Now, Mr B. C. who brought on this motion was a sorry artist, and the whole sum and substance of his case was, that as we secured the services of eminent and able men, we ought to pay them “properly.” Why, in that one word “properly” lay the whole question. What constitutes proper payment? Every career in life carries with it some circumstance either of advantage or the reverse, which either compensates for the loss of a material benefit, or is requited by some addition of a tangible profit. The educated man who accepts three hundred a-year in the Church is not recompensed, or considered to be recompensed, by this miserable pittance. It is in the respect, the influence, the power, and the reverence that attach to his calling he is rewarded. Place a layman in the parish beside him with that income, and mark the difference of their stations! The same of the soldier. Why or how does seven-and-sixpence diurnally represent one the equal of the best in any society of the land? Simply by a conventional treaty, by which we admit that a man, at the loss of so much hard cash, may enjoy a station which bears no imaginable proportion to his means.
On the other hand, there are large communities who, addressing themselves to acquire wealth and riches, care very little for the adventitious advantages of social state. As it is told of Theodore Hook, at a Lord Mayor’s feast, that he laid down his knife and fork at the fifth course, and declared “he would take the rest out in money;” so there are scores of people who “go in” for the actual and the real. They have no sympathy with those who “take out” their social status partly in condition partly in cash, as is the case with the curate and the captain.
Almost every man, at his outset in life, makes some computation of how much his career can pay him in money, how much in the advantages of rank and station. The bailiff on the estate makes very often a far better income than the village doctor; but do you believe that Æsculapius would change places with him for all that? Is not the unbought deference to his opinion, the respect to his acquirements, the obedience to his counsel, something in the contract he makes with the world? Does he not recognise, every day of his life, that he is not measured by the dimensions of the small house he resides in, or the humble qualities of the hack he rides, but that he has an acceptance in society totally removed from every question of his fortune?
In the great lottery we call life, the prizes differ in many things besides degree. If the man of high ambition determine to strain every nerve to attain a station of eminence and power, it may be that his intellectual equal, fonder of ease, more disposed to tranquillity, will settle down with a career that at the very best will only remove him a step above poverty; and shall we dare to say that either is wrong? My brother the Lord Chancellor is a great man, no doubt. The mace is a splendid club, and the woolsack a most luxurious sofa; but as I walk my village rounds of a summer’s morning, inhaling perfume of earth and plant, following with my eye the ever-mounting lark, have I not a lighter heart, a freer step, a less wearied head? Have I not risen refreshed from sleep? not nightmared by the cutting sarcasms of some noble earl on my fresh-gilt coronet, some slighting allusion to my “newness in that place”? Depend upon it, the grand law of compensation which we recognise throughout universal nature extends to the artificial conditions of daily life, and regulates the action and adjusts the inequalities of our social state.
What is a viceroy or a colonial governor? A man of eminence and ability, doubtless, but who is satisfied to estrange himself from home and country, and occupy himself with cares and interests totally new and strange to him, for some five or fifteen thousand pounds a-year, plus a great variety of other things, which to certain minds unquestionably represent high value—the—station, the power, the prestige of a great position, with all its surroundings of deference and homage. Large as his salary is, it is the least distinctive feature of his high office. In every attribute of rank the man is a king. In his presence the wisest and the most gifted do no more than insinuate the words of their wisdom, and beauty retires curtsying, after a few commonplaces from his lips. Why, through all the employments of life, who ever attains to the like of this? His presence is an honour, his notice is fame. To be his guest is a distinction for a day; to be his host is to be illustrious for a lifetime. Are these things nothing? Ask the noble earl as he sits in his howdah; ask my lord marquis as he rides forth with a glittering staff.
Did any one, even Mr B. C. himself, ever imagine that Mr Macready ought to be pensioned after he had played Cardinal Wolsey? Was it ever proposed, even in Parliament, that Mr Kean should have a retiring allowance when he had taken off his robes as Henry IV.? These eminent men were, however, just as real, just as actual, during their brief hour on the stage, as His Excellency the Viceroy or the “Lord High.” They were there under a precisely similar compact. They had to represent a state which had no permanence, and a power that had no stability. They were to utter words which would be ridiculous from their lips to-morrow, and to assume a port and bearing that must be abandoned when they retired to change their clothes.
It is one of my very oldest memories as a boy that I dined in company with Charles Kemble. There was a good deal of talking, and a fair share of wine-drinking. In the course of the former came the question of the French Revolution of ‘30, and the conduct of the French King on that occasion. Kemble took no part in the discussion; he listened, or seemed to listen, filled his glass and emptied it, but never spoke. At last, when each speaker appeared to have said his say, and the subject approached exhaustion, the great actor, with the solemnity of a judge in a charge, and with a grand resonance of voice, said: “I’ll tell you how it is, sirs; Charles X. has forfeited a—a—a right good engagement!” And that was exactly the measure that he and all his tribe took, and are now taking, of kings and rulers—and let us profit by it. The colonial king has his “engagement;” it is defined exactly like the actor’s. He is to play certain parts, and for so many nights; he is to strut his hour in the very finest of properties, and is sure, which the actor is not always, of a certain amount of applause. No living creature believes seriously in him, far less he himself, except, perhaps, in some impassioned moment or other like that in which I once knew Othello so far carried away that he flung Iago into the orchestra.
Pension Carlisle, pension Storks, if you will; but be just as well as generous, and take care that you provide for Paul Bedford and Buckstone.
In Archbishop Whately’s ‘Historic Doubts,’ we find that the existence of the first emperor can be disproven by the very train of argument employed to deny the apostles. Let me suggest the converse of this mode of reasoning, and ask, Is there a word you can say for the Viceroy you cannot equally say for the actor? Have you an argument for him who governs St Helena that will not equally apply to him who struts his hour at the Haymarket?
I perceive that the writer of a letter to the ‘Times’ advocates the claims of the ex-Governors, on the plausible plea that it is exactly the very men who best represent the dignity of the station—best reflect the splendour of the Sovereign—who come back poor and penniless from the high office: while the penurious Governor, who has given dissatisfaction everywhere, made the colony half rebellious by his narrow economies, and degraded his station by contemptible savings, comes back wealthy and affluent—self-pensioned, in fact, and independent.