HIGH LIFE IN THE LAST CENTURY.[5]
The volumes of which we are about to give fragments and anecdotes, contain a portion of the letters addressed to a man of witty memory, whose existence was passed almost exclusively among men and women of rank; his life, in the most expressive sense of the word, West End; and even in that West End, his chief haunt St James's Street. Parliament and the Clubs divided his day, and often his night. The brilliant roués, the steady gamesters, the borough venders, and the lordly ex-members of ex-cabinets, were the only population of whose living and breathing he suffered himself to have any cognizance. In reverse of Gray's learned mouse, eating its way through the folios of an ancient library—and to whom
"A river or a sea was but a dish of tea,
And a kingdom bread and butter,"
to George Selwyn, the world and all that it inhabits, were concentrated in Charles Fox, William Pitt, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and the circle of men of pleasantry, loose lives, and vivacious temperaments, who, with whatever diminishing lustre, revolved round them.
Of the City of London, Selwyn probably had heard; for though fixed to one spot, he was a man fond of collecting curious knowledge; but nothing short of proof positive can ever convince us that he had passed Temple Bar. He, of course, knew that there were such things on the globe as merchants and traders, because their concerns were occasionally talked of in "the House," where, however, he heard as little as possible about them; for in the debates of the time he took no part but that of a listener, and even then he abridged the difficulty, by generally sleeping through the sitting. He was supposed to be the only rival of Lord North in the happy faculty of falling into a sound slumber at the moment when any of those dreary persons, who chiefly speak on such subjects, was on his legs. St James's, and the talk of St James's, were his business, his pleasures, the exciters of his wit, and the rewarders of his toil. He had applied the art of French cookery to the rude material of the world, and refined and reduced all things into a sauce piquante—all its realities were concentrated in essences; and, disdaining the grosser tastes of mankind, he lived upon the aroma of high life—an epicure even among epicures; yet not an indolent enjoyer of the luxuries of his condition, but a keen, restless, and eager student of pleasurable sensations—an Apicius, polished by the manners, and furnished with the arts of the most self-enjoying condition of mankind, that of an English gentleman of fortune in the 18th century.
We certainly are not the champions of this style of life. We think that man has other matters to consider than pâtés and consommés, the flavour of his Burgundy and pines, or even the bons-mots of his friends. We are afraid that we must, after all, regard the whole Selwyn class as little better than the brutes in their stables, or on their hearth-rugs; with the advantage to the brutes of following their natural appetites, having no twinges of either conscience or the gout, and not being from time to time stripped by their friends, or plundered by the Jews. The closing hours of the horse or the dog are also, perhaps, more complacent in general, and their deaths are less a matter of rejoicing to those who are to succeed to their mangers and cushions. Of higher and more startling contemplations, this is not the place to speak. If such men shall yet have the power of looking down from some remoter planet on their idle, empty, and self-indulgent course in our own, perhaps they would rejoice to have exchanged with the lot of him whose bread was earned by the sweat of his brow, yet who had fulfilled the duties of his station; and whose hand had been withheld by necessity from that banquet, where all the nobler purposes of life were forgotten, and where the senses absorbed the higher nature. Still, we admit that these are topics on which no man ought to judge the individual with severity. We have spoken only of the class. The individual may have had virtues of which the world can know nothing; he may have been liberal, affectionate, and zealous, when his feelings were once awakened; his purse may have dried many a tear, and soothed many a pulse of secret suffering. It is, at all events, more kindly to speak of poor human nature with fellow feeling for those exposed to the strong temptations of fortune, than to establish an arrogant comparison between the notorious errors of others, and the secret failures of our own.
But we have something to settle with Mr Jesse. He is alive, and therefore may be instructed; he is making books with great rapidity, and therefore may be advantageously warned of the perils of book-making. The title of his volumes has altogether deceived us. We shall not charge him with intending this; but it has unquestionably had the effect. "George Selwyn and his contemporaries." We opened the volumes, expecting to find our witty clubbist in every page; George in his full expansion, "in his armour as he lived;" George, every inch a wit, glittering before us in his full court suit, in his letters, his anecdotes, his whims, his odd views of mankind, his caustic sneerings at the glittering world round him; an epistolary HB., turning every thing into the pleasant food of his pen and pungency. But we cannot discover any letters from him, excepting a few very trifling ones of his youth. We have letters from all sorts of persons, great lords and little, statesmen and travellers, placemen and place-hunters; and amusing enough many of them are. Walpole furnishes some sketches, and nothing can be better. In fact the volumes exhibit, not George Selwyn, the only one whose letters we should have cared to see, but those who wrote to him. And the disappointment is not the less, that in those letters constant allusions are made to his "sparkling, delightful, sportive, characteristic, &c. &c., epistles." Great ladies constantly urge him to write to them. Maids, wives, and widows, pour out a stream of perpetual laudation. Men of rank, men of letters, men at home, and men abroad, unite in one common supplication for "London news" réchaufféed, spiced, and served up, by the perfect cuisinerie of George's art of story-telling; like the horse-leech's two daughters, the cry is, "Give, give." And this is what we wanted to see. Selwyn, the whole Selwyn, and nothing but Selwyn.
It is true that there is a preface which talks in this wise:—
It seems to have been one of the peculiarities of George Selwyn, to preserve not only every letter addressed to him by his correspondents during the course of his long life, but also the most trifling notes and memoranda. To this peculiarity, the reader is indebted for whatever amusement he may derive from the perusal of these volumes. The greater portion of their contents consists of letters addressed to Selwyn, by persons who, in their day, moved in the first circles of wit, genius, and fashion."