Chapter XI
Chapter XI
Scythrop, attending one day the summons to dinner, found in the
drawing-room his friend Mr Cypress the poet, whom he had known at
college, and who was a great favourite of Mr Glowry. Mr Cypress said,
he was on the point of leaving England, but could not think of doing
so without a farewell-look at Nightmare Abbey and his respected
friends, the moody Mr Glowry and the mysterious Mr Scythrop, the
sublime Mr Flosky and the pathetic Mr Listless; to all of whom, and
the morbid hospitality of the melancholy dwelling in which they were
then assembled, he assured them he should always look back with as
much affection as his lacerated spirit could feel for any thing. The
sympathetic condolence of their respective replies was cut short by
Raven's announcement of 'dinner on table.'
The conversation that took place when the wine was in circulation, and
the ladies were withdrawn, we shall report with our usual scrupulous
fidelity.
MR GLOWRY
You are leaving England, Mr Cypress. There is a delightful melancholy
in saying farewell to an old acquaintance, when the chances are twenty
to one against ever meeting again. A smiling bumper to a sad parting,
and let us all be unhappy together.
MR CYPRESS (filling a bumper)
This is the only social habit that the disappointed spirit never
unlearns.
THE REVEREND MR LARYNX (filling)
It is the only piece of academical learning that the finished educatee
retains.
MR FLOSKY (filling)
It is the only objective fact which the sceptic can realise.
SCYTHROP (filling)
It is the only styptic for a bleeding heart.
THE HONOURABLE MR LISTLESS (filling)
It is the only trouble that is very well worth taking.
MR ASTERIAS (filling)
It is the only key of conversational truth.
MR TOOBAD (filling)
It is the only antidote to the great wrath of the devil.
MR HILARY (filling)
It is the only symbol of perfect life. The inscription 'HIC NON
BIBITUR' will suit nothing but a tombstone.
MR GLOWRY
You will see many fine old ruins, Mr Cypress; crumbling pillars, and
mossy walls--many a one-legged Venus and headless Minerva--many a
Neptune buried in sand--many a Jupiter turned topsy-turvy--many a
perforated Bacchus doing duty as a water-pipe--many reminiscences of
the ancient world, which I hope was better worth living in than the
modern; though, for myself, I care not a straw more for one than the
other, and would not go twenty miles to see any thing that either
could show.
MR CYPRESS
It is something to seek, Mr Glowry. The mind is restless, and must
persist in seeking, though to find is to be disappointed. Do you feel
no aspirations towards the countries of Socrates and Cicero? No wish
to wander among the venerable remains of the greatness that has passed
for ever?
MR GLOWRY
Not a grain.
SCYTHROP
It is, indeed, much the same as if a lover should dig up the buried
form of his mistress, and gaze upon relics which are any thing but
herself, to wander among a few mouldy ruins, that are only imperfect
indexes to lost volumes of glory, and meet at every step the more
melancholy ruins of human nature--a degenerate race of stupid and
shrivelled slaves, grovelling in the lowest depths of servility and
superstition.
THE HONOURABLE MR LISTLESS
It is the fashion to go abroad. I have thought of it myself, but am
hardly equal to the exertion. To be sure, a little eccentricity and
originality are allowable in some cases; and the most eccentric and
original of all characters is an Englishman who stays at home.
SCYTHROP
I should have no pleasure in visiting countries that are past all hope
of regeneration. There is great hope of our own; and it seems to me
that an Englishman, who, either by his station in society, or by his
genius, or (as in your instance, Mr Cypress,) by both, has the power
of essentially serving his country in its arduous struggle with its
domestic enemies, yet forsakes his country, which is still so rich
in hope, to dwell in others which are only fertile in the ruins of
memory, does what none of those ancients, whose fragmentary memorials
you venerate, would have done in similar circumstances.
MR CYPRESS
Sir, I have quarrelled with my wife; and a man who has quarrelled with
his wife is absolved from all duty to his country. I have written an
ode to tell the people as much, and they may take it as they list.
SCYTHROP
Do you suppose, if Brutus had quarrelled with his wife, he would have
given it as a reason to Cassius for having nothing to do with his
enterprise? Or would Cassius have been satisfied with such an excuse?
MR FLOSKY
Brutus was a senator; so is our dear friend: but the cases are
different. Brutus had some hope of political good: Mr Cypress has
none. How should he, after what we have seen in France?
SCYTHROP
A Frenchman is born in harness, ready saddled, bitted, and bridled,
for any tyrant to ride. He will fawn under his rider one moment, and
throw him and kick him to death the next; but another adventurer
springs on his back, and by dint of whip and spur on he goes as
before. We may, without much vanity, hope better of ourselves.
MR CYPRESS
I have no hope for myself or for others. Our life is a false nature;
it is not in the harmony of things; it is an all-blasting upas,
whose root is earth, and whose leaves are the skies which rain their
poison-dews upon mankind. We wither from our youth; we gasp with
unslaked thirst for unattainable good; lured from the first to the
last by phantoms--love, fame, ambition, avarice--all idle, and all
ill--one meteor of many names, that vanishes in the smoke of death.[8]
MR FLOSKY
A most delightful speech, Mr Cypress. A most amiable and instructive
philosophy. You have only to impress its truth on the minds of
all living men, and life will then, indeed, be the desert and the
solitude; and I must do you, myself, and our mutual friends, the
justice to observe, that let society only give fair play at one and
the same time, as I flatter myself it is inclined to do, to your
system of morals, and my system of metaphysics, and Scythrop's system
of politics, and Mr Listless's system of manners, and Mr Toobad's
system of religion, and the result will be as fine a mental chaos as
even the immortal Kant himself could ever have hoped to see; in the
prospect of which I rejoice.
MR HILARY
'Certainly, ancient, it is not a thing to rejoice at:' I am one
of those who cannot see the good that is to result from all this
mystifying and blue-devilling of society. The contrast it presents
to the cheerful and solid wisdom of antiquity is too forcible not to
strike any one who has the least knowledge of classical literature. To
represent vice and misery as the necessary accompaniments of genius,
is as mischievous as it is false, and the feeling is as unclassical as
the language in which it is usually expressed.
MR TOOBAD
It is our calamity. The devil has come among us, and has begun by
taking possession of all the cleverest fellows. Yet, forsooth, this is
the enlightened age. Marry, how? Did our ancestors go peeping about
with dark lanterns, and do we walk at our ease in broad sunshine?
Where is the manifestation of our light? By what symptoms do you
recognise it? What are its signs, its tokens, its symptoms, its
symbols, its categories, its conditions? What is it, and why? How,
where, when is it to be seen, felt, and understood? What do we see by
it which our ancestors saw not, and which at the same time is worth
seeing? We see a hundred men hanged, where they saw one. We see five
hundred transported, where they saw one. We see five thousand in the
workhouse, where they saw one. We see scores of Bible Societies, where
they saw none. We see paper, where they saw gold. We see men in stays,
where they saw men in armour. We see painted faces, where they saw
healthy ones. We see children perishing in manufactories, where they
saw them flourishing in the fields. We see prisons, where they saw
castles. We see masters, where they saw representatives. In short,
they saw true men, where we see false knaves. They saw Milton, and we
see Mr Sackbut.
MR FLOSKY
The false knave, sir, is my honest friend; therefore, I beseech you,
let him be countenanced. God forbid but a knave should have some
countenance at his friend's request.
MR TOOBAD
'Good men and true' was their common term, like the chalos chagathos
of the Athenians. It is so long since men have been either good or
true, that it is to be questioned which is most obsolete, the fact or
the phraseology.
MR CYPRESS
There is no worth nor beauty but in the mind's idea. Love sows the
wind and reaps the whirlwind.[9] Confusion, thrice confounded, is the
portion of him who rests even for an instant on that most brittle of
reeds--the affection of a human being. The sum of our social destiny
is to inflict or to endure.[10]
MR HILARY
Rather to bear and forbear, Mr Cypress--a maxim which you perhaps
despise. Ideal beauty is not the mind's creation: it is real beauty,
refined and purified in the mind's alembic, from the alloy which
always more or less accompanies it in our mixed and imperfect nature.
But still the gold exists in a very ample degree. To expect too
much is a disease in the expectant, for which human nature is not
responsible; and, in the common name of humanity, I protest against
these false and mischievous ravings. To rail against humanity for not
being abstract perfection, and against human love for not realising
all the splendid visions of the poets of chivalry, is to rail at the
summer for not being all sunshine, and at the rose for not being
always in bloom.
MR CYPRESS
Human love! Love is not an inhabitant of the earth. We worship him as
the Athenians did their unknown God: but broken hearts are the martyrs
of his faith, and the eye shall never see the form which phantasy
paints, and which passion pursues through paths of delusive beauty,
among flowers whose odours are agonies, and trees whose gums are
poison.[11]
MR HILARY
You talk like a Rosicrucian, who will love nothing but a sylph, who
does not believe in the existence of a sylph, and who yet quarrels
with the whole universe for not containing a sylph.
MR CYPRESS
The mind is diseased of its own beauty, and fevers into false
creation. The forms which the sculptor's soul has seized exist only in
himself.[12]
MR FLOSKY
Permit me to discept. They are the mediums of common forms combined
and arranged into a common standard. The ideal beauty of the Helen of
Zeuxis was the combined medium of the real beauty of the virgins of
Crotona.
MR HILARY
But to make ideal beauty the shadow in the water, and, like the dog in
the fable, to throw away the substance in catching at the shadow, is
scarcely the characteristic of wisdom, whatever it may be of genius.
To reconcile man as he is to the world as it is, to preserve and
improve all that is good, and destroy or alleviate all that is evil,
in physical and moral nature--have been the hope and aim of the
greatest teachers and ornaments of our species. I will say, too,
that the highest wisdom and the highest genius have been invariably
accompanied with cheerfulness. We have sufficient proofs on record
that Shakspeare and Socrates were the most festive of companions. But
now the little wisdom and genius we have seem to be entering into a
conspiracy against cheerfulness.
MR TOOBAD
How can we be cheerful with the devil among us!
THE HONOURABLE MR LISTLESS
How can we be cheerful when our nerves are shattered?
MR FLOSKY
How can we be cheerful when we are surrounded by a reading public,
that is growing too wise for its betters?
SCYTHROP
How can we be cheerful when our great general designs are crossed
every moment by our little particular passions?
MR CYPRESS
How can we be cheerful in the midst of disappointment and despair?
MR GLOWRY
Let us all be unhappy together.
MR HILARY
Let us sing a catch.
MR GLOWRY
No: a nice tragical ballad. The Norfolk Tragedy to the tune of the
Hundredth Psalm.
MR HILARY
I say a catch.
MR GLOWRY
I say no. A song from Mr Cypress.
ALL
A song from Mr Cypress.
MR CYPRESS sung--
There is a fever of the spirit,
The brand of Cain's unresting doom,
Which in the lone dark souls that bear it
Glows like the lamp in Tullia's tomb:
Unlike that lamp, its subtle fire
Burns, blasts, consumes its cell, the heart,
Till, one by one, hope, joy, desire,
Like dreams of shadowy smoke depart.
When hope, love, life itself, are only
Dust--spectral memories--dead and cold--
The unfed fire burns bright and lonely,
Like that undying lamp of old:
And by that drear illumination,
Till time its clay-built home has rent,
Thought broods on feeling's desolation--
The soul is its own monument.
MR GLOWRY
Admirable. Let us all be unhappy together.
MR HILARY
Now, I say again, a catch.
THE REVEREND MR LARYNX
I am for you.
ME HILARY
'Seamen three.'
THE REVEREND MR LARYNX
Agreed. I'll be Harry Gill, with the voice of three. Begin
MR HILARY AND THE REVEREND MR LARYNX
Seamen three! I What men be ye?
Gotham's three wise men we be.
Whither in your bowl so free?
To rake the moon from out the sea.
The bowl goes trim. The moon doth shine.
And our ballast is old wine;
And your ballast is old wine.
Who art thou, so fast adrift?
I am he they call Old Care.
Here on board we will thee lift.
No: I may not enter there.
Wherefore so? 'Tis Jove's decree,
In a bowl Care may not be;
In a bowl Care may not be.
Hear ye not the waves that roll?
No: in charmed bowl we swim.
What the charm that floats the bowl?
Water may not pass the brim.
The bowl goes trim. The moon doth shine.
And our ballast is old wine;
And your ballast is old wine.
This catch was so well executed by the spirit and science of Mr
Hilary, and the deep tri-une voice of the reverend gentleman, that the
whole party, in spite of themselves, caught the contagion, and joined
in chorus at the conclusion, each raising a bumper to his lips:
The bowl goes trim: the moon doth shine:
And our ballast is old wine.
Mr Cypress, having his ballast on board, stepped, the same evening,
into his bowl, or travelling chariot, and departed to rake seas and
rivers, lakes and canals, for the moon of ideal beauty.
* * * * *
* * *