Memoirs

by Charles Godfrey Leland

I can recall of that first year, as of many since at Brighton, long breezy walks on the brow of the chalk cliffs, looking out at the blue sea white capped, or at the downs rolling inland to Newport, sometimes alone, at times in company. On all this chalk the grass does not grow to more than an inch or so in length, and as the shortest, tenderest food is best for sheep, it is on this that they thrive—I believe by millions—yielding the famous South Downs mutton. In or on this grass are incredible numbers of minute snails, which the sheep are said to devour; in fact, I do not see how they could eat the grass without taking them in, and these contribute to give the mutton its delicate flavour. Snails are curious beings. Being epicene, they conduct their wooings on the mutual give and take principle, which would save human beings a great deal of spasmodic flirtation, and abolish the whole femme incomprise business, besides a great many bad novels, if we could adopt it. When winter comes, half-a-dozen of them retire into a hole in a bank, connect themselves firmly into a loving band like a bunch of grapes by the tenderest ties, and

stay there till spring. Finally, in folk-lore the snail is an uncanny or demoniac being, because it has horns. Its shell is an amulet, and the presentation of one by a lady to a gentleman is a very decided declaration of love, especially in Germany. Sed mittamus hæc.

At this time, and for some time to come, I was engaged in collecting and correcting a book of poems of a more serious character than the “Breitmann Ballads.” This was “The Music Lesson of Confucius and other Poems.” Of which book I can say truly that it had a succès d’estime, though it had a very small sale. There were in it ten or twelve ballads only which were adapted to singing, and all of these were set to music by Carlo Pinsutti, Virginia Gabriel, or others. There was in it a poem entitled “On Mount Meru.” In this the Creator is supposed to show the world when it was first made to Satan. The adversary finds that all is fit and well, save “the being called Man,” who seems to him to be the worst and most incongruous. To which the Demiurgus replies that Man will in the end conquer all things, even the devil himself. And at the last the demon lies dying at the feet of God, and confesses that “Man, thy creature hath vanquished me for ever—Vicisti Galilæe!” Some years after I read a work by a French writer in which this same idea of God and the devil is curiously carried out and illustrated by the history of architecture. And as in the case of the letter from Lord Lytton Bulwer, warm praise from other persons of high rank in the literary world and reviews, I had many proofs that these poems had made a favourable impression. The only exception which I can recall was a very sarcastic review in the Athenæum, in which the writer declared his belief that the poems or Legends of Perfumes in the book were originally written as advertisements of some barber or tradesman, and being by him rejected as worthless, had been thrown back on my hands! Other works by me it treated kindly—so it goes in this world—like a recipe for a cement which I have just copied into my great work on “Mending

and Repairing”—in which vinegar is combined with sugar.

While at Brighton we met Louis Blanc, whom we had previously seen several times at the Trübners’, in London. In Brighton he heard the news of the overthrow of the Empire and departed for Paris. At Christmas we went to London to visit the Trübners, and thence to the Langham Hotel, where we remained till July. I recall very little of what I witnessed or did beyond seeing the Queen prorogue Parliament and translating Scheffel’s Gaudeamus, a little volume of German humorous poems. Scheffel, as I have before written, was an old Mitkneipant, or evening-beer companion of mine in Heidelberg.

In July we made up a travelling party with Mrs. S. Laing and her daughters Cecilia and Floy, and departed for a visit to the Rhine—that is to say, these ladies preceded us, and we joined them at the Hotel des Quatre Saisons in Homburg. It was a very brilliant season, for the German Emperor, fresh with the glory of his great victory, was being fêted everywhere, and Homburg the brilliant was not behind the German world in this respect. I saw the great man frequently, near and far, and was much impressed with his appearance. Punch had not long before represented him as Hans Breitmann in a cartoon, deploring that he had not squeezed more milliards out of the French, and I indeed found in the original very closely my ideal of Hans, who always occurs to me as a German gentleman, who drinks, fights, and plunders, not as a mere rowdy, raised above his natural sphere, but as a rough cavalier. And that the great-bearded giant Emperor Wilhelm did drink heavily, fight hard, and mulct France mightily, is matter of history. This was the last year of the gaming-tables at Homburg. Apropos of these, the roulette-table was placed in the Homburg Museum, where it may be seen amid many Roman relics. Two or three years ago, while I was in the room, there came in a small party of English or Yankee looking or gazing tourists, to whom the attendant

pointed out the roulette-table. “And did the old Romans really play at roulette, and was that one of their tables?” said the leader of the visitors. This ready simple faith indicates the Englishman. The ordinary American is always possessed with the conviction that everything antique is a forgery. Once when I was examining the old Viking armour in the Museum of Copenhagen, a Yankee, in whose face a general vulgar distrust of all earthly things was strongly marked, came up to me and asked, “Do you believe that all these curiosities air genooine?” “I certainly do,” I replied. With an intensely self-satisfied air he rejoined, “I guess you can’t fool me with no such humbug.”

There was a great deal of cholera that year in Germany, and I had a very severe attack of it either in an incipient form or something thereunto allied: suffice it to say that for twelve hours I almost thought I should die of pure pain. I took in vain laudanum, cayenne pepper, brandy, camphor, and kino—nothing would remain. At last, at midnight, when I was beginning to despair, or just as I felt like being wrecked, I succeeded in keeping a little weak laudanum and water on my stomach, and then the point was cleared. After that I took the other remedies, and was soon well. But it was a crisis of such fearful suffering that it all remains vividly impressed on my memory. I do not know whether any sensible book has ever been written on the moral influence of pain, but it is certain that a wonderful one might be. So far as I can understand it, I think that in the vast majority of cases it is an evil, or one of Nature’s innumerable mistakes or divagations, not as yet outgrown or corrected; and it is the great error of Buddhistic-Christianity that it accepts pain not merely as inevitable, but glorifies and increases it, instead of making every conceivable exertion to diminish it. Herein clearly lies the difference between Science and Religion. Science strives in every way to alleviate pain and suffering; erroneous “Religion” is based on it. During the Middle Ages, the Church did all in its power to hinder, if not destroy, the

healing art. It made anatomy of the human body a crime, and carried its precautions so far that, quite till the Reformation, the art of healing (as Paracelsus declares) was chiefly in the hands of witches and public executioners. Torturers, chiefly clergymen such as Grillandus, were in great honour, while the healing leech was disreputable. It was not, as people say, “the age” which caused all this—it was the result of religion based on crucifixion and martyrdoms and pain—in fact, on that element of torture which we are elsewhere taught, most inconsistently, is the special province of the devil in hell. The cant of this still survives in Longfellow’s “Suffer and be strong,” and in the pious praise of endurance of pain. What the world wants is the hope held out to it, or enforced on it as a religion or conviction, that pain and suffering are to be diminished, and that our chief duty should consist in diminishing them, instead of always praising or worshipping them as a cross!

We left our friends and went for a short time to Switzerland, where we visited Lucerne, Interlaken, Basle, and Berne. Thence we returned to London and the Langham Hotel. This was at that time under the management of Mr. John Sanderson, an American, whom I had known of old. He was a brother of Professor Sanderson, of Philadelphia, who wrote a remarkably clever work entitled The American in Paris. John Sanderson himself had contributed many articles to Appletons’ Cyclopædia, belonged to the New York Century Club, and, like all the members of his family, had culture in music and literary taste. While he managed the Langham it was crowded during all the year, as indeed any decent hotel almost anywhere may be by simple proper liberal management. This is a subject which I have studied au fond, having read Das Hotel wesen der Gegenwart, a very remarkable work, and passed more than twenty years of my life in hotels in all countries.