From a literary to a learned or scientific conversazione, at one of which we are about to take a transient peep, there is but one step; indeed, literature is always welcome among the good-natured old Dryasdusts, who are continually raking and rummaging, and rocking the “placers” and “prospects” of knowledge, and turning up huge masses of quartz, from which the nimble-fingered chymists of the pen extract flakes of shining gold. Presto! we leave the Republic of Letters, and are in the handsome rooms of the Royal Inquiring Society. This meritorious association (incorporated by Royal charter) is perpetually asking questions, and, though it often receives insufficient, if not ridiculous responses, yet manages, at the close of every year, to accumulate a highly-respectable stock of information on almost every imaginable topic. The members, I will assume (would that such a society in strict reality existed), are draughts from all the learned, scientific, philosophical, antiquarian, and artistic societies in London; and on the first Thursday in every month during the season, they meet to gloze over curiosities exhibited for their inspection, to shake hands and crack jokes with one another—I have even seen the friendly dig in the ribs, accompanied by the sly chuckle, occasionally administered—and to ask questions and receive answers. They are “Notes and Queries” (chattiest, most quaintly-erudite of periodicals) incarnated. But they abjure not the presence of the gentler, unscientific sex. These rare old boys of learning and science thread their way through the rooms (sometimes almost inconveniently crowded, for the Royal Inquiring Society is very popular) with blooming wives and daughters on their arms. The young ladies delight in these conversaziones—for a change. They are so strange, so peculiar, they say. You don’t meet anybody to dance with or to talk about the weather, or the Crystal Palace, or crinoline, or the Botanical Gardens; but you see such nice old gentlemen, with dear, shiny, bald heads, and such wonderful intellectual-looking beings, with long hair, turn-down collars, and large feet, who smell musty bones with unpronounceable names, and make extraordinary instruments to whiz round, and point out places upon maps, and talk so cleverly (but so incomprehensibly to you, my dears) about rusty coins and the backbones of fishes, and battered saucepans, which they say are helmets. And then there are the nice stereoscopes to peep through, and the beautiful water-colour drawings and photographs to look at, and the old gentlemen are so quiet and so polite, and so different from the young men one meets in society, who either stammer and blush or are superciliously rude and put their hands in their trousers’ pockets. Yes, young ladies, the bald-headed old gentlemen, the careworn, long-haired, slovenly-looking men, are quiet and polite. They were, many of them, poor and humble once; but they have hewn out steps from the rock of knowledge, whereby they have mounted to that better fortune—European, Worldwide fame. That quiet man with gray hair, smiles when ministers press upon him a knighthood or a baronetcy: “Cui bono?” he says; “I would rather be a corresponding member of the Academy of Honolulu. When I am old and broke, and past work, you may give me enough for a little bread in my old days: I take it as a Right, not as a favour,” just as Turner the painter left in his will the simple direction that he was to be buried in the Cathedral Church of St. Paul.—“St. Paul’s is for the painters and the warriors, as Westminster Abbey is for the poets and statesmen; but I want not your honours and titles. Such as you have, you bestow on your lawyers and your lacqueys; but your captains are almost ashamed to take the decorations that are shared by footmen and backstairs cringers.”
You have readily divined, I hope, why I have instructed the dexterous limner who illustrates these pages to select for his subject the scientific, rather than the literary, conversazione. The men of science do not obtrude their personalities upon the public. Their fame is known, their influence felt from London to Louisiana, but their portraits seldom meet the public eye. Those of General Tom Thumb or the Christy Minstrels would attract more crowds to the print-shop windows, and sell better. But, good lack! what a commotion there would be if the portraits of a series of littérateurs, in their habits as they live, appeared in “Twice Round the Clock!” I should be denounced, repudiated, vilified, abused, for the artist’s misdeeds. The great Mr. Polyphemus would crush me mercilessly beneath his iron heel; Grubstreet would (threaten to) kick me; Garbage would have me on the hip; O’Roarer smite me beneath the fifth rib; Leathers devise devices against me to make my existence intolerable; and Ethelred Guffoon castigate me terribly in his popular paper, “The Half-penny Cane.” No; let me deal only with the shadows; and those that the cobweb cap fits, e’en let them wear it.
At Eleven o’Clock in the evening, the social institutions known as Evening Parties assume their gayest and most radiant aspect. I think that I have already hinted in these pages that I am not a very frequent visitor at these entertainments. The truth must out: the people don’t like me. At the last soirée I attended, a fashionable physician, coming in very late, and throwing out for general hearing the fact that he had been dining with an earl, I meekly suggested that he should allow me to rub myself up against him, in order to catch some of his aristocracy. All the women laughed, but the men looked as though they would have very much liked to throw me out of the window. There was one exception—a gentleman with one eye, and a face like a glass case full of curiosities, so many different phases of expression were there in it, who came across to me and made friends at once. But I shall never be asked to that house again; and if I am ill, I won’t send for the fashionable physician. Timeo Danäos, and the pills they give you.
Thus circumstanced, I feel it becoming my degree to stay on the outside of great houses, and, herding among the crowd and the link-men, to witness the setting down and the taking up of the carriages coming to or going from evening parties. It has always been my lot so to stand on the kerb, to be a continual dweller on the threshold. I have stood there to see people married, to see people buried, and have murmured: “My turn must come next, surely;” but my time has not come yet. A king has patted me on the head, and I have sate, as a child, on the knee of the handsomest woman in Europe. I have been on the brink of many a precipice; I have attained the edge of many a cloud. But I have stopped there. I have always been like the recalcitrant costermonger’s donkey, “going for to go,” but never accomplishing the journey in its entirety.
I spoke of link-men. I might tell you a not uninteresting story regarding those industrials, in these gas-lit days growing day by day rarer and rarer. The tarred-rope made links are indeed, save on extraneous foggy nights, grown quite extinct, and are replaced by neat lanterns; and the time will come when the old red jackets, famous as a class from Grosvenor Square to the Horticultural Gardens at Chiswick, from the club-house fronts, on levée days, to the doorways of evening parties, shall become quite obsolete. But there is a grand old admiral living now—titled, high in office, before whom even his equals in rank bow, and who can make post-captains wait in his ante-chambers—who owes at least half his advancement and social position to the services of the link-men. Thirty years ago this officer was a young stripling, cast upon the ocean of London society. He was of good family, but his acquaintances in the fashionable world were few and far between, his influence was nil, and his promotion was therefore more than dubious. But at the Opera, then the King’s Theatre, he happened to form a shilling-giving on the one side, cap-touching on the other, acquaintance with a link-man—Silver Tom, I think he was called, from a silver badge he always wore, presented to him by a noble marquis whom he had saved from being prematurely scrunched on a certain dark night between his own carriage wheels and those of the equipage of a duchess, his grandmamma. “Silver Tom,” moved by gratitude, and experienced by his (outside) knowledge of the fashionable world, put the then young and poor lieutenant up to what is vernacularly known as “a thing or two.” Not a grand entertainment could be given in Fashionabledom, but on the lieutenant’s arrival in full evening costume, “Silver Tom” bawled up his name to the footman in attendance on the door-step (the régime of cards was not so strictly attended to as it is now); he on the door-step halloaed it out to the powdered attendant on the first landing; he, in his turn, gave it to the black-vestmented groom of the chambers, who proclaimed it to the world in general in sonorous tones, and the bold lieutenant was inducted to the saloons of reception. Who was to know whether he had been invited to the feast or not? Not, certainly, the hostess, who, perhaps, did not know two hundred and fifty of her five hundred guests by sight. Some had been asked by her husband, some by herself. Not certainly the guests, who would not have been much surprised if they had met the Hottentot Venus or the King of the Cannibal Islands. The lieutenant made his bow and himself comfortable; was sure to meet some lady or gentleman in society whom he knew, and probably departed with a list of half-a-dozen newly-formed and valuable acquaintances. He went on and prospered. Gradually, from being met and liked at great houses, he received genuine invitations, and, as I have premised, he made a good end of it at the Admiralty. I hope he pensioned “Silver Tom.”
ELEVEN O’CLOCK P.M.: AN EVENING PARTY.