and original theologians, Walter Sichel and George Russell our most fertile writers in general literature.” I do not know whether that was a considered opinion or only a passing thought: in either case I offer Sir Arthur my condolences on being mentioned in the same breath with me. As for the two theologians, here is something that Dean Rashdall lately wrote—“I am sure that on no subject but theology could Bishop Gore have been so blind to the requirement of ordinary fairness and straight dealing between man and man.” I suggested that he could have put it better in schoolboy diction with words like liar and sneak, but he informs me that he thinks those terms too strong.
It was rather a shock to me when a former fag of mine was made a Bishop—not Gore, of course—but you can never tell how fellows will turn out. Another fellow, in the same house, was sacked for getting drunk and disorderly in Harrow town. He succeeded to a Peerage and was a huge success as a Colonial Governor; and I believe his secret of success was giving the Colonials a finer Cognac, and more of it, than any Governor had given them before.