“I shouldn’t wonder,” said the landlord, tranquilly.
“Why, bless your heart, man alive!” broke out, impatiently, his interlocutor, “can’t you guess who he is? He’s Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg. I have seen his Royal Highness a hundred times, and know him by sight as well as I do you.”
The next forenoon, when the sable horseman arrived, he found a roll of crimson baize laid down from the pales before the tavern to the doorway, which was lined by American aloes in tubs. The staircase was freshly carpeted; in the stranger’s customary place was a table covered with a crimson cloth, backed by a crimson chair with gilt legs. The landlady, her daughter, and the barmaid, were all in holiday attire, and when the unknown rang the bell, the landlord himself, in a blue coat and brass buttons, and his hair newly powdered, brought him the beer in a silver tankard, and a wax candle at which to light his pipe. The black horseman said nothing, drank his ale, and smoked his tobacco, paid his reckoning, made his way downstairs amidst a profusion of bows and curtsies, mounted his horse, and—never came again. So runs the legend. The commercial traveller may have been wrong in his assertion, or may have been hoaxing the landlord; but I incline to the belief that this was really Prince Leopold. Why not? The incident is trifling enough; yet there is something touching in the picture of the good-natured young German brooding over his bereavement, yet consoling himself in the simple German fashion, over his pipe and beer.
Friend of mine, if you have the slightest hope or thought that whither I am now taking thee is one of the gay and merry scenes of London night-life, prithee dismiss the thought, for thou art in error. Prithee pull up the collar of thy coat, stiffen thy neckcloth as much as possible, take that wicked cigar from thy mouth, cast down thine eyes, and assume a decorum, if thou have it not. We are going to Exeter Hall.
Don’t be alarmed: this is not the month of May or the season for meetings in aid of missions to the Quashiboos, the Rumbatumbas, or the Oolalooloo cannibals. We are not going to hear John B. Gough lecture on temperance. We are going to hear an oratorio, conducted by Mr. Costa—an oratorio in which Mr. Sims Reeves, Mr. Weiss, Miss Dolby, and Madame Clara Novello, are to sing—and to listen to a band and chorus brought to a degree of perfection which only the genius of such a conductor could insure, or the gigantic resources of the Sacred Harmonic Society command.
There would seem to be in an oratorio something essentially germane to the English mind and character. The sounding recitative and swelling hymns, the rolling choruses and triumphant bursts of exultant music, have a strange affinity with the solemn, earnest, energetic English people, slow to move to anger or to love, but, when moved, passionately enthusiastic in their love, bloody and terrible in their great wrath. The French can no more understand oratorios than they can understand blank verse. I remember going to see Mendelssohn’s “Elijah” once in Paris. It was winter time, and the performances took place in Franconi’s great, windy, for-summer-built horse-riding circus in the Champs Elysées. The band and chorus shivered as they scraped and sang; the prima donna’s nose and lips were blue, and the music paper quivered in her hand; the contralto looked exquisitely uncomfortable at not having to wear a page’s dress and show her legs. As for the audience, the ladies sat muffled up in shawls and furs—it was a morning performance—and whispered among themselves; the men sucked the knobs of their canes, twirled their moustaches, stared up at the chandeliers, and murmured, Quelle drôle de musique! They didn’t repeat that oratorio, and I don’t wonder at it. To the French it was neither fish nor flesh, neither ecclesiastical nor secular. If the first, they might argue, give us the chanting priests, the swinging censers dispensing fragrant clouds, the red-cassocked altar boys, the twinkling tapers, the embroidered canopies, and the swelling pæans of the concealed choristers. If the last, let us have a drinking chorus, a laughing chorus, and a dagger chorus, a prima donna to make her entrance on horseback, a contralto in tights, a ballet in the second act, and some red fire at the end. But this is neither mass nor opera.
They think differently in England. To the seriously-inclined middle classes the oratorio supplies the place of the opera. And it behoves you to consider what a vast power in the state those serious middle-class men and women are. It is all very well for us, men and citizens of the world, yet living in a comparatively contracted circle of acquaintances as cosmopolitan as ourselves; it is all very well for us, who see “no harm” in sitting at home and reading the newspaper, while our wives go to church; who support Sunday bands, Sunday steamboats, and Sunday excursion trains, and are agitating now for the opening of museums, and galleries, and palaces on the Sabbath; who talk lightly on serious topics, and call clergymen parsons; it is all very well, I say, for us, travelled, and somewhat cynical as we may be, to pretend that the “serious” world is an amalgam of bigotry, hypocrisy, and selfishness, and to ignore the solemn religious journals that denounce hot dinner on Sundays, or a walk after it, or the perusal of a secular book on the sacred day, as intolerable sins. Yet how many thousands—how many millions—of sober, sincere, conscientious citizens are there, who are honestly persuaded of the sinfulness of many things which we consider harmless recreations! who would shrink back in horror, if they heard a tithe of the conversations that go on every night in hundreds of well-conducted London drawing-rooms! who look upon dancing as an irreligious and Babylonish pastime! whose only light reading consists of tracts, missionary chronicles, and memoirs of sainted cheesemongers, and the beatified daughters of dairymen! I declare that I never see a theatre in a country town—where, at least, two-thirds of the population consist of such as I have described—without wondering at the lunacy of the person who built it, without marvelling at the idiocy of every fresh speculator who enters on the management. We may pretend to despise the Puritan world, write books and farces against them, and quiz the “Record” or the “Wesleyan;” but it is folly to ignore the vast numerical strength of these same Puritans. They purchase such books as “Memorials of Captain Headly Vicars” by thousands; they subscribe thousands of pounds yearly in an almost insane hope of converting heathen barbarians to a better faith; they give away millions of tracts; they flood the platform and the auditory of every public meeting. It won’t do to ignore them. Cromwell’s Ironsides and Sir Harry Vane’s Fifth-Monarchy Men have made too deep a mark upon the people of England to be lightly passed over.
But the serious world, and that section who are worldly, meet on neutral ground at an Exeter Hall oratorio. The religionists see no sin in listening to sacred music; the mundane come to listen with delight to the immortal strains of Handel, of Haydn, and of Mendelssohn. “When shall their glory fade” asked Tennyson, singing of the Six Hundred at Balaclava. When shall the glory of our great oratorio writers decay? Never—I hope.
A resident at Bethlehem Hospital—he wasn’t either a doctor or a keeper, but wore, habitually, a strait-waistcoat, took shower-baths very frequently, and kept his head close shaved—once divided the world into two classes: people who were mad, and people who would be mad. I, too—but out of Bedlam, thank heaven!—have made a somewhat analogous classification. I divide the world into people who have and have not seen Ghosts. I belong myself to the first class. I am continually seeing ghosts. I shake hands in the street with friends who have been dead these ten years. A dear dead sister comes and sits by me at night when I read, and tells me, with a kiss, that I am a good boy for coming home so early. I was troubled some years ago with a man with his head off, who, in that unseemly position, and holding his head on his knees, sat continually before me. I dismissed him at last as being an unworthy hallucination, and not a genuine ghost. I meet a good many ghosts now—friendly ghosts, pleasant ghosts—but chiefly do they favour me with their company at places of public entertainment. It may be that I am a bad listener to music or theatrical dialogue, that I am absent in mind, and distrait; but so surely as I go to a theatre or concert, so surely do I fall a conjuring up mind-pictures, till the theatre or the hall, and its occupants, quite fade away, and I find myself in entirely different company, talking to people who are mouldering in their graves, or who are thousands of miles away.