Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine Volume 53, No. 332, June, 1843 - Various

Various

Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine Volume 53, No. 332, June, 1843

MARSTON; OR, THE MEMOIRS OF A STATESMAN

PART I

Why I give the world a sketch of my career through it, is not among the discoveries which I intend to make. I have been a public man; let those who know public life imagine what interest may be felt in reviewing the scenes and struggles of which such a life is full. May there not be a pleasure in conceiving once again the shapes and circumstances of things, as one sitting by his fireside sees castles and cottages, men, women, and children in the embers, and shapes them the better for the silence and the solitude round him? Let the reader take what reason he will. I have seen the world, and fought my way through it; have stumbled, like greater men, have risen, like lesser; have been flung into the most rapid current of the most hurried, wild, and vivid time that the world has ever seenI have lived through the last fifty years. In all the vigour of my life, I have mingled in some of the greatest transactions, and been mingled with some of the greatest men, of my time. Like one who has tumbled down Niagara, and survived the fall, though I have reached still water, the roar of the cataract is yet in my ears; and I can even survey it with a fuller gaze, and stronger sense of its vastness and power, than, when I was rolling down its precipice.

I have been soldier, adventurer, traveller, statesman. I have been lover, husband, fatherpoor and opulent; obscure and conspicuous. There are few sensations of our nature, or circumstances of our life, which I have not undergone. Alternately suffering to the verge of ruin, and enjoying like an epicurean deity: I have been steeped in poverty to the lips; I have been surcharged with wealth. I have sacrificed, and fearfully, to the love of power; I have been disgusted with its possession. I figured in the great Babel until I loved even its confusion of tongues; I grew weary of it, until I hated the voice of man.

Every man is born for a special purpose, and with a special passion. The multitude, possessing both, exhibit neither; they are flung, or choose to be flung, into the pond, where they float only to perish, like blind puppies. But there are others who stem the great tide, and are only the stronger for the struggle. From my first sense, the passion to be known and felt, nay, at the expense of being feared, was my impulse. It has been the impulse of all men who have ever impressed the world. With great talents it is all-commanding: the thunderbolt in the hands of Jove. Even with inferior faculties, and I make no pretence of mine, it singularly excites, urges, and animates. When the prophet saw the leopard winged, he saw a miracle; I claim for my powers only those of the muscle and sinew.

Ambition was the original passion of my nature. It rose before me, as the sun ascends before the Indian, until its fire drives him to the shade. I, too, have been scorched, have shrunk, and now I regret my shrinking. But time deals alike with all. I can now amuse myself only by images of the past; and, in the darkness and solitude of years, I take their Magic Lantern, and replace life by the strange, wild, and high-coloured extravagances, the ghosts and genii of the phantasmagoria of ambition.

I was the seventh son of one of the oldest families of England. If I had been the seventh son of the seventh son, I should, by all the laws of juggling, have been a conjurer; but I was a generation too early for fame. My father was an earl, and as proud of his titles as if he had won them at Crecy or Poictiers, and not in the campaigns of Westminster, consummated on the backstairs of Whitehall. He had served his country, as he termed it, in a long succession of Parliaments; and served her still more, as his country neighbours termed it, by accepting a peerage, which opened the county to any other representative among the sons of men. He was a strong-built, stern-countenanced, and haughty-tongued personageby some thought a man of sense; by others a fool, with all his depth, arising from his darkness. My own experience convinced me, that no man made more of a secret, or thought less of a job. From my boyhood I own I feared more than honoured him; and as for love, if I had been more susceptible, mine would have flown round the globe before it could have fixed on that iron visage. The little love that I could afford for any human being, was for another and a different order of existence. Boys have a natural fondness for the mother; and mine was gentle, timid, and fond. She always parted with me, on my going to school, as if she had lost a limb, and when I returned, received me as if she had found a pinion in its place. She perhaps spoiled me by indulgence, as much as my lord and father spoiled me by severity; but indulgence is the pleasanter of the two, and I followed the course of nature, and gave her whatever heart I have. I still remember her. She was remarkably indebted to nature, at least for externals. She had fine eyeslarge, dark, and sentimental; her dress, which would now be preposterous, seemed to me, then, the perfection of all taste, and was in the highest fashion of her time. Her beauty worked miracles; for now and then I have observed even my father's eye fixed on her, with something of the admiration which we might conceive in an Esquimaux for a fixed star, or in an Italian highwayman for some Parian statue which he had stumbled on in his thickets. But the admiration was soon absorbed in the job in hand, and he turned awayto scribble to the Minister. Of the younger portion of the family I shall say but little. Children are happiest in the nursery, and there I leave them. I had two sisters, sweet little creatures, one with black eyes and the other with blue. This is enough for their description. My four brothers were four rough, bold, well-looking animals, all intended for ambassadors, admirals, generals, and secretaries of statefor my father had too long tasted of the honey of official life to think that there was any other food for a gentleman in the world. He had been suckled for too many years at those breasts, which, like the bosom of the great Egyptian goddess, pour the stream of life through whole generations of hangers-on, to believe that any other fount of existence was to be named but the civil list. I am strongly inclined to surmise that he would have preferred a pencil, purloined from the Treasury, to all the cedars of Lebanon.

It may be presumed that I was destined for public lifein other words, to live on the public; and, to prepare me for the performance of a part, alternately menial and mastersupple as the slave, and superb as the ministerI was sent to Eton. At this great school of the aristocracy, would-be and realbarons and dukes in esse, and the herald's office alone, or bedlam, knows what in posse, I remained for the customary number of years. If whoever does me the honour to read these pages, hates the history of schooldays as much as I do their memory, he will easily pardon my passing by the topic altogether. If the first purpose of all great public institutions is to stand still; the great schools of England, fifty years ago, were righteous adherents to their contract; they never moved. The world might whirl round them as it would; there remained the grey milestones, only measuring the speed with which every thing on the road passed them. This, they say, has largely and fortunately changed in later years. But the change must proceed; the venerable cripples must throw by their crutches, and try the effect of flesh and blood. Flogging and fagging, are the education for a footman; they disgrace the common sense, and offend the feelings of a manly people. The pugilist must be expelled, and the puppy must follow him. The detestable grossness of classical impurity, must be no longer the price at which Latin "quantities" are to be learned. The last lesson of the "prodigal son," must not be the first learned by the son of the gentleman of Englandto be fed on the "husks" fit only for the swine.

On my delighted release from this supreme laboratory of statesmen, I found the state of things considerably altered at Mortimer Castle. I had left it a stately but rather melancholy-looking household; I found the mansion glittering in all the novelty of French furniture, gilding, and or-molucrowded with fashion, and all its menial tribe, from the groom in the stables to the gentleman's gentleman, who slipped along the chambers in soft silence, and seemed an embodying of Etiquette, all in new equipments of all kindsthe avenue trimmed, until it resembled a theatrical wood; and the grounds, once sober and silent enough for a Jacques to escape from the sight of human kind, and hold dialogues with the deer; now levelled, opened, shorn, and shaved, with the precision of a retired citizen's elysium.

The heads of the family were equally changed; my mother, unhappily, for the worse. Her fine eyes beamed with joy as she threw herself upon my neck, and murmured some of those mingled blessings and raptures which have a language of their own. But when the first flush was past, I perceived that the cheek was thin, the eye was hollow and heavy, and the tremulous motion of her slight hand, as it lay in mine, alarmed me; in all my ignorance of the frailty of the human frame. But the grand change was in the Earl. My father, whom I had left rather degenerating into the shape which three courses and a bottle of claret a-day inflict on country gentlemen "who live at home at ease," was now braced and laced, costumed in the newest fashion, and overflowing with exuberant volatility. He breathed of Bond Street. He welcomed me with an ardour which astonished, more than delighted, me; Talked fragments of French, congratulated me on my "air distingué," advised me to put myself "en grande tenue;" and, after enchanting me in all kinds of strange ways, concluded by making an attempt to kiss me on both cheeks, like a true Frenchman. My Eton recollections enabled me to resist the paternal embrace; until the wonder was simplified, by the discovery that the family had but just returned from a continental residence of a couple of yearsa matter of which no letter or word had given me the knowledge at my school. My next discovery was, that an old uncle had died, and left us money enough to carry the county; and the last and crowning one was, that my eldest brother had just been returned for the North Riding.

This was such an accumulation of good-luck as might have thrown any elderly gentleman off the balance of his gravity. It was like Philip's three plates at the Greek horse-races, crowned by the birth of Alexander. If my lordly father had danced the "Minuette de la Cour" over the marble tesselation of his own hall, I should now not have been surprised. But, from my first sense, or insensibility, I had felt no great delight in matters which were to make my own condition neither better nor worse; and after a remarkably brief period, the showy déjeûnés and dinners which commemorated the triumphs of the heir-apparent of our house, grew tiresome to me beyond all count, and I openly petitioned to be sent to college, or to the world's end.

My petition was listened to with a mixture of contempt for my want of taste, and astonishment at my presumption. But before the reply had time to burst out from lips, at no time too retentive, I was told, that at the end of one week more I should be suffered to take my way; that week being devoted to a round of especial entertainments in honour of my brother's election; the whole to be wound up by that most preposterous of all delights, an amateur play.

To keep a house in commotion, to produce mysterious conversations, conferences without number, and confidences without end; and to swell maidens' hearts and milliners' bills, let me recommend an amateur play in the country. The very mention of it awoke every soul in the Castle; caps and complexions were matched, and costumes criticised, from morning till night, among the ladies. The "acting drama" was turned over leaf by leaf by the gentlemen. The sound of many a heavy tread of many a heavy student, was heard in the chambers; the gardens were haunted by "the characters" getting their parts; and the poet's burlesque of those who "rave, recite, and madden round the land," was realized to the life in the histrionic labours of the votaries of Thalia and Melpomene, who ranged the groves of Mortimer Castle.

Then we had all the charming difficulty of fixing on the play. The dullest and dreariest of our country Rosciuses were uniformly for comedy; but the fair sex have a leaning to the tragic muse. We had one or two, who would have had no objection to be piquant in Lady Teazle, or petulant in Lady Townley; but we had half a dozen Desdemonas and Ophelias. The soul of an O'Neil was in every one of our party conscious of a pair of good eyes, a tolerable shape, and the captivation which, in some way or other, most women in existence contrive to discover in their own share of the gifts of nature. At length the votes carried it for Romeo and Juliet. The eventful night came; the élite of the county poured in, the theatre was crowded; all was expectancy before the curtain; all was terror, nervousness, and awkwardness behind. The orchestra performed its flourish, and the curtain rose.

To do the heads of the household justice, they had done their duty as managers. The theatre, though but a temporary building, projecting from the ball-room into one of the gardens, was worthy of the very handsome apartment which formed its vestibule. The skill of a famous London architect had been exerted on this fairy erection, and Verona itself had, perhaps, in its palmiest days, seldom exhibited a display of more luxuriant elegance. The audience, too, so totally different from the mingled, ill-dressed, and irregular assemblage that fills a city theatre; blooming girls and showy matrons, range above range, feathered and flowered, glittering with all the family jewels, and all animated by the novelty of the scene before them, formed an exhibition which, for the night, inspired me with the idea, that (strolling excepted) the stage might not be a bad resource for a man of talents, after all.

But the play wasmust I confess it? though I myself figured as the Romeoutterly deplorable. The men forgot their parts, and their casual attempts to recover them made terrible havoc of the harmony of Shakspeare. The ladies lost their voices, and carried on their loves, their sorrows, and even their scoldings, in a whisper. Our play perfectly deserved the criticism of the old gentleman, who, after a similar performance, being asked which of the personages he liked best, candidly replied, "the prompter, for of him he had heard the most and seen the least."

However, every thing has an end; and we had carried Juliet to the tomb of all the Capulets, the chant was done, and the mourners were gathered in the green-room. I was standing, book in hand, preparing for the last agonies of a love very imperfectly committed to memory, when I heard a slight confusion in the court-yard, and shortly after the rattle of a post-chaise. The sound subsided, and I was summoned to my post at the entrance to the place where the lovely Juliet lay entranced. The pasteboard gate gave way to knocks enforced with an energy which called down rapturous applause; and in all the tortures of a broken heart, rewarded by a profusion of handkerchiefs applied to bright eyes, and a strong scent of hartshorn round the house, I summoned my fair bride to my arms. There was no reply. I again invoked her; still silent. Her trance was evidently of the deepest order. I rose from the ground, where I had been "taking the measure of my unmade grave," and approaching the bier, ventured to drop a despairing hand upon her pillow. To my utter surprise, it was vacant. If I had been another Shakspeare, the situation was a fine one for a display of original genius. But I was paralyzed. A sense of the general embarrassment was my first impression, and I was absolutely struck dumb. But this was soon shaken off. My next was a sense of the particular burlesque of my situation; I burst out into laughter, in which the whole house joined; and throwing down my mattock, rushed off the stage. My theatrical dream was broken up for ever.