Well, if these conquests were illusions, they were certainly the pleasantest ever a man indulged in. They consoled him at heart for the loss of fortune, country, and position; they were his recompense for all the lost glories of Crockford’s and the ‘Clarendon.’ Never was there such a picture of perfect tranquillity and unclouded happiness. Oh, let moralists talk as they will about the serenity of mind derivable alone from a pure conscience, the peaceful nature that flows from a source of true honour, and then look abroad upon the world and count the hundreds whose hairs are never tinged with grey, whose cheeks show no wrinkles, whose elastic steps suffer no touch of age, and whose ready smile and cheerful laugh are the ever-present signs of their contentment—let them look on these, and reflect that of such are nine-tenths of those who figure in lists of outlawry, whose bills do but make the stamps they are written on of no value, whose creditors are legion and whose credit is at zero, and say which seem the happier. To see them one would opine that there must be some secret good in cheating a coachmaker, or some hidden virtue in tricking a jeweller; that hotel-keepers are a natural enemy to mankind, and that a tailor has not a right even to a decimal fraction of honesty. Never was Epicurean philosophy like theirs; they have a fine liberal sense of the blackguardisms that a man may commit, and yet not forfeit his position in society. They know the precise condition in life when he may practise dishonesty; and they also see when he must be circumspect. They have one rule for the city and another for the club; and, better than all, they have stored their minds with sage maxims and wise reflections, which, like the philosophers of old, they adduce on every suitable occasion; and many a wounded spirit has been consoled by that beautiful sentiment, so frequent in their mouths, of—
‘Go ahead! for what’s the odds so long as you ‘re happy?’
Such, my reader, was the clique in which, strangely enough, I now found myself; and were it not that such characters abound in every part of the Continent, that they swarm at spas and infest whole cities, I would scruple to introduce you to such company. It is as well, however, that you should be put on your guard against them, and that any amusement you may derive from the study of eccentricity should not be tarnished with the recollection of your being imposed upon.
There happened, on the day I speak of, to be a man of some rank at table, with whom I had a slight, a very slight acquaintance; but in passing from the room he caught my eye, came over and conversed with me for a few minutes. From that moment Lady Lonsdall’s manners underwent a great change in my regard. Not only did she venture to look at me without expressing any air of supercilious disdain, but even vouchsafed the ghost of a smile; and, as we rose from table, I overheard her ask the Honourable Jack for my name. I could not hear the first part of his reply, but the last was couched in that very classic slang, expressive of my unknown condition—
‘I take it, he hain’t got no friends!’
Notwithstanding this Foundling-hospital sentence, Sir Marmaduke was instructed to invite me to take coffee—an honour which, having declined, we separated, as do people who are to speak when next they meet.
Meditating on the unjust impression foreigners must conceive of England and the English by the unhappy specimens we ‘grind for exportation,’ I sat alone at a little table in the park. It was a sad subject, and it led me further than I wished or knew of. I thought I could trace much of the animosity of foreign journals to English policy in their mistaken notions of national character, and could well conceive how dubiously they must receive our claim to being high-spirited and honourable, when their own experiences would incline to a different conclusion; for, after all, the Fleet Prison, however fashionable its inmates, would scarcely be a flattering specimen of England, nor do I think Horsemonger Lane ought to be taken as a fair sample of the country. It is vain to assure foreigners that these people are not known nor received at home, neither held in credit nor estimation; their conclusive reply is, ‘How is it, then, that they are admitted to the tables of your ambassadors, and presented at our courts? Is it possible you would dare to introduce to our sovereigns those whom you could not present to your own?’ This answer is a fatal one. The fact is so; the most rigid censor of morals leaves his conscience at the Ship Hotel at Dover; he has no room for it on a voyage, or perhaps he thinks it might be detained by a revenue-officer. Whatever the cause, he will know at Baden—ay, and walk with—the man he would cut in Bond Street, and drive with the party at Brussels he would pass to-morrow if he met in Hyde Park.
This ‘sliding scale’ of morality has great disadvantages; none greater than the injury it inflicts on national character, and the occasion it offers for our disparagement at the hands of other people. It is in vain that liberal and enlightened measures mark our government, or that philanthropy and humanity distinguish our institutions, we only get credit for hypocrisy so long as we throw a mantle over our titled swindlers and dishonourable defaulters. If Napoleon found little difficulty in making the sobriquet of ‘La Perfide Albion’ popular in France, we owe it much more to the degraded characters of our refugee English than to any justice in the charge against the nation. In a word, I have never met a foreigner commonly fair in his estimate of English character, who had not travelled in England; and I never met one unjust in all that regarded national good faith, honesty, and uprightness, who had visited our shores. The immunity from arrest would seem to suggest to our runaways an immunity from all the ties of good conduct and character of our countrymen, who, under that strange delusion of the ‘immorality of France,’ seem to think that a change of behaviour should be adopted in conformity with foreign usage; and as they put on less clothing, so they might dispense with a little virtue also.
These be unpleasant reflections, Arthur, and I fear the coffee or the maraschino must have been amiss; in any case, away with them, and now for a stroll in the Cursaal!