For a long time Mr. Samuel Ridley, butler and confidential valet to the Right Honourable John James Baron Todmorden, was in a state of the greatest despair and gloom about his only son, the little John James,—a sickly and almost deformed child “of whom there was no making nothink,” as Mr. Ridley said. His figure precluded him from following his father’s profession, and waiting upon the British nobility, who naturally require large and handsome men to skip up behind their rolling carriages, and hand their plates at dinner. When John James was six years old his father remarked, with tears in his eyes, he wasn’t higher than a plate-basket. The boys jeered at him in the streets—some whopped him, spite of his diminutive size. At school he made but little progress. He was always sickly and dirty, and timid and crying, whimpering in the kitchen away from his mother; who, though she loved him, took Mr. Ridley’s view of his character, and thought him little better than an idiot until such time as little Miss Cann took him in hand, when at length there was some hope of him.
“Half-witted, you great stupid big man,” says Miss Cann, who had a fine spirit of her own. “That boy half-witted! He has got more wit in his little finger than you have in all your great person! You are a very good man, Ridley, very good-natured I’m sure, and bear with the teasing of a waspish old woman: but you are not the wisest of mankind. Tut, tut, don’t tell me. You know you spell out the words when you read the newspaper still, and what would your bills look like if I did not write them in my nice little hand? I tell you that boy is a genius. I tell you that one day the world will hear of him. His heart is made of pure gold. You think that all the wit belongs to the big people. Look at me, you great tall man! Am I not a hundred times cleverer than you are? Yes, and John James is worth a thousand such insignificant little chits as I am; and he is as tall as me too, sir. Do you hear that! One day I am determined he shall dine at Lord Todmorden’s table, and he shall get the prize at the Royal Academy, and be famous, sir—famous!”
“Well, Miss C., I wish he may get it; that’s all I say,” answers Mr. Ridley. “The poor fellow does no harm, that I acknowledge; but I never see the good he was up to yet. I wish he’d begin it; I du wish he would now.” And the honest gentleman relapses into the study of his paper.
All those beautiful sounds and thoughts which Miss Cann conveys to him out of her charmed piano, the young artist straightway translates into forms; and knights in armour, with plume, and shield, and battle-axe; and splendid young noblemen with flowing ringlets, and bounteous plumes of feathers, and rapiers, and russet boots; and fierce banditti with crimson tights, doublets profusely illustrated with large brass buttons, and the dumpy basket-hilted claymores known to be the favourite weapon with which these whiskered ruffians do battle; wasp-waisted peasant girls, and young countesses with oh, such large eyes and the lips!—all these splendid forms of war and beauty crowd to the young draughtsman’s pencil, and cover letter-backs, copybooks, without end. If his hand strikes off some face peculiarly lovely, and to his taste, some fair vision that has shone on his imagination, some houri of a dancer, some bright young lady of fashion in an opera-box, whom he has seen, or fancied he has seen (for the youth is short-sighted, though he hardly as yet knows his misfortune)—if he has made some effort extraordinarily successful, our young Pygmalion hides away the masterpiece, and he paints the beauty with all his skill; the lips a bright carmine, the eyes a deep, deep cobalt, the cheeks a dazzling vermilion, the ringlets of a golden hue; and he worships this sweet creature of his in secret, fancies a history for her; a castle to storm, a tyrant usurper who keeps her imprisoned, and a prince in black ringlets and a spangled cloak, who scales the tower, who slays the tyrant, and then kneels gracefully at the princess’s feet, and says, “Lady, wilt thou be mine?”
There is a kind lady in the neighbourhood, who takes in dressmaking for the neighbouring maid-servants, and has a small establishment of lollipops, theatrical characters, and ginger-beer for the boys in Little Craggs Buildings, hard by the Running Footman public-house, where father and other gentlemen’s gentlemen have their club: this good soul also sells Sunday newspapers to the footmen of the neighbouring gentry; and besides, has a stock of novels for the ladies of the upper servants’ table. Next to Miss Cann, Miss Flinders is John James’s greatest friend and benefactor. She has remarked him when he was quite a little man, and used to bring his father’s beer of a Sunday. Out of her novels he has taught himself to read, dull boy at the day-school though he was, and always the last in his class, there. Hours, happy hours, has he spent cowering behind her counter, or hugging her books under his pinafore when he had leave to carry them home. The whole library has passed through his hands, his long, lean, tremulous hands, and under his eager eyes. He has made illustrations to every one of those books, and been frightened at his own pictures of Manfroni or the One-handed Monk, Abellino the Terrific Bravo of Venice, and Rinaldo Rinaldini Captain of Robbers. How he has blistered Thaddeus of Warsaw with his tears, and drawn him in his Polish cap, and tights, and Hessians! William Wallace, the Hero of Scotland, how nobly he has depicted him! With what whiskers and bushy ostrich plumes!—in a tight kilt, and with what magnificent calves to his legs, laying about him with his battle-axe, and bestriding the bodies of King Edward’s prostrate cavaliers! At this time Mr. Honeyman comes to lodge in Walpole Street, and brings a set of Scott’s novels, for which he subscribed when at Oxford; and young John James, who at first waits upon him and does little odd jobs for the reverend gentleman, lights upon the volumes, and reads them with such a delight and passion of pleasure as all the delights of future days will scarce equal. A fool, is he?—an idle feller, out of whom no good will ever come, as his father says. There was a time when, in despair of any better chance for him, his parents thought of apprenticing him to a tailor, and John James was waked up from a dream of Rebecca and informed of the cruelty meditated against him. I forbear to describe the tears and terror, and frantic desperation in which the poor boy was plunged. Little Miss Cann rescued him from that awful board, and Honeyman likewise interceded for him, and Mr. Bagshot promised that, as soon as his party came in, he would ask the Minister for a tide-waitership for him; for everybody liked the solemn, soft-hearted, willing little lad, and no one knew him less than his pompous and stupid and respectable father.
Miss Cann painted flowers and card-screens elegantly, and “finished” pencil-drawings most elaborately for her pupils. She could copy prints, so that at a little distance you would scarcely know that the copy in stumped chalk was not a bad mezzotinto engraving. She even had a little old paint-box, and showed you one or two ivory miniatures out of the drawer. She gave John James what little knowledge of drawing she had, and handed him over her invaluable recipes for mixing water-colours—“for trees in foregrounds, burnt sienna and indigo”—“for very dark foliage, ivory black and gamboge”—“for flesh-colour,” etc. etc. John James went through her poor little course, but not so brilliantly as she expected. She was forced to own that several of her pupils’ “pieces” were executed much more dexterously than Johnny Ridley’s. Honeyman looked at the boy’s drawings from time to time, and said, “Hm, ha!—very clever—a great deal of fancy, really.” But Honeyman knew no more of the subject than a deaf and dumb man knows of music. He could talk the art cant very glibly, and had a set of Morghens and Madonnas as became a clergyman and a man of taste; but he saw not with eyes such as those wherewith Heaven had endowed the humble little butler’s boy, to whom splendours of Nature were revealed to vulgar sights invisible, and beauties manifest in forms, colours, shadows of common objects, where most of the world saw only what was dull, and gross, and familiar. One reads in the magic story-books of a charm or a flower which the wizard gives, and which enables the bearer to see the fairies. O enchanting boon of Nature, which reveals to the possessor the hidden spirits of beauty round about him! spirits which the strongest and most gifted masters compel into painting or song. To others it is granted but to have fleeting glimpses of that fair Art-world; and tempted by ambition, or barred by faint-heartedness, or driven by necessity, to turn away thence to the vulgar life-track, and the light of common day.
The reader who has passed through Walpole Street scores of times, knows the discomfortable architecture of all, save the great houses built in Queen Anne’s and George the First’s time; and while some of the neighbouring streets, to wit, Great Craggs Street, Bolingbroke Street, and others, contain mansions fairly coped with stone, with little obelisks before the doors, and great extinguishers wherein the torches of the nobility’s running footmen were put out a hundred and thirty or forty years ago:—houses which still remain abodes of the quality, and where you shall see a hundred carriages gather of a public night; Walpole Street has quite faded away into lodgings, private hotels, doctors’ houses, and the like; nor is No. 23 (Ridley’s) by any means the best house in the street. The parlour, furnished and tenanted by Miss Cann as has been described; the first floor, Bagshot, Esq., M.P.; the second floor, Honeyman; what remains but the garrets, and the ample staircase and the kitchens? and the family being all put to bed, how can you imagine there is room for any more inhabitants?
And yet there is one lodger more, and one who, like almost all the other personages mentioned up to the present time (and some of whom you have no idea yet), will play a definite part in the ensuing history. At night, when Honeyman comes in, he finds on the hall-table three wax bedroom candles—his own, Bagshot’s, and another. As for Miss Cann, she is locked into the parlour in bed long ago, her stout little walking-shoes being on the mat at the door. At 12 o’clock at noon, sometimes at 1, nay at 2 and 3—long after Bagshot is gone to his committees, and little Cann to her pupils—a voice issues from the very topmost floor, from a room where there is no bell; a voice of thunder calling out “Slavey! Julia! Julia, my love! Mrs. Ridley!” And this summons not being obeyed, it will not unfrequently happen that a pair of trousers enclosing a pair of boots with iron heels, and known by the name of the celebrated Prussian General who came up to help the other christener of boots at Waterloo, will be flung down from the topmost story, even to the marble floor of the resounding hall. Then the boy Thomas, otherwise called Slavey, may say, “There he goes again;” or Mrs. Ridley’s own back-parlour bell rings vehemently, and Julia the cook will exclaim, “Lor, it’s Mr. Frederick.”
If the breeches and boots are not understood, the owner himself appears in great wrath dancing on the upper story; dancing down to the lower floor; and loosely enveloped in a ragged and flowing robe de chambre. In this costume and condition he will dance into Honeyman’s apartment, where that meek divine may be sitting with a headache or over a novel or a newspaper; dance up to the fire flapping his robe-tails, poke it, and warm himself there; dance up to the cupboard where his reverence keeps his sherry, and help himself to a glass.
“Salve, spes fidei, lumen ecclesiæ,” he will say; “here’s towards you, my buck. I knows the tap. Sherrick’s Marsala bottled three months after date, at two hundred and forty-six shillings the dozen.”