Volume 74 — FOREIGN ESTIMATES OF ENGLAND.[2]

FOREIGN ESTIMATES OF ENGLAND.^[2]

With what heart or conscience can an English critic expose the deficiencies of a foreign book, “dedicated to the great, the noble, the hospitable English people”? Upon its first page he finds a compliment that cripples his quill. Though he had gall in his ink, it must turn to honey on his paper. Mr Schlesinger takes his English readers and reviewers at an unfair advantage. Perhaps he thinks to treat them like children, thrusting a comfit into their mouths to bribe them to swallow drugs. The flattering flourish of his commencement may be intended to mask the batteries about to open. He gags us with a rose, that we may silently bear the pricking of the thorns.

Inexhaustible interest attaches to the printed observations of intelligent foreigners upon England and its capital. The field is vast, and has been little worked. There are few books upon the subject either in French or in German, and, of such as there are, very few possess merit or have met with success. Defaced, in a majority of instances, by prejudice, triviality, or misappreciation, they attracted slight notice in the countries of their publication, and were utterly unheeded in that they professed to describe. Increased facilities of communication, and more extensive study of the English language in France and Germany, will bring about a change in this respect. We anticipate the appearance, within the next twenty years, of many foreign books upon England, and especially upon London—a city first known to Continentals, according to the author now present, in the year of grace 1851. “Stray travellers, bankers, wandering artisans, and diplomatic documents, had occasionally let fall a few words, which sounded like fairy tales, concerning the greatness, the wealth, the industry, and the politics of the monster city of the West; but that city lay, geographically, too far out of the way, and the phases of its historical development had not been sufficiently connected with the history of Continental nations, for it to be, like Paris, a favourite object of travel and study.” The cosmopolitan glasshouse was the glittering bait which drew to our shores a larger concourse of foreigners than England ever before at one time beheld, or than she is likely ever again to behold, at least in our day, unless in the rather improbable contingency of the French Emperor’s successfully realising those projects of invasion some are disposed to impute to him. A summer of unusual beauty, a general disposition to show kindness and hospitality to the stranger, the manifold attractions of that really wonderful building, unsurpassed save by the edifice now rising from its remains on the slope of a Kentish hill, combined to invest London with a charm to which foreigners who had already visited it were wholly unaccustomed, and for which those who for the first time beheld it were quite unprepared.

Max Schlesinger, well known as the author of one of the most successful and popular of the books that were written on the late Hungarian war, was amongst the visitors to the Crystal Palace, but must have resided in England for a longer period than the duration of that exhibition. The first volume of his “Wanderings,” which appeared last year, was written in England, for he dates his preface from the Isle of Wight. He does not profess to give an account of London. He felt that two volumes, compendious though they be, would be insufficient for more than a glance at such a multitude of objects for description, and of subjects for reflection and analysis, as are presented by the overgrown British metropolis, and he preferred dwelling upon a few points to glancing at a great many. He has hit upon an ingenious and amusing plan for the exposition of his views and maintenance of his impartiality. He establishes himself in an English family, in the terra incognita of Guildford Street. The master of the house, Sir John, who is intended as a prototype of his countrymen, is a thorough John Bull—shrewd, sensible, intelligent, with a moderate allowance of English prejudices, a warm attachment to his country, a well-founded conviction of its pre-eminence amongst the nations, and of the excellence of its institutions. Dr Keif (the word signifies a grumbler), another inmate of the house, and an old friend of Sir John’s, is an Austrian journalist, whose pen has taken liberties that have endangered his own, and who has sought refuge in England, which he begins good-humouredly to abuse almost as soon as he has landed in it. He is kind-hearted, impetuous, excitable, given to faultfinding and polemics, and nearly as much convinced of German superiority as Sir John is of that of England. Then there is a Frenchman, Tremplin, introduced in the second volume, and who can see nothing good out of Paris. An Englishman named Frolick—who conducts the foreigners upon nocturnal excursions to theatres, gin palaces, “penny gaffs,” the purlieus of Drury Lane and St Giles’s, and to any other place they are curious to study—and the ladies of Sir John’s family, make up the list of characters, amongst whom there are occasionally very amusing dialogues, when the master of the house, Keif, and Tremplin, hold stiff disputations as to the merits of their respective countries. Mr Schlesinger’s style is pointed, and often humorous; and the plan he has adopted imparts to his book a lightness and entertaining quality by no means invariably found in works of the kind; whilst it at the same time enables him to avoid that appearance of invidious dogmatism which is one of the most fatal pitfalls literary travellers are exposed to stray into.

As may be supposed from the terms of his dedication, Mr Schlesinger has found much to like and admire in England, and especially in the English nation. His book is, upon the whole, highly favourable to us, although sarcastic Dr Keif and that puppy Tremplin now and then point to a raw spot. Evidently well acquainted with our language, gifted with an active mind and an observant eye, he has no need to resort to the flimsy devices of some recent writers on the same topic. There is solid pabulum in his pages, something superior to the flimsy lucubrations of one or two French writers we have lately fallen in with, and of one of whom (M. Méry) we took notice a few months ago. Most Frenchmen who write about London do so with an extremely superficial knowledge of the subject. Want of self-confidence is not a failing of theirs; they come to England with a mere smattering of the language, and with a predisposition to dislike the place and its customs, to laugh at the people, to be tortured by the climate and poisoned by the cooks. They remain a short time, examine nothing thoroughly, nor appreciate anything impartially, quit the country with joy, remember it with a shudder, and write books in which burlesque stories and ridiculous exaggerations are eked out by denunciations of perpetual fogs, and by hackneyed jokes concerning the sun’s invisibility. Such writers may be sometimes witty, occasionally amusing, but they are neither fair critics nor reliable authorities.

There is no plan or order in Mr Schlesinger’s book. Guildford Street is his headquarters; thence he rambles, usually with Dr Keif, sometimes with Sir John and other companions, whithersoever the fancy of the moment leads him. On their return home, from Greenwich or Vauxhall, from the House of Commons or a minor theatre, or from a stroll in the streets, they invariably find, no matter how late the hour, the cheerful tea-urn and smiling female faces to welcome them; and it is usually during these sober sederunts, whilst imbibing innumerable cups of bohea, that Sir John and Dr Keif hold those lively arguments which Mr Schlesinger has transcribed with stenographic fidelity. We turn to the fourth chapter of the second volume, headed “Westminster—The Parliament.” Probably no foreigner ever gave a more vivid and correct description than this chapter contains of things with which it takes both time and pains for a foreigner to become thoroughly acquainted. Doubtless Mr Schlesinger has been indebted to reading and conversation as well as to his own observations, and some statistical and descriptive parts of his work are probably derived from English books. One entire chapter, that on Spitalfields, he acknowledges to have taken from such a source. But there are numerous remarkable passages for which he can hardly be indebted to anything but to his own quick ear and sharp eye. In company with Sir John and Dr Keif, he goes to the Speaker’s Gallery of the House of Commons. It is five o’clock—bills are being read—presently the debate begins—Dr Keif, who has a perfect knowledge of English, is indignant that the chat amongst the members prevents his hearing the orators. These, he is assured by Sir John, who is an old frequenter of the House, are mere skirmishers, of little importance; the gossips will be still enough when any one worth listening to rises to speak. A message from the Upper House fixes the attention of the Germans, who are immensely diverted by the formalities with which it is presented, by the forward and backward bowing of the messengers and of the sergeant-at-arms, whose official costume, knee breeches and sword, has already excited their curiosity. Mr Schlesinger, a decided liberal in German politics, not unfrequently becomes as decidedly conservative in treating of English customs and institutions. “All these ceremonies,” he says, “are extraordinarily comical to the foreign guest, and even the Englishman, who enters for the first time in his life the workshop of his lawmakers, may probably be rather startled by such pigtailed formalities, although his courts of justice have already accustomed him to periwigs. In most Continental states, ceremonies handed down from previous generations, and unsuited to the present time, have been done away with as opportunity offered. People got ashamed of perukes and silk cloaks, and dismissed them to the lumber room, as opposed to the spirit of the age. Whether they might not, in their war against those intrinsically unimportant and harmless externals, make a commencement of more serious conflicts, was probably overlooked. In France and Germany we have lived to witness such conflicts. In the revolutions of both those countries the war was in great measure against externals, against abuses of minor importance, against titles of nobility, orders of knighthood, upper chambers, clerical and royal prerogatives; but in neither did a compact majority ever contrive to seize the right moment, to harmonise contradictions, and to secure the two results which should be the aim of every revolution—improvement of the condition of the people, and unlimited individual liberty. Where these two things are secured, all other difficulties peaceably solve themselves.... A pacific progress ensues; a gradual, but so-much-the-safer activity of reform becomes not only possible, but necessary and inevitable. The English, even those belonging to the Radical party, have an instinctive sense of this truth. The Lower House has never taken the field against the Peers, because their wives wear coronets in their hair, or because the Queen opens and closes Parliament in the Upper House, upon which occasions the Commons stand thronged like a flock of sheep before the bar of the House of Lords,” &c. &c. We pass over some pages of interesting remarks to get to Mr Schlesinger’s sketches of certain prominent members of the House of Commons, merely recording, by the way, this German reformer’s opinion, that the monarchical principle is firmer in England at the present day than it was a century ago, before the clamour of innovation and revolution had swept across the Channel. We trust and believe that he is right in this opinion. We well know that there are, both in and out of Parliament, a few men, more noted for a certain class of talent than respected for consistency and high principle, who look upon the crown as a costly bauble, and would gladly see it replaced by a republican government. If they do not say as much, it is because they dare not, because they know that the press and the public would combine to hoot them down. But it is not difficult to discern the levelling principle that is paramount in their hearts. The enunciation of that principle, did they ever contemplate it in any form, has not been favoured by the events of the last five years. Common sense and shrewd perception are qualities claimed by Englishmen, and usually conceded to them even by those foreigners who like them least. We must, indeed, be lamentably deficient in both, not to have taken a warning from what we have beheld, since 1847, in the two most civilised countries of the European continent. There is little contagion in such examples as have been set to us. License, with despotism as a sequel, constitutes no very alluring prospect to a nation accustomed to seek its prosperity in industry and order. We have seen enough of the results of sudden changes abroad to desire that any we adopt at home should be exceedingly gradual and well-considered. Foreign revolutionists have done us the service which drunken helots were made to render to the children of Sparta. We have learned temperance from the spectacle of their degradation.

In his preface, Mr Schlesinger protests his impartiality, and on this score we have no fault to find with him. Some of his parliamentary portraits, however, are perhaps a little tinged by his political predilections. In the main they are extremely correct, and the likenesses undeniable. Mr Disraeli, Lord John Russell, Lord Palmerston, Colonel Sibthorp, are his four most prominent pictures. Lord John himself would hardly claim the designation of “a great orator” bestowed upon him by his German admirer, who, in other respects, gives a truthful and happy delineation of the Whig statesman. But the following sketch is the gem of the parliamentary chapter.

“‘So that is my Lord Palmerston,’ whispered Dr Keif, parodying his friend Kappelbaumer—‘that is the “God-preserve-us” of all rational Continental cabinets? He yonder with the white whiskers, the finely-cut features, the striped neckcloth, and the brown trousers, which he probably got as a present from Mazzini? Yonder elderly gentleman, lying rather than sitting upon his bench, and chatting with his neighbour as he might do in a tavern? Now, by Metternich! this Lord Palmerston looks so cordial, that, if I had not read the German newspapers for many years past, I never would have believed all the wickedness there is in him. To think that yonder people do not scruple to converse with him! with a convicted partisan of rebels, in whose company no respectable citizen of Vienna or Berlin would be seen to cross a street! But, as we say, there is nothing in a man’s looks. He does not look in the least like a rebel or a conspirator. And yet to think of all the rude notes he has written!’

“‘That is just because he is a great diplomatist,’ remarked Sir John, with much unction. ‘We like him so much the more because you, across the water, hate, and fear, and throw stones at him. He has the luck to be as popular at home as he is abused abroad. When that is not the case with a minister of foreign affairs, better pension him off at once. He is appointed for the very purpose of barking and snapping all round the house, to keep off intruders and thieves. And can you deny that Lord Palmerston perfectly performed his bull-dog mission? Was he not always on his legs? Did he not lustily bark like a chained watch-dog, so that all the neighbours round respected him? And did he ever bite anybody? No, you cannot say that he ever bit anybody. Only showed his teeth. Nothing more. That was enough. And that, merely by so doing, he frightened you all, that, we well know, is what you will never forgive.’

“‘I would give anything in the world,’ cried Dr Keif, ‘to hear him make a little speech. How does he speak?’

“‘In a way I well like to hear,’ answered Sir John; ‘out and openly; no pathos, no emotion—sensibly, intelligibly—and above all, courteously and politely, as befits an English gentleman. It is not in his nature to be rude; he cannot be so, except when he takes pen in hand to write abroad. In the House he is never personal; and yet nobody better knows how to turn a troublesome questioner into ridicule, often in the most innocent manner, so that it is impossible to be angry with him.

“‘I was in the House last summer,’ continued Sir John, ‘when Mr So-and-so questioned him about the foreign refugees. In such cases members do not put to a minister the straightforward question, Have you answered this or that note? but they make an introduction a yard long, ramble round and round the subject like cats round a plate of porridge, make a long rhetorical display before coming to the point. Mr So-and-so made a lengthy discourse—spoke until the sweat broke out upon his brow from sheer liberalism and sympathy with the refugees; at last he got to his question, Whether it was true that several Continental governments had demanded that the British Government should keep watch over the proceedings of the refugees in London? what governments those were? whether the Secretary of State for foreign affairs had replied to the demand? and whether he had any objection to lay before the House the correspondence concerning it? The question was not a very agreeable one to a minister in Lord Palmerston’s position. During the speech by which it was prefaced, he sat with his head bent forward and his legs crossed, pulling his hat down lower and lower upon his forehead, and frequently passing his handkerchief across his face. It seemed as if he perspired even more than his interrogator; he was evidently in the most painful embarrassment what to reply. Mr So-and-so made an end and sat down. The House was so silent that one could plainly distinguish the snoring of some drowsy members on the back benches; Palmerston slowly rose, and requested the speaker to repeat his question in plainer terms, it not having been put with sufficient clearness the first time. The fact was, it had been put so clearly and plainly that in the gallery we lost not a syllable. Oho! thought I, and many with me—something wrong here; the noble Lord wants to gain a few minutes to prepare his reply. Mr So-and-so probably thought the same thing. He got up with the air of a man who feels confident that he has found a sore place, and repeated his question in the following simplified form: “I beg to ask the Secretary of State for foreign affairs,” he said, “which are the foreign governments that have demanded of the British Cabinet that it should exercise surveillance over the political refugees in London?” He paused. There was dead silence. Lord Palmerston rose with solemn slowness, took off his hat, cleared his throat, as if he were about to make a long speech, said very quickly, “Not one”—threw his hat upon his head and himself back upon his seat. You may imagine the stupefied countenance of the questioner, and the roar of laughter in the House. Do you suppose Lord Palmerston had not at once understood the question? He understood it perfectly; but his meditative attitude, his request for its repetition, his solemn uprising, his clearing of his throat, his very perspiration—all, everything was diplomatic roguery, intended to heighten the effect of the two carelessly-spoken monosyllables, “Not one.” His interrogator looked ridiculous enough, but Lord Palmerston had said nothing that could offend him. The minister had so far attained his object that for some time afterwards he was not plagued with questions about refugees. Such scenes do not bear telling; they must be witnessed. When Lord Palmerston pleases, the House laughs, and all laugh, and no man is hit so hard that he cannot laugh with the rest.’”

Proceeding from a foreign pen, this lively parliamentary sketch must be admitted to be wonderfully truthful. Mr Schlesinger was particularly struck, upon his visits to the House of Commons, by two things, and these were, the longwindedness of the orators, and their ungraceful gesticulation. An English orator, he says, seems to make up his mind beforehand to abstain from gestures, and does his best to put his hands in a place of safety. Some of the attitudes, which are the consequence of this desire, he justly describes as neither tasteful nor elegant. “One man thrusts his hands into his breeches’ pockets, another sticks them into his waistcoat armholes, some hide them inside their waistcoats, or under their coat tails, others take a Napoleonic attitude. Thus do they begin their speeches. But, as the Englishman is wont to linger no short time over the mere exordium of his harangue; as he is capable of talking much longer about nothing than is commonly supposed upon the Continent; as he has very good lungs; and as a large portion of the British public is apt to estimate a speech’s value by its length, it is quite conceivable that he cannot maintain, during the whole duration of his discourse, the posture he adopts at its commencement. Besides this, he may warm as he goes on, and, when this is the case, he displays the strangest action of his arms and of his whole body.” In this paragraph, Mr Schlesinger makes one grave mistake. With the exception of a very limited number of methodical old fogies—slaves to habit, and the curse of their clubs—who, having nothing else in the world to do, make it the business of their lives to read the debates from the first line to the last, we know of no class in the United Kingdom that would not heartily rejoice if members of Parliament would cultivate brevity of speech and early hours, as advantageous alike to their own health and to the business of the country. “What a capital speech; it took an hour and a half in delivery!” Such, according to Mr Schlesinger, is the form of praise often heard in England. He blunders here. People will certainly listen with pleasure for an hour and a half, or for thrice as long, if they have the chance, to the earnest and fiery eloquence of a Derby—to the graceful, lucid, and often witty discourse of a Palmerston—to the polished and scholarly periods of a Macaulay—to the incisive oratory of a Disraeli. They will even lend their attention to the somewhat drawling and monotonous, although business-like delivery of the Whig leader whom Mr Schlesinger has dubbed a great orator, because Lord John is supposed not to be one of those Englishmen whom his German admirer has declared to be capable of talking a long while about nothing at all. But Mr Schlesinger has taken a part for the whole, and imagines that English willingness to hear and read the long discourses of a few chosen and gifted men, extends itself to the lame prose of the first noodle who takes advantage of dinner-time to inflict himself upon a bare house, a yawning gallery, and reporters with closed note-books. Let him take the confession of members, public, and reporters, as to the feelings with which they listen to an infinitesimal economical calculation, or to a two hours’ blatter about Borneo, from Mr Hume; or to a monody on Poland, or eulogium of Kossuth, from the lips of that most wearisome of well-meaning men, Lord Dudley Coutts Stuart. He will find that in England the value of a speech is not—as Byron says that of a very different thing should be—“measured by its length.”

Probably the two things that foreigners, upon a visit to London, are most curious to see, are the Thames tunnel and Greenwich. Mr Schlesinger, Dr Keif, and Frolick—who seems an easy-going man-about-town sort of cockney, delighted to have the pretext of ciceronism to revisit all manner of queer haunts—take ship at London Bridge, their minds upon white bait intent. They find much to say upon the way, and are very pleasant and amusing. In the beginning Mr Schlesinger moralises upon the crowd of colliers, more precious, he maintains, to Britain than ever were gold-laden galleons to Spain. “Take from the British Isles their coals,” he says; “pour gold, silver, and diamonds, into the gloomy shafts; fill them with all the coins that have been coined, since the world’s commencement, by good and bad princes, and you will not replace the inflammable spark that lies dormant in the coal, and which creates vitality by its own exhaustion.” Then he turns his attention to his fellow-passengers by the steam-boat, and remarks that the difference of classes is not so strongly defined by costume in England as in France and Germany. He misses the linen frocks or blouses worn on the Continent by men of a class which, in England, is usually clad in broadcloth, though this be often ragged or threadbare. “In London,” he says, “if you see, early in the morning, a man hurrying along the street in a black coat, round hat, and white cravat, do not take him for a professor hastening to his college, or for an attaché to an embassy conveying important despatches to his chief. He probably has soap-box, strap, and razor in his pocket, or at best is shopman to some Regent Street haberdasher—he may be a waiter, a tailor, a shoemaker, or a boot-cleaner. Many an omnibus-driver sits white-cravated upon his lofty box, and drives his horses as gravely as a Methodist preacher leads his flock. Amongst Englishwomen, also, the difference of rank is not very easy to be inferred from their dress. Coloured silks, black velvet, and hats with botanical appurtenances, are worn by the maid as by her mistress.” This general uniformity of costume in England strikes most foreigners, and shocks many. Frenchmen, in particular, consider the use of old and second-hand clothes, common amongst the lower classes of our countrymen and countrywomen, as a sort of degrading barbarism. An amusingly impertinent French journalist, in a little book now before us, states his view of the matter in colours which are certainly vivid, but can hardly be called exaggerated. “The eternal black coat and white cravat!” he exclaims. “One might take the people for so many gentlemen of high degree, condescending, in their leisure moments, or from eccentric caprice, to weigh sugar and measure calico. Thus it was that I took the grocer, in whose house I lodge, for a gentleman, and, through stupid pride, dared not bargain for my apartment, for which I pay twice its value. The history of an English black coat would fill a volume, at once comic and philosophical. One must take it up at its birth, when it quits the premises of a fashionable tailor to grace the shoulders of Lord ——, who pays seven or eight guineas for it, on account of its inimitable cut. Thrown, a fortnight later, to the nobleman’s valet-de-chambre, it passes to the second-hand dandy, then from back to back, lengthened, shortened, always descending in the social scale, losing its buttons, gaining holes, and at last devolving to the poor devil who sweeps a crossing, over which prance the splendid horses of the lord who was its first possessor. Poor coat! Sold at last for three shillings; its fragments finally used to polish a table or cleanse a kitchen floor, until they are bought by the hundredweight and cast into the mill, to reappear in some new form. The fate of the coat is also that of the gown. The lady’s gown and hat begin their career in the drawing-room, and end it in the gutter. We foreigners are always shocked, on our first arrival in England, to see the servant-maids washing the door-steps in bonnets, which once were of velvet, and now are of nothing at all! One sometimes observes upon them certain vestiges which, plunged into Marsh’s apparatus and analysed by a skilful chemist, might be recognised as fragments of feathers, shreds of lace, or stalks of flowers. Does the cook who wears this cast-off covering, who wraps herself, to go to market, in a tattered shawl, on whose surface holes and stains vie for the mastery, imagine that she will be taken for her mistress going to buy her own butter and vegetables, as an agreeable change from the daily routine of park and opera? What strange vanity is it that peeps through these ragged garments? Why do these honest Englishmen prefer a gentleman’s old clothes to the clean blouse or warm strong jacket they might get for the same price?” There is considerable truth in these remarks, especially as regards men’s coats and women’s head-dress, although we do not believe, as does the Frenchman we have quoted, that the wearing of second-hand clothes proceeds, on the part at least of English men of the lower classes, from a desire to ape their superiors. It is one of those habits one can hardly explain, which we may designate as cosa de Inglaterra, just as Spaniards define as cosa de España any peculiar and eccentric usage of their country. We must submit the matter, one of these days, to our old friend and contributor, the author of the “Æsthetics of Dress.” Of one thing we are very sure, that no one possessing an eye—we will not say for the picturesque, but for what is neat, appropriate, and convenient—can travel on the Continent, without drawing between the everyday dress of the English lower orders and that of the corresponding classes in most foreign countries, comparisons highly unfavourable to the former. And this is the more surprising that, in most things, neatness is peculiarly an English characteristic. Witness the trim gardens, the whitewashed cottages, the well-swept courts of our villages, the vigorous application of brush, broom, and soap in the humblest dwellings of Britain. But a line must be drawn between the country and the towns. In the latter, the appearance of the lower classes is anything but well calculated to inspire foreigners with a high opinion of their regard to the external proprieties. We share our French friend’s horror of greasy, threadbare coats, and of bonnets requiring chemical decomposition to ascertain their primitive materials; and, were it possible, we would gladly see the former replaced by the coarse clean frock or jacket; the latter by the cheap coloured handkerchief or straw-hat, which looks so neat and becoming upon the heads of Continental peasant and servant-women. It is to be feared, however, that to agitate the change would be but a profitless crusade. The fault—and a fault we think it must be admitted to be—lies in the total absence of anything like a national costume. In all the more highly civilised European countries, this, however graceful, has been abandoned by the upper classes in favour of a conventional, and certainly, in most respects, a graceless dress. But in all those countries, except in England, that national costume has been either retained, to a certain extent, by the people, or exchanged for one more in harmony with their occupations—not discarded in favour of such absurdities as long-tailed coats and high-crowned beavers.

At the Thames Tunnel the two Germans and their companion pause, and Mr Schlesinger gives an account of its origin and progress, which will have novelty and interest even for many Londoners. On reaching Greenwich, the party admire the hospital—the finest architectural group of modern England, according to Mr Schlesinger, with whom, notwithstanding the florid pretensions of the new Houses of Parliament, we quite agree on this score. Greenwich is unquestionably the only royal palace England possesses worthy of the name. Windsor Castle ranks in a different category. “Take the most ingenious architect in the world,” says Mr Schlesinger, “bind his eyes, and bring him to the platform on which we now stand; then, removing the bandage, ask him the purpose of this magnificent pile. If he does not at once say that it is a king’s palace, he is either the most narrow-minded or the sharpest-witted mortal that ever drew the plan of a house. Who would suspect that all this splendour of columns and cupolas is devoted to the service of poor crippled old sailors? That it nevertheless is so, does honour to the founders and to the English nation.” And then Mr Schlesinger, who is a bit of a frondeur, and not very indulgent to his own country’s defects and failings, contrasts the thoughtful care, tender kindness, and splendid provision which England’s veterans find at Chelsea and Greenwich, with the deficiencies and discomforts of the analogous institution at Vienna, and with the absence of any at all at Berlin. Passing the Trafalgar, which he recommends to all “who are willing to pay more money for a good dinner than would keep an Irish family for a week,” he moralises his way through the Park—then full of holiday-makers, for it is Monday, and “the people indemnify themselves for the rigidity of English Sabbath-observance.” A dinner at Lovegrove’s, and speculations upon white bait, conclude a pleasant day and an amusing chapter.

Mr Tremplin is described as a little elderly gentleman, with hair curled in a very youthful fashion, rosy cheeks, and a forest of grey whisker which would make him look quite fierce, but for the expression of mingled good-humour and vanity that twinkles in his little black eyes. For twenty years he had been in the habit of paying an occasional week’s visit to Sir John, and upon each succeeding visit he found London more and more gloomy and unbearable. Nothing less than his affection for his old friends could have induced him to exchange his heavenly Paris for the fogs of Thames. When in England, however, he amiably concealed his dissatisfaction, ate and drank like an Englishman, laughed and joked with the ladies from morning till night, and wiped his eyes when he took his leave. Between him and Dr Keif vehement discussions were of frequent occurrence. Tremplin was inexhaustible in his laudation of France; and this the doctor could the less endure, that this adulator of Paris was himself a German by birth, although he had passed his life in the French capital, had made his little fortune in the Opera Passage, and, like most renegades, out-Heroding Herod, was infinitely more French than a native-born Frenchman. Had he been an undeniable Parisian, Dr Keif might perhaps, from courtesy, have spared his feelings; but the Austrian journalist had no consideration for the feelings of a Frenchman who had first seen the light at Frankfort-on-the-Maine, and he gave his sarcastic tongue full swing. At dinner, one day, at Sir John’s, we find them at it, hammer-and-tongs; Monsieur Tremplin holding up Paris as an example in all respects to the entire universe; Dr Keif, exasperated by this exorbitant claim, sneering bitterly at the pretension.

“‘It is inconceivable,’ cried the doctor, ‘that all the world beside does not sit idle, since Paris is there to think and work for it. What does one need for universal regeneration beyond the Journal des Débats, which signifies enlightenment—Mademoiselle Rachel, who represents the æsthetical education of mankind—and the Chasseurs d’Afrique as the representatives of freedom? Even in the Paris cancan, immoral as it may seem, there is doubtless grace and decency enough to civilise half a world. Eh? What say you? And if France is found one morning in the guardhouse, it is merely because she has danced like mad the whole night through for the good of oppressed humanity, and her evil case is but a witty trick, suggested by the most profound ideas of emancipation; for, enfin, France can do whatever she wills to do. She undertakes, in broad daylight and before the eyes of all Europe, to lie down in the dirtiest gutter, and she succeeds. Woe to the benighted people who do not forthwith follow her example, who cannot see that a gutter in which France wallows must lead straight to salvation. The French are the most conceited and crazy people on the earth’s surface—a nation of witty fools, of genial ragamuffins, of old gamins and revolutionary lacqueys, who can neither govern themselves nor be governed, for any length of time, by God’s grace; they consequently, after their fourth revolution and third republic, will seek safety at the feet of an Orleanist or Bourbon prince, whom they will replace, after a while, by some romantic hairdresser, dancing-master, or cook, elected by universal suffrage. For my part, I vote for Soyer: he has at least the merit of having established a good school of cookery at the Reform Club.’”

Whilst extracting this tirade of the incorrigible Keif’s, we have taken no notice of the frequent interruptions attempted by the unfortunate German-Frenchman. The doctor’s flowers of rhetoric were far from fragrant to the nostrils of Tremplin, and the vein of truth that ran through his discourse made its somewhat brutal and exaggerated form yet harder to bear. “The most audacious blasphemy,” says Mr Schlesinger, “shouted into the ear of an English bishop’s grandmother, might have an effect approaching to that which the compliments of the excited Keif had upon his neighbour’s nerves.” Purple and perspiring, and unable to get in a word, poor Tremplin received one rattling volley after another, vainly endeavouring to escape from the iron grip the doctor kept upon the topmost button of his coat. At last he was released, with a parting prod from Keif’s barbed tongue.

“‘Notwithstanding their deeply sunken condition,’ the doctor said, ‘it is undeniable that the French, like the Spaniards, Italians, and Irish, are still a witty, diverting, and highly interesting nation.’

“‘Infiniment obligé!’ screamed Tremplin, breaking from the doctor, making a low bow, and thrice repeating the words, ‘How said you? Di-vert-ing! Infiniment obligé, Monsieur le Docteur! Your German modesty inspires you with charming compliments.’

“‘No compliment, Monsieur Tremplin,’ replied Keif: ‘merely my honest opinion.’

“The Frenchman cast an epigrammatical side-glance at the doctor, buttoned his coat to the chin, as if arming himself for an important decision, and exclaimed in a loud voice: ‘You are’—(A long pause ensued, during which all present rose in confusion from their seats.) ‘You are totally unacquainted with Paris!’

“‘And what then?’ said Dr Keif.

“‘That is enough, I need to know no more. Enfin....’ And with a shrug of the shoulders in which the doctor should have beheld his moral annihilation, Mr Tremplin turned his back upon his opponent.”

Some minutes elapsed before the agitation caused by this little scene completely subsided. In the embrasure of a window, the lady of the house poured balm into poor Tremplin’s wounds; Keif paced the room, his complexion green and yellow, visibly struggling with the consciousness that he had been too hard upon the poor little Frenchman—rather rudely vehement and sarcastic; Sir John alone remained at table, balancing a silver dessert-knife, and making a small speech, to which nobody listened, in praise of the admirable parliamentary order observed at English public dinners. “‘There, when did it occur to anybody, before the removal of the cloth, to speak on more serious subjects than the domestic virtues of turtle and turbot, the tenderness of the lamb and venison, the age and excellence of the wines, and the qualities of all those good things of the earth which are so exquisitely adapted to promote the harmonious intercourse of Whigs and Tories, High Churchmen and Dissenters, landlords and cotton lords? There is the great point. That is what foreigners will not learn. They do nothing at the right time and nothing thoroughly, therefore do they eat gall and brew poison.’” There may be more than one grain of truth in the baronet’s words, Mr Schlesinger opines, but he does not stay to discuss the subject. It was written that the evening should be one of scrutiny and controversy. The feud between Keif and Tremplin having been easily put an end to by Sir John’s good-humoured intervention, the conversation again became general. The doctor must go out at nine o’clock, he said; he had promised to accompany Frolick to the theatre, and in a stroll through the theatrical district of London. This brought up Tremplin—not, indeed, to renew wordy combat with the formidable antagonist by whom he had been so recently worsted, but to express his astonishment that anybody could go to a London theatre in the dead season. He had always understood that the only theatres to which comme-il-faut people went in London were the Italian operas and the miniature French playhouse in St James’s, and these were then closed. It was true that the queen annually honoured the obscure English theatres with a few visits, but that was merely out of complaisance to English prejudices. The ladies protested against this depreciation of the English drama; but the Parisian, who had quite forgotten his late indignation and discomfiture, did but smile and politely persist—developing his notions on an infinite variety of subjects with that easy, urbane, superficial dogmatism which characterises the very numerous class of Frenchmen who combine unbounded admiration of their own nation and country with slight esteem for, and considerable ignorance of, all others.

“‘Mesdames!’ he exclaimed, ‘you have no idea of all that you forego by living in London. It is well for you that you have never been in Paris, or you would feel like Eve when banished from Paradise, to which she would so gladly have returned for a chat with the seductive serpent. Pardieu, Paris! There, everyday life is an enchanting drama; every drawing-room is a stage; every chamber has its wings; and every one, from the porter to the duke, has perfectly learned his part. The theatres that open at night do but display and illuminate, with a magical light, the day’s comedy. Your worthy English people can neither act nor judge of acting. An English actor is a creature as much out of nature as a Parisian quaker. Where do you find most passion for the art—here or with us? Paris has hardly half so many inhabitants as London, but has many more theatres, and they are always as full as your churches. The poorest artisan cannot exist without sunning himself in the radiance of the stage; and will live for two days of the week on bread and milk, in order to save a few sous for the Variétés or the Funambules on Sunday evening. Show me the Englishman who will sacrifice a mouthful of his bloody roast-beef for the sake of a refined enjoyment. No, no;—you weave and spin, and steam and hammer, and eat and drink, with God knows how many horses’ power; but as to enjoying life, you do not understand it. Am I right, Madame?’”

The ladies looked at each other, but were not ready with an answer. Sir John shook his head as he sat in his arm-chair, and remarked that there were good grounds for the difference. The Frenchman would not admit their goodness, and launched into an energetic diatribe against the strictness of London Sabbath-observance. We take it for granted that, even if the personages introduced into Mr Schlesinger’s book are not imaginary, the conversations he gives are chiefly of his own composition, intended to display the different sides of the various questions discussed; and that a juste milieu between the rather extreme views expressed by Keif and Tremplin, and occasionally by Sir John, may be adopted with tolerable certainty as the measure of the author’s own opinions. Of this last point we feel the more convinced, by the moderate and sensible manner in which Mr Schlesinger expresses himself when speaking in his own person. His delineation of the representatives of England, Germany, and France, and the manner in which he puts them through their parts, is really very spirited and clever. Without, of course, in the slightest degree coinciding in the levity and irreverence of the profane Parisian, we will give a further specimen of his views and notions concerning this country, its condition and institutions; views and notions which, allowing for the tinge (only a slight one) of humorous caricature thrown in by Mr Schlesinger, are, in our firm belief—we might almost say, to our certain knowledge—those of a great number of Monsieur Tremplin’s fellow-citizens. Having taken up the ball of conversation, the Frenchman ran on with it at a canter, curvetting and kicking up his heels with huge self-satisfaction, and highly pleased at having an opportunity of showing himself at once patriotic, eloquent, and gallant. He proceeded to explain the causes of the decline of the British drama.

“In the first place,” he said, “the performance of a play would desecrate the Sunday evening. The Sabbath must be ended as wearisomely as it is begun. If one speaks of this to an Englishman, he pulls a long face, and talks about the morality of the lower orders. How moral the English lower orders are! One sees that every Monday, when the drunken cases are brought up at the police offices. One man has bitten off a constable’s nose by way of a joke; another has knocked down his wife and danced upon her body; a third has cut open his better-half’s head with the poker. All morality and liquor; but, thank heaven, they have not been to the theatre—any more than to church. Don’t tell me, because you have more churches than there are days in the calendar, that your poor people go to them; there is no room for them. Your churches are for respectable citizens, with cash jingling in their pockets. Then again, there are thousands of quakers, methodists, and other fanatics, who consider it a deadly sin to visit a theatre even upon working days. And finally, you are all such smoky fireside people—so given to stick in your shells like snails—that it is a punishment to you to have to creep out of your houses; or else you have such a silly passion for green grass, that you go and live at the end of the world, where you need a carriage to bring you home from the theatre by daybreak. These terrible distances ruin the pocket, and cramp civilisation. Your much-be-praised Englishmen, doctor, have not got a monopoly of wisdom. But I pity them not. It is for the poor daughters of Albion that I feel sorry. Upon my honour, ladies, I should not grieve if Napoleon’s glorious dream were to be realised. Ha, ha! That would be a life! Fancy our grande armée leaping one day upon the British shores. Before the sun is up the braves are in the city, say bonjour, conquer, and are forthwith conquered—by the charms of the fair-haired Anglo-Saxons. Our soldiers ask nothing in the way of acknowledgment. Keep your bank, your religion, and your lord mayor. The sole glory desired by France is, to annihilate the dragon of English ennui. Hand in hand with the fair sex, the invincible army achieves that feat. On the first evening there is a great fraternity-ball at Vauxhall; the next morning appears a manifesto in the name of the liberating army, by which the erection of at least one French vaudeville theatre in every parish is decreed, as the sole reward of the victors; and in a few years, when these new institutions have taken firm root in the hearts of the English people, the heroic army returns to sunny France, promising to come back should you relapse into your puritanical hypochondria. The daughters of Albion stand upon their chalky cliffs, and wring their white hands in grief at their deliverers’ departure. What say you to this picture? Is it not chivalrous? Is it not replete with the most affecting disinterestedness? And do you doubt that it dwells in the hearts of thousands of Frenchmen?”

If Monsieur Tremplin here paused, it was for breath rather than for a reply. Certainly it was not for want of matter, for he quickly resumed his satirical commentary on English usages, rattling off a string of libels on the dress and carriage of Englishwomen, on English musical taste, &c. &c.—the whole for the special benefit of Keif, whom he had got into a corner, the ladies being now busy tea-making. In the heap of flippancy and exaggeration, a few sparkles of sense and truth are discernible; not all the Frenchman’s arrows fly wide of the mark. He laughs pitilessly at the medley of colours frequently seen in ladies’ dresses in England; talks of “a scarlet shawl over an apple-green gown with yellow flounces, and a cavalry hat with ostrich feathers” (the judicious assortment of colours is one of the great studies and occupations of a Parisian woman’s life), and is altogether abominably disrespectful and scandalous in his remarks upon the fair sex of Great Britain, although he speaks in raptures of the beauty of “the raw material”—the beautiful hair, form, complexion, and so forth. Presently he gets upon the opera, and the dress exacted as a condition of admission. “Dresscoats and black trousers—why not powder and bagwigs? It is written in the Morning Post that seven delicate ladies, in the first row of boxes, once fell into picturesque fainting fits, because a foreigner with a coloured neckcloth had smuggled himself into the pit. Be it observed that he had paid his bright Victorias at the door like anybody else. Dress-coat is indispensable—black trousers ditto; but coat and trousers may be old, dirty, threadbare. It strikes one as strange, that, besides paying his money, he is to be tutored by the servants at a theatre-door.” Keif, listening with smiling indulgence to the petulant Frenchman, occasionally presumes to differ from him, or at least to modify his strictures on English tastes and usages. “One meets with very good musical connoisseurs in this country,” says the doctor; “but I confess that the British public’s digestive powers, in respect of music, often astonish me. John Bull sits out two symphonies by Beethoven, an overture of Weber’s, a couple of fugues by Bach, half-a-score of Mendelssohn’s songs, and half-a-dozen other airs and variations, and goes home and sleeps like a marmot. At the theatre he will take in a tragedy by Shakespeare, a three-act comedy from the French, a ballet, and a substantial London farce. All that does not spoil his stomach.” Tremplin was delighted to find the doctor falling into his line. “Yes,” he said, “nothing satisfies these people but quantity. The Englishman throws down his piece of gold and asks for a hundredweight of music”—and he urged the doctor to go to Paris. Sir John was the best creature in the world, but he was an original—an oddity. The doctor, upon the other hand, was a man of sense and observation; and before he had worn out a couple of pair of shoe-soles upon the asphalt of the boulevards, his eyes would be opened.

“Pardieu! Paris!” cried the little man, getting very excited. “The whole civilised world dresses itself out in the cast-off clothes of Paris. What has Paris not? Do you wish religion? There are Lacordaire, Lamennais, and the Univers. Religion of all sorts. Are you a lover of philosophy? Go to Proudhon. For my part, to speak candidly, I care neither for philosophy nor religion; both are mauvais genre, and I should not mind if M. Proudhon were hung; but that does not prevent me, as a Frenchman, from being proud of him. In a word, you will convince yourself that the whole world beside is but a bad imitation of Paris. There you find heaven and the other place, order and freedom, the romance of orgies and the solitude of the cloister, all combined in the most beautiful harmony—in the most magnificent and elegant form. Of one thing especially”—and Tremplin laid his hand, with the earnestness of an apostle, upon the shoulder of the astounded Keif—“be well assured, and that is, that nowhere but in Paris can you learn to speak French. Impossible. You never catch the accent. England’s climate is the most dangerous of all for the pronunciation. I, an old Parisian, still am sensible of the pestilential influence the jargon here spoken has upon my tongue; and whenever I return to Paris from London, I feel ashamed before my own porter.”

The hour was come for Keif to bend his steps theatrewards. Sir John escorted him to the door, and apologised, by the way, for the provocation Tremplin had given him at dinner. It was some slighting remark about Germans—an intimated opinion that they would never be accessory to the combustion of the Thames—that had first roused the ire of Keif, and provoked his tremendous denunciation of Frenchmen as all that is frivolous, unstable, and contemptible.

“‘What can you expect from a Frenchman?’ said Sir John. ‘He is a harmless soul, but a great oddity; one might make money by exhibiting him in Piccadilly. When I first knew him I took some trouble with him, and tried to give him an idea of what England is; but, as the proverb says, you cannot argue a dog’s hind-leg straight. You will never catch me arguing with him again.’”

Keif went his way, chuckling at the notion of this precious pair of mortals taxing each other with oddity, and totally unconscious that he himself was as great an oddity as either of them. It was long after midnight when he returned home. Everybody was gone to bed, the servant told him, except Sir John and Monsieur. He found them at their chamber-doors; with candles, burnt low, in their hands. The baronet had forgotten his resolution;—he was trying to argue the dog’s hind-leg straight. The pair were in the heat and fervour of a discussion, which had evidently been of long duration. Shakspeare and Frenchwomen were its rather strangely assorted subjects. The doctor caught a few sentences as he passed, wished the disputants good night, and turned into bed. Fully a quarter of an hour elapsed before they evacuated the lobby to follow his example. Keif laughed to himself.

“‘So,’ he said, ‘in Monsieur Tremplin’s eyes, Shakespeare is deficient in power; and Sir John denies that Frenchwomen are graceful! Was there ever such a pair of originals?’ And so saying, the third original went to sleep.”

We need hardly say that the ramble of Dr Keif (by whom we suspect Mr Schlesinger himself is meant) through the theatrical purlieus, furnished abundant materials for a chapter. It was Saturday—the very night to see the Drury district in its glory; for wages had been paid, and after twelve no liquor would be sold; so the fortunate recipients of cash were making the most of the short night. This chapter, like some others in the book, shows such a thorough familiarity with, and correct perception of, London low life—is so totally different, in short, from the blundering and exaggerated pictures one usually meets with in accounts of London by foreigners—that we are more than once tempted, whilst reading it, to suspect the writer of unacknowledged obligations to English authors. But Mr Schlesinger has, we have no doubt, been long resident in England, and as he, moreover, in one or two instances, indicates by a note his appropriation of English materials, we dismiss from our mind the idea of unconfessed plagiarism. Since we do so, we must not refuse him the praise to which his faithful and striking sketches fairly entitle him. With him and Frolick, we turn out of the Strand, through a narrow court, into Drury Lane.

“In the shops which occupy the ground floor of almost all the houses, are exposed for sale, at low prices, shabby female apparel, coarse eatables, low literature with horrible illustrations, strong shoes, old clothes, abominable cigars, cold and hot meat. But the most prominent feature in the whole of Drury Lane is the gin palace, whose favourite station is at corners, where the lane is intersected by cross streets. The gin palace contrasts with the adjacent buildings pretty much as does a Catholic church with the cottages of a Slavonian village. From afar it looms like a lighthouse to the thirsty working man; for it is sumptuous with plate glass and gilt cornices, and dazzling with a hundred many-coloured inscriptions. Here, in the window, is the portrait of a giant from Norfolk, who is employed in the house to draw liquor and customers; yonder, in green letters upon the pane, we read—‘The Only Genuine Brandy in London;’ or, in red letters—‘Here is sold the celebrated strengthening wholesome Gin, recommended by all the doctors’—‘Cream Gin’—‘Honey Gin’—‘Genuine Porter’—‘Rum that would knock down the Devil,’ &c. &c. Often the varnished door-posts are painted from top to bottom with suchlike spirited announcements. It is to be remarked, that even those gin shops which externally are the most brilliant, within are utterly comfortless. The landlord intrenches himself behind the bar, as in a fortress where his customers must not enter. The walls in this sanctuary are covered with a whole library of large and small casks, painted of various colours. The place thus partitioned off is sometimes a picture of cleanliness and comfort, and within it an arm-chair invites to repose; but in front of the bar, for the customers, there is nothing but a narrow dirty standing place, rendered yet more disagreeable by the continual opening and shutting of the doors, and where the only seat, if there be one at all, is afforded by an empty cask in a corner. Nevertheless the palace receives a constant succession of worthy guests, who, standing, reeling, crouching or lying, muttering, groaning or cursing, drink and—forget.

“On sober working days, and in tolerable weather, there is nothing remarkable, to the uninitiated, in the appearance of Drury Lane. Many a little German capital is worse lighted, and not so well paved. Misery is less plainly legible upon the physiognomy of this district than upon that of Spitalfields, St Giles’s, Saffron Hill, and other wretched corners of London. But at certain times it oozes, like Mississippi slime, out of every pore. On Saturday evenings, after working-hours, on the evening of holiday-Monday, and after church on Sunday, Drury Lane is seen in its glory. On the other hand, Sunday morning in Drury Lane is enough to give the most cheerful person the spleen. For the poorer classes of labourers the Lord’s day is a day of penance, without church to go to or walk to take. The well-dressed throngs that fill parks and churches scare smock-frock and fustian-jacket into the beer-shops. For the English proletarian is ashamed of his rags, and knows not how to drape himself with them picturesquely, like the Spanish or Italian lazzarone, who holds beggary to be an honourable calling. In the deepest misery, the Englishman has still pride enough to shun the society of those even half a grade superior to himself, and to confine himself to that of his equals, amongst whom he may freely raise his head. And then church and park have no charm for him. His legs are too weary for a walk into the country; boat, omnibus, and railway, are too dear. His church, his park, his club, his theatre, his refuge from the exhalations of the sewers above which he dwells and sleeps, are the gin palace.”

This is a gloomy, but we fear, to a certain extent, too true a picture. In every large city, and particularly in such an overgrown one as London, a certain-amount of misery of the kind above depicted must exist; there must be a certain number of human beings living in a state of almost total deprivation of those blessings which God intended all his creatures to share—of a pure air, of the sight of fields and flowers, of opportunities to praise His name in the society of their fellow-men. But we are pretty sure Mr Schlesinger has lived long enough in England to discern, and has candour enough to admit, that in no country in the world are such generous, energetic, and unceasing efforts made by the more fortunate classes for the moral and physical betterment of the unfortunates whose degraded condition he graphically and truly describes. That which in most European countries is left almost entirely to the charge of government, and which is consequently often left undone, or at best half done, is effected in England by the cordial co-operation of the government and the nation, aided by a press which must in justice be admitted to be ever ready to give publicity to social grievances, to the sufferings of particular classes, and to practical suggestions for their alleviation or remedy. Fortunate inhabitants of a favoured land, we must not allow the difference just pointed out to inflate our national vanity over-much. In no country is there so much private wealth as in England, and thus, when we seem to give much, we may be giving not more than others whose means are less, but their will as good. Then there is, undeniably, another, and we should perhaps say a selfish, motive for the energetic, efficient, and liberal manner in which the opulent and well-to-do classes of Englishmen take up and prosecute schemes for the amelioration of their poorer countrymen. An observant people, shrewd in deduction, and setting common sense above every other mental quality, we take warning by our neighbours. And we feel that the best safeguard for institutions we all revere and cherish—the best security against sedition and revolution, and against the propagation, by designing knaves and misguided enthusiasts, of that jacobinism whose manœuvres and excesses have proved so fatal in other lands—is a generous and humane consideration of the wants and sufferings of the poorer classes, and an earnest endeavour to elevate their condition.

And let us acknowledge, with thankfulness, that we have good stuff to work upon; that if the higher classes show themselves prompt in sacrifices, a praiseworthy patience is displayed by those they strive to succour. The Parisian artisan or day-labourer, although probably less of a bellygod than the Londoner of the same class, quickly gets irate when he finds bread dear and commons short; and, upon the first suggestion from any democrat who promises him a big loaf, is ready enough to “descend into the street,” tear up the pavement, build a barricade, and shoot his brother from behind it. Contrast this with the fortitude and long-suffering of the poor gin-and-beer-drinking people whom Mr Schlesinger qualifies (and the terms, perhaps, may not be justly gainsaid) as besotted and obtuse of sense. Grant that they be so; they yet have qualities which constitute them valuable citizens of a free country. They will toil, when work is to be had; they have an innate respect for law and order, and a manly pride which makes them shun a workhouse coat as an abject livery; they loathe the mendicancy in which the southern lazzarone luxuriates; they are not insensible to the benevolent efforts constantly making in their behalf; and they take little heed of the demagogue’s artful incitements.

“There is hardly any people,” muses Mr Schlesinger, in a very different part of his book and of London, (when strolling at the Hyde Park end of Piccadilly), “that loves a green tree and an open lawn so heartily as the English. They have not less reverence for the noble trees in their parks than had the Druids for the sacred oaks in their consecrated groves; and it does one’s heart good to see that the struggle with Nature, the striving to apply her powers to wool-carding and spindle-turning, does not destroy the feeling for those of her beauties which cannot be converted into capital and interest. The English nation refute, in their own persons, the oft-repeated lie that ‘excessive’ cultivation (civilisation) estranges men from their primitive childish feelings. In England, more than in any other part of the world, are fire and water, earth and air, made use of as bread-winners; in England, the ploughed field is fattened with manure gathered on barren reefs thousands of miles distant; in England, nature is forced to produce the enormous water-lilies of the tropics, and to ripen fruits of unnatural size; in England, one eats grapes from Oporto, oranges from Malta, peaches from Provence, pine-apples from Jamaica, bananas from St Domingo, and nuts from Brazil. That which the native soil produces only upon compulsion, and at great cost, is borrowed from other zones, but not on that account are his native trees and meadows, woods and shrubberies, less dear to the Englishman.”

Mr Schlesinger will not doubt that this love of rural scenes and nature’s beauties, which he so happily and gracefully discriminates and defines, is common to all classes of Englishmen. We believe that it is, and we recognise in it a propitious sign. The poor people he has seen, during his Sabbath rambles in London’s “back-slums,” losing sight of the blessed sunshine, and immuring themselves in a tap-room or gin palace, would perhaps, but for their ragged garments, weary limbs, and scantily furnished pockets, have preferred, like their betters, a country ramble, to the cheap and deleterious excitement provided for them by Booth and Barclay. But we feel that we are arguing without an opponent. We can only trust, and we do so trust, seriously and gladly, that the day will never come when the consciousness that the attainment of perfection is impossible will deter English legislators and philanthropists from devoting their utmost energies and abilities to the improvement of the meanest and most depraved classes of their fellow-countrymen.

The conviction that Shakespeare is better known, better understood, and, above all, better acted in Germany than in England, is very prevalent in the former country, where we have often heard it boldly put forward and sustained. When in Shakespeare’s native land, Germans may possibly be more modest in their pretensions; and yet we must not be too confident of that, when we see a German company selecting Shakespeare’s plays for performance before a refined and critical London audience. The recent performances of Emil Devrient and his companions, give especial interest to some theatrical criticisms put forth by Dr Keif for the benefit of his friend Frolick, seated by his side in the pit of the Olympic Theatre. He is of opinion that English actors, when rendering Shakespeare’s characters, cling too tenaciously to tradition, and aim too little at originality. After a visit to a penny theatre, of the proceedings at which he gives a most laughable account, he returns, at some length, to the subject of the English stage, and highly praises certain English comic actors as excellent, and superior to any of the same class in Germany. “I know nothing better,” he says, “than Matthews at the Lyceum, and Mrs Keeley. There you have natural freshness, vigour, ease, and finesse, all combined in right proportions. There is less heartiness about our German comic performances; they always remind me of the strained vivacity of a bookworm in a drawing-room; now the author, then his interpreter, is too visibly forced in his condescension.” What follows is less complimentary. “When I for the first time, at Sadler’s Wells, saw Romeo and Juliet performed, I bit my lips all to pieces. Juliet looked as if she came from a ladies’ school at Brompton, instead of an Italian convent; the orthopedical stays and backboard were unmistakable: as to Romeo, I would unhesitatingly have confided to him the charge of an express train, so sober and practical was his air, so solid and angular each one of his movements. The same impression was made upon me by Mercutio, Tybalt, Lorenzo. It was not that they displayed too little vocal and mimic power; on the contrary, it was because they gesticulated like madmen, and ranged up and down the entire gamut of human tones, from a whistle to a roar, that I too plainly saw that no tragic passion was in them. The same company afterwards delighted me in comic pieces.” In English theatricals Mr Schlesinger’s taste is strongly for the humorous; the broader the farce and the thicker the jokes, the better he is pleased. A Christmas pantomime, with its practical fun and methodical folly, delights him. He is wonderstruck and enchanted by the mischievous agility of clown, and the only drawback to his pleasure is the inappropriate introduction of a ballet. “To see twenty or thirty Englishwomen, of full grenadier stature, perform a ballet-dance ten minutes in length, is an enjoyment from which one does but slowly recover. To this day I live in the firm conviction that the worthy young women had not the least idea that they were called upon for an artistical performance, but took their long legs for mathematical instruments, with which to demonstrate problems relating to right angles, the hypothenuse, and the squaring of the circle.” This sarcasm elicited a long reply from Frolick, who had once, it seems, been a fideler bursch in Heidelberg, who knew German well, and had seen Shakespeare acted in both countries. In some respects he preferred the German performance of Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet, but Richard III. and Falstaff were to be seen best in England. The decline of the drama in this country he attributed to a complication of causes, of which he cited two—the nation’s preoccupation with matters more practical and important, and the want of a government support. “In your country,” he said, “thirty courts cherish, foster, and patronise the theatre; here, every theatre is a private speculation. When the Queen has taken a box at the Princess’s Theatre and another at Covent Garden, she has done all that is expected from her Majesty in the way of patronage of the drama. Upon the same boards upon which to-day you hear the swanlike notes of Desdemona, you to-morrow may behold an equestrian troop or a party of Indian jugglers. If you complain of such desecration of the muse’s temple, you are simply laughed at. Aubry’s dog, which so excited the holy indignation of Schiller and Goethe, would be welcomed at any of our theatres, so long as he filled the house.” Without going the length of restricting theatrical performances to what is termed the legitimate drama, there ought to be a limit to illegitimacy, and unquestionably the introduction upon our stage of tumblers, jugglers, and posture-masters, circus-clowns, rope-dancers, and wild Indians, has powerfully contributed to lower its character, and to wean many lovers of the drama from the habitual frequenting of theatres. But the stage in England has not the importance and weight it enjoys in some foreign countries; notably in France, where it is one of the means used to distract from politics the attention of the restless excitement-loving people; where ministers of state, and imperial majesty itself, condescend to interfere in minute dramatic details, and to command the suppression of pieces whose merits they deem beneath the dignity of the theatre at which they are produced. There, it is worth a government’s while to subsidise the theatres; in England such an item would never be tolerated in a chancellor of the exchequer’s budget. Nor is it needed. Public demand will always create as large a supply as is really required.

Pleasantly and intelligently criticising and discoursing, the German doctor and his companion took their way again through Drury Lane, witnessing more than one disgusting scene of drunkenness, riot, and brutality. It was hard upon midnight: the gin palaces and their frequenters were making the most of their last few minutes; the barrows of battered fruit and full-flavoured shell-fish were trading at reduced prices, upon the principle of small profits and quick returns; oysters as big as a fist were piled up by threes and fours, at a penny a heap—poverty and oysters, Mr Weller has informed us, invariably walk hand in hand; here was a girl carried away dead drunk upon a stretcher—“it was the hunger,” an old Irishwoman, with a glowing pipe in her mouth, assured the gentleman, “that had done it—oh! only the hunger—the smallest drop had been too much for poor Sall;” here a brace of Amazons were indulging in a “mill” in the centre of an admiring ring; in front of a public-house a half-famished Italian ground out the air of “There’s a good time coming, boys—wait a little longer,” the organist looking the while as if he had great need of the “good time,” and very little power to wait. Suddenly the lights went out in the gin palaces, ballad-singers and hurdygurdy stopped short in the middle of their melodies, shouts and curses subsided into a hoarse murmur, and the mob dispersed and disappeared, to adopt Mr Schlesinger’s severe comparison, “like dirty rain-water that rolls into gutters and sewers.” The amateur observers of London’s blackguardism pursued their homeward way.

“Suddenly, from a side street, a tall figure emerged with long noiseless steps, and cast a glance right and left—no policeman was in sight. Then she rapidly approached our two friends and fixed her glassy eyes upon them.

“It is no midnight spectre, but neither is it a being of flesh and blood, it consists but of skin and bone. Upon her arm is an infant, to which the bony hand affords but a hard dying-bed. For a few seconds she gazes at the strangers. They put some silver into her hand. Without a word of thanks, or of surprise at the liberality of the alms, she walks away.

“‘The holy Sabbath has commenced,’ said Keif, after they had proceeded for some distance in silence, ‘the puritanical Sabbath, on which misery feels itself doubly and trebly forlorn.’

“‘My dear friend,’ replied Frolick, ‘five-and-twenty years ago you might have paved Oxford Street with such unhappy wretches as that we just now met. Now you must seek them out in a nook of Drury Lane. And the puritanism of the present day is a rose-coloured full-blooded worldling, compared to that of the Roundheads; it is nothing but the natural reaction against the licentious cavalier spirit, created by the gloomy hypocrisy that prevailed before the Restoration, and handed down even to the beginning of the present century. It is English nature to cure one extreme by running into the other. Either wildly jovial or prudishly refined; drunkards or teetotallers; prize-fighters or peace-society-men. If the perception of a harmonious happy medium, and the instinct of beauty of form, were innate in us, either we should no longer be the tough, hard-working, one-sided, powerful John Bull, or we should ere now have proved the untruth of your German proverb that in no country under the sun do trees grow until their branches reach the sky.’”

After which modest intimation (somewhat Teutonic in style) of his patriotic and heartfelt conviction that if England were a little better than she is, she would be too good for this world, Frolick took leave of his friend. We shall soon follow his example. Before doing so, we recommend to all English readers of German, the twelfth chapter of Mr Schlesinger’s second volume, both as very interesting and as containing many sensible observations and home-truths. No extraordinary acuteness is necessary to discriminate between the writer’s jest and earnest.

“The reader acquainted with English domestic arrangements,” says Mr Schlesinger in a note to his first volume, “will long ago have found out that the house we live in is that of a plain citizen. So we may as well confess that Sir John is neither knight nor baronet, but was dubbed by ourselves, in consideration of his services to the reader, without licence from the Queen, and with a silver spoon instead of a sword.” Sir John is not the less—if Mr Schlesinger’s sketch be a portrait—a good fellow and a worthy simple-hearted Englishman; and we find with pleasure, at the close of the book, a letter from him, dated from his cottage in the country, and addressed to the cynical Keif, who was braving November’s fogs in Guildford Street. The doctor had sent to his friend and host the proof-sheets of the second volume of the Wanderings through London; Sir John writes back his thanks, his opinion of the work, and his cordial forgiveness of the jokes at his expense that it contains. “Never mind,” he says; “we Englishmen can stomach the truth; and if you will promise me to abjure some portion of your German stiffneckedness, I willingly pledge myself never again to try to reason a Frenchman’s hind-leg straight. Between ourselves, that was the greatest absurdity our friend has exposed. As to all the rest, I will maintain my words before God, the Queen, and my countrymen. But,” continues Sir John, quitting personal considerations, “as regards our friend’s book—which, you tell me, is to be published at Christmas in Berlin, the most enlightened of German cities—I really fear, my dear doctor, that it is a bad business. How, in heaven’s name, are Germans to form an idea of London from those two meagre volumes? Many things are depicted in them, but how many are neglected, and these the very things in which you Germans should take a lesson from us! Not a word about our picture-galleries, which, nevertheless, impartially speaking, are the first in the world! Not a word about the British Museum, about the Bridgewater, Vernon, and Hampton Court galleries! Not a word about St Paul’s, nor a syllable concerning the Colosseum, Madame Tussaud, or Barclay and Perkins’ Brewery! No mention of our finest streets—Regent Street, Bond Street, Belgravia, and Westbourne Terrace; of our concerts at Exeter Hall, our markets, our zoological and botanical gardens, Kew, Richmond, Windsor, art, literature, benevolent institutions,” &c. &c. Sir John continues his enumeration of omissions, until it seems to comprise everything worth notice in London; and we ask ourselves with what Mr Schlesinger has filled the eight hundred pages we have read with so much satisfaction and amusement. We perceive that he has given his attention to men rather than to things, that his vein has been reflective and philosophical, and that he has not mistaken himself for the compiler of a London guide. But still Sir John is dissatisfied. In Berlin, he says, “people will imagine England has no picture-galleries—ha! ha! and no hospitals—ha! ha! ha! In ten such volumes, the materials would not be exhausted.”

“It is delightful here in the country,” concludes Sir John, breaking off his criticism. “Where do you find such fresh green, and such mild air in November as in our England? I go out walking without a greatcoat, and say to myself, ‘Across the water, in Germany, the snow lies deep, and the wolves walk in and out of Cologne Cathedral.’ Here it is a little damp of a morning and evening, but then one sits by the fire and reads the newspaper. Nowhere is one so comfortable as in the country in England. Come and see us in our cottage; the children are longing to see you, and so am I.”

Then comes a postscript, which, like many postscripts, is not the least important part of the letter. “At this damp time of the year,” says the spoon-dubbed baronet, “I advise you to take a small glass of cognac of a morning—there must still be some bottles of the right sort in the cellar—and every night one of my pills. You will find a boxful on the chimney-piece in my study. Do not be obstinate: you do not know how dangerous this season of the year is in England.”

So kind and hospitable a letter demanded a prompt reply, and accordingly we get Dr Keif’s by return of post. It is pretty evident, however, that the motive of his haste is rather anxiety to answer the charge of incompleteness brought against Max Schlesinger’s book, than generous impatience to thank Sir John for placing the pill-box at his disposal. The author of the Wanderings, he says, preferred dissecting and dwelling upon a few subjects to slightly touching upon a large number; and, in his usual caustic strain, he reminds his friend, that if some things of which London has a right to be proud have been left unnoticed, the same has been the case with other things of which she has reason to be ashamed. He then enumerates the blots, as Sir John had detailed the glories. Having done so: “it is horrible here in London,” he says. “Where do you find such fogs and such a pestilential atmosphere, in November, as in your London? That the wolves now walk in and out of Cologne Cathedral is a mere creation of your Britannic imagination; and, since you talk of doing without a greatcoat, why, the English walk about the whole winter through, in Germany, in black dresscoats, but they are cunning enough to carry several layers of flannel underneath them. Have you by chance discarded yours? That you are comfortable in your country-house I have no doubt. That I never disputed.”

In his turn, Dr Keif treats himself to a postscript. “Since this morning,” he says, “I have followed your medical prescription, and will keep to it—partially, that is to say. I found the cognac, and will take it regularly. On the other hand, when you return to London, you will find your pills untouched upon your chimney-piece.”

And so we come to “Finis.” Mr Schlesinger is a genial and unprejudiced critic of a foreign capital’s customs and character, and we thank him for his agreeable, spirited, and impartial volumes. By his own countrymen they will, or we are greatly mistaken, be highly and deservedly prized.

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