Various
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, No. 359, September 1845
I seldom spent more anxious hours in the course of an anxious life, than during the period of this deliberation. I felt all the fascinations of the man of genius. On the other hand, I respected all the solid and manly qualities of his opponent. In a personal view, the issue of the contest was likely to produce evil to my own views. I was still a dependent upon fortune. I had new ties and interests, which made official income more important to me day by day. In the fall of the administration I must follow the general fate. – In making my decision with the unsuccessful candidate for power, I must go down along with him; and the claims of the competitors were so equally balanced, and both were so distinguished, that it was beyond all conjecture to calculate the result. I, too, was not without many a temptation to perplex my judgment. The rivalry had at length become public, and the friends of each were active in securing opinions among the holders of office. The whole was a lottery, but with my political existence dependent on my escaping a blank. In this dilemma I consulted my oracle, Clotilde. Her quick intelligence decided for me at once. "You must resign," said she. "You value both; you cannot side with either without offending their feelings, or, what I more regard, distressing your own. Both are men of intelligence and honour, and they will understand your motives and respect them. To retain office is impossible."
"But, Clotilde, how can I bear the thought of reducing you and my infants to the discomforts of a narrow income, and the obscurity of a life of retirement?"
"A thousand times better, than you could endure the thought of retaining office against your judgment, or taking a part against a friend. Follow the impressions of your own generous nature, and you will be dearer than ever to Clotilde – even though it condemned us all to the deepest obscurity." Tears gushed into her eyes as she spoke the words; and in her heart she was evidently less of the heroine than in her language: the children had come playing round her feet at the moment; and the family picture of the reverse in our fortunes, filled with this cluster of young faces, unconscious of the chance which lay before them, was too severe a trial for a mother's feelings. Her tears flowed abundantly, and the beating of her heart showed the anguish of her sacrifice. But she still persisted in her determination. As I took leave of her to go down to the House, her last words, as she pressed my hand, were – "Resign, and leave the rest to fortune."
A motion on the subject of the rival claims had been appointed for the evening; and the premier was to open the debate. The House was crowded at an early hour; and as my services were required in the discussion, I postponed the communication of my resolve, until the division should announce that my labours were at an end. But the hour passed away in routine business. Still, the premier did not appear. The anxiety grew excessive. At length whispers ran round the benches, of a rencounter between the two distinguished individuals; and, like all rumours of this nature, the results were pronounced to be of the most alarming kind. The consternation was gradually mitigated by the announcement that one of the combatants remained unhurt, but that the other had received a mortal wound. The House was speedily deserted; and all rushed out to ascertain the truth of this melancholy intelligence. Yet, nothing was to be gathered among the numberless reports of the night, and I returned home harassed almost into fever. The morning quieted the general alarm. The wound was dangerous, but not mortal; and both combatants had sent in their resignation. It was accepted by royalty, and before another night fell; I was sent for by the premier, and offered one of the vacant offices.
Such are the chances of public life. The lottery had been drawn, and mine was a prize. With what feelings I returned on that night to my fireside; with what welcome I was received by my gentle, yet heroic, wife; or with what eyes I glanced upon my infants, as they came to ask the paternal kiss and blessing before they parted for their pillows, I leave to those who know the rejoicing of the heart, to conceive.
Those events had shaken the ministry, as dissensions always have done; and it still cost us many a severe struggle to resist the force of Opposition combined with the clamours of the country. England and France now presented a spectacle unexampled in the annals of hostilities, engaged in a war which seemed interminable – both determined to conquer or perish; both impelled by the most daring courage; yet neither able to inflict the slightest blow upon the other, with but fifteen miles between. France was nearer to Russia, nay, was nearer to the remotest extremity of Asia, than to England. In the midst of the fiercest war, both preserved the attitude of the most profound peace. The lion and the tiger, couching on the opposite sides of some impassable ravine, each watching the fiery eyes and naked fangs of the other, would have been the natural emblems of this hopeless thirst of encounter between the two most powerful and exasperated nations of the earth.
It is no superstition to trace those events to a higher source than man. The conclusion of this vast conflict was already written, in a record above the short-sighted vision and infirm memory of our nature. In all the earlier guilt of Europe, France has been the allotted punisher of the Continent; and England the allotted punisher of France. I make no presumptuous attempt to explain the reason; but the process is incontestable. When private profligacy combines with some atrocious act of public vice to make the crimes of the Continent intolerable, France is sent forth to carry fire and sword to its boundaries, to crush its armies in the field, to sack its cities, and to decimate its population. Then comes the penalty of the punisher. The crimes of France demand purgation. The strength of England is summoned to this stern duty, and France is scourged; her military pride is broken; her power is paralysed, peace follows, and Europe rests for a generation. The process has been so often renewed, and has been completed with such irresistible regularity, that the principle is a law. The period for this consummation was now come once more.
I was sitting in my library one evening, when a stranger was introduced, who had brought a letter from the officer commanding our squadron on the Spanish coast. He was a man of noble presence, of stately stature, and with a countenance exhibiting all the vivid expression of the South. He was a Spanish nobleman from the Asturias, and deputed by the authorities to demand succours in the national rising against the common enemy, Napoleon. I was instinctively struck by the measureless value of resistance in a country which opened to us the whole flank of France; but the intelligence was so wholly unexpected, so entirely beyond calculation, and at the same time so pregnant with the highest results to England, that I was long incredulous. I was prepared to doubt the involuntary exaggeration of men who had every thing at stake; the feverish tone of minds embarked in the most formidable of all struggles; and even the passion of the southern in every event and object, of force sufficient to arouse him into action. But the Asturian was firm in his assurances, clear and consistent in his views, and there was even a candour in his confession of the unprepared state of his country, which added largely to my confidence. Our dialogue was, I believe, unprecedented for the plainness of its enquiries and replies. It was perfectly Lacedæmonian.
"What regular force can Spain bring into the field?"
"None."
"What force has Napoleon in Spain at this moment?"
"At least two hundred and fifty thousand men, and those in the highest state of equipment and discipline."
"And yet you venture to resist?"
"We have resisted, we shall resist, and we shall beat them."
"In what state are your fortresses?"
"One half of them in the hands of the French, and the other half, without garrisons, provisions, or even guns; still, we shall beat them."
"Are not the French troops in possession of all the provinces?"
"Yes."
"Are they not in fact masters of the country?"
"No."
"How am I to reconcile those statements?"
"The French are masters by day; the Spaniards are masters by night."
"But you have none of the elements of national government. You have lost your king."
"So much the better."
"Your princes, nobles, and court."
"So much the better."
"Even your prime minister and whole administration are in the hands of the enemy."
"Best of all!" said the respondent, with a frown like a thunder-cloud.
"What resource, then, have you?"
"The people!" exclaimed the Spaniard, in a tone of superb defiance.
"Still – powerful as a united people are – before you can call upon a British government to embark in such a contest, it must be shown that the people are capable of acting together; that they are not separated by the jealousies which proverbially divide your country."
"Señor Inglese," said the Don, with a Cervantic curl of the lip, "I see, that Spain has not been neglected among the studies of your high station. But Spain is not to be studied in books. She is not to be sketched, like a fragment of a Moorish castle, and carried off in a portfolio. Europe knows nothing of her. You must pass the Pyrenees to conceive her existence. She lives on principles totally distinct from those of all other nations; and France will shortly find, that she never made a greater mistake than when she thought, that even the southern slope of the Pyrenees was like the northern."
"But," said I, "the disunion of your provinces, the extinction of your army, and the capture of your executive government, must leave the country naked to invasion. The contest may be gallant, but the hazard must be formidable. To sustain a war against the disciplined troops of France, and the daring determination of its ruler, would require a new age of miracle." The Spaniard bit his lip, and was silent. "At all events, your proposals do honour to the spirit of your country, and I shall not be the man to throw obstacles in your way. Draw up a memoir; state your means, your objects and your intentions, distinctly; and I shall lay it before the government without delay."
"Señor Inglese, it shall be done. In that memoir, I shall simply say that Spain has six ranges of mountains, all impregnable, and that the Spanish people are resolved to defend them; that the country is one vast natural fortress; that the Spanish soldier can sleep on the sand, can live on the simplest food, and the smallest quantity of that food; that he can march fifty miles a-day; that he is of the same blood as the conquerors of the Moors, and with the soldiers of Charles V.; and that he requires only discipline and leaders to equal the glory of his forefathers." His fine features glanced with manly exultation.
"Still, before I can bring your case before the country, we must be enabled to have an answer for the objections of the legislature. Your provinces are scarcely less hostile to each other than they are to the enemy. What plan can unite them in one system of defence? and, without that union, how can resistance be effectual?"
"Spain stands alone," was the reply. "Her manners, her feelings, and her people, have no examples in Europe. Her war will have as little similarity to the wars of its governments. It will be a war, not of armies, but of the shepherd, of the artificer, the muleteer, the contrabandist – a war of all classes the peasant, the priest, the noble, nay, the beggar on the highway. But this was the war of her ancestors, the war of the Asturias, which cleared the country of the Moors, and will clear it of the French. All Spain a mass of hostility, a living tide of unquenchable hatred and consuming fire – the French battalions, pouring over the Pyrenees, will be like battalions poured into the ocean. They will be engulfed; they will never return. Our provinces are divided, but they have one invincible bond – abhorrence of the French. Even their division is not infirmity, but strength. They know so little of each other that even the conquest of one half of Spain would be scarcely felt by the rest. This will be a supreme advantage in the species of war which we contemplate – a war of desultory but perpetual assaults, of hostilities that cease neither night nor day, of campaigns that know no distinction between summer and winter – a war in which no pitched battles will be fought, but in which every wall will be a rampart, every hollow of the hills a camp, every mountain a citadel, every roadside, and swamp, and rivulet, the place of an ambuscade. We shall have no battalions and brigades, we require no tactics; our sole science will be, to kill the enemy wherever he can be reached by bullet or knife, until we make Spain the tomb of invasion, and her very name an omen, and a ruin to the tyrant on the French throne."
The councils of England in the crisis were worthy of her ancient name. It was resolved to forget the long injuries of which Spain had been the instrument, during her passive submission to the arrogance of her ally and master. The Bourbons were now gone; the nation was disencumbered of that government of chamberlains, maids of honour, and duennas. It was to be no longer stifled in the perfumed atmosphere of court boudoirs, or to be chilled in the damps of the cloister. Its natural and noble proportions were to be left unfettered and undisguised by the formal fashions of past centuries of grave frivolity and decorous degradation. The giant was to rise refreshed. The Samson was to resume his primal purpose; he was no longer to sleep in the lap of his Delilah; the national fame was before him, and, breaking his manacles at one bold effort, he was thenceforth to stand, as nature had moulded him, powerful and prominent among mankind.
These were dreams, but they were high-toned and healthy dreams – the anticipations of a great country accustomed to the possession of freedom, and expecting to plant national regeneration wherever it set foot upon the soil. The cause of Spain was universally adopted by the people and was welcomed by Parliament with acclamation; the appointment of a minister to represent the cabinet in Spain was decided on, and this distinguished commission was pressed upon my personal sense of duty by the sovereign. My official rank placed me above ambassadorships, but a service of this order had a superior purpose. It was a mission of the country, not of the minister. I was to be the instrument of an imperial declaration of good-will, interest, and alliance to a whole people.
In another week, the frigate which conveyed me was flying before the breeze, along the iron-bound shore of Galicia; the brightest and most burning of skies was over my head, the most billowy of seas was dashing and foaming round me, and my eye was in continual admiration of the noble mountain barriers which, in a thousand shapes, guard the western coast of Spain from the ocean. At length the bay of Corunna opened before us; our anchor dropped, and I made my first step on the most picturesque shore, and among the most original people, of Europe. My destination was Madrid; but it was essential that I should ascertain all the facts in my power from the various provincial governments as I passed along; and I thus obtained a more ample knowledge of the people than could have fallen to the lot of the ordinary traveller. I consulted with their juntas, I was present at their festivals, I rode with their hidalgos, and I marched with their troops. One of the peculiarities which, as an Englishman, has always interested me in foreign travel is, that it brings us back to a period different from the existing age at home. All descending from a common stock, every nation of Europe has made a certain advance; but the advance has been of different degrees. Five hundred years ago, they were all nearly alike. In the Netherlands, I continually felt myself carried back to the days of the Protectorate; I saw nearly the same costume, the same formality of address, and the same habits of domestic life. In Germany, I went back a century further, and saw the English primitive style of existence, the same stiff architecture, the same mingling of stateliness and simplicity, not forgetting the same homage to the "divine right of kings." In Spain, I found myself in the thirteenth century, and but for the language, the heat, and the brown visages around me, could have imagined myself in England, in the days when "barons bold" still exercised the rights of feudalism, when gallant archers killed the king's deer without the king's permission, and when the priest was the lawgiver of the land.
Day by day, I saw the pilgrim making his weary way from shrine to shrine; the landowner caracoling his handsome horse over wild heaths and half-made highways – that horse caparisoned with as many fantastic trappings as the charger of chivalry, and both horse and rider forming no feeble representation of the knight bound on adventure. I saw the monastery of our old times, exhibiting all its ancient solidity, sternness, and pomp; with its hundred brethren; its crowd of sallow, silent domestics; its solemn service; and even with its beggars crowding and quarreling for their daily dole at its gate. The face of the country seemed to have been unchanged since the first invasion of the Visigoths: – immense commons, grown barren from the absence of all cultivation; vast, dreary sheep-walks; villages, few, rude, and thinly peopled; the absence of all enclosures, and a general look of loneliness, which, however, I could have scarcely imagined in England at any period since the Heptarchy. Yet, those wild wastes were often interspersed with delicious spots; where, after toiling half the day over a desert wild as Arabia, the traveller suddenly stood on the brink of some sweet and secluded valley, where the eye rested on almost tropical luxuriance – all the shrubs and blossoms which require so much shelter in our rougher climate, flourishing in the open air; hedges of myrtle and jessamine; huge olives, and primeval vines, spreading, in all the prodigality of nature, over the rocks; parasite plants clothing the oaks and elms with drapery of all colours, floating in every breath of wind; and, most delicious of all, in the fiery centre of Spain, streams, cool as ice and clear as crystal, gushing and glancing away through the depths of the valley; sometimes glittering in the sun, then plunging into shade, then winding along, seen by starts, like silver snakes, until they were lost under sheets of copse and foliage, unpruned by the hand of man, and which seemed penetrable only by the bird or the hare.
WATERTON'S SECOND SERIES OF ESSAYS. 8
At the conclusion of the autobiography prefixed to his former series of Essays, published some years since, Mr Waterton announced that he then "put away the pen not to be used again except in self-defence." That this resolution has been departed from, from whatever motive, will be matter for congratulation to most, if not all, of the readers of the "Wanderings" and "Essays;" and the volume before us derives an additional interest from its being an unsolicited donation to the widow of his deceased friend, Mr Loudon, the well-known naturalist. Methinks the author would not have done amiss in continuing, both to this and the former series of essays, the peculiarly appropriate title under which his first lucubrations were given to the world: since veritable Wanderings they are over every imaginable variety of subject and climate, from caymans in the Essequibo to the blood of St Januarius at Naples; schemes for the banishment of Hanoverian rats (Mr W. never allows this voracious intruder a British denizenship) in Yorkshire, and for averting the projected banishment of the rooks in Scotland. Among the amusing omniun gatherum intermingled with the valuable ornithological information in the present volume, we find dissertations on the gigantic raspberries, now, alas! no more produced in the ruined garden of Walton Hall – on the evils of tight shoes, tight lacing, and stiff cravats – on the natural history of that extinct-by-law variety of the human species called the chimney sweeper – and last, not least, on that of the author himself, in the continuation of his unique autobiography; and we rejoice to find him, though now close upon his grand climacteric, still able to climb a tree by the aid of toes which have never been cramped by tight shoes, with all the vigour, if not all the agility, of his lusty youth, breathing hostility against no living creature except Mr Swainson and Sir Robert Peel – the little love he already bore to the latter for framing the oath of abjuration for Catholics9 not being greatly augmented by the imposition of the income-tax – and still maintaining in Walton Park an inviolable asylum for crows, hawks, owls, and all the generally proscribed tribes of the feathered race.
The continuation of the autobiography is taken up from the publication of the first volume of essays in 1837, and consists chiefly of the narrative of adventures by land and perils by sea, in an expedition with his family, by the route of Holland and the Rhine, to the sunny shores of Italy. But the intervening period was not without incidents worthy of record. By a judicious system of pavement joined with Roman cement, and drains secured at the mouths by iron grates, "Charles Waterton, in the year of grace 1839, effectually cleared the premises at Walton Hall of every Hanoverian rat, young and old … and if I were to offer L.20 sterling money for the capture of a single individual, in or about any part of the premises, not one could be procured." Not long after this memorable achievement, a case of hydrophobia in Nottingham promised to afford him an opportunity of trying the virtues of the famous Wourali poison, as a cure for this dreadful and hitherto unconquerable malady. The difficulties and dangers encountered in the search for this potent narcotic through the wilds of Guiana, and the subsequent experiments on the ass Wouralia, which, after being apparently deprived of life by its influence, was revived by the inflation of the lungs with a blowpipe, and lived twenty-four years in clover at Walton, are familiar to the readers of the Wanderings– but its presumed efficacy in cases of hydrophobia was not destined to be tested in the present instance, as the patient had expired before Mr W.'s arrival. Its powers were, however, exhibited in the presence of a scientific assemblage: – one of two asses operated upon, though restored at the time, died on the third day, the other was perfectly recovered by the process of artificial respiration, and "every person present seemed convinced that the virulence of the Wourali poison was completely under the command of the operator … and that it can be safely applied to a human being labouring under hydrophobia!" Now this inference, with all due deference to Mr Waterton, appears to partake not a little of the non sequitur; and unless the modus operandi by which relief is to be obtained during the suspension of vitality thus produced is more clearly explained, we doubt whether many applications will be made for "the scientific assistance of Mr Gibson of the General Hospital at Nottingham, to give the sufferer a chance of saving his life by the supposed, though yet untried, efficacy of the Wourali poison, which, worst come to the worst, would, by its sedative qualities, render death calm and composed, and free from pain." Satisfied, however, with the somewhat equivocal result of this experiment, Mr Waterton resumed his preparations for departure, and having "called up the gamekeeper, and made him promise, as he valued his place, that he would protect all hawks, crows, herons, jays, and magpies," sailed from Hull for Rotterdam with his two sisters-in-law and his only son, a boy eleven years of age.
Mr Waterton's Catholic sympathies for the Belgian revolt, "for real liberty in religious matters," and his lamentations over the magnificent churches in Holland, stripped of their pictures and ornaments on the change of religion, do not prevent his feeling very favourably disposed towards the Dutch and their country, "the uniformity of which, and the even tenor of their tempers, appear as if one had been made for the other." The protection extended to the stork, which builds without fear in the heart of their towns, gives them an additional claim on his good-will; and "would but our country gentlemen put a stop to the indiscriminate slaughter of birds by their ruthless gamekeepers, we should not have to visit Holland to see the true habits of the stork, nor roam through Germany to enjoy the soaring of the kite – a bird once very common in this part of Yorkshire, but now a total stranger to it." The progressive extinction of so many of the larger species of birds once indigenous to England before the progress of drainage and clearing; has long been a subject of regret not only to the naturalist but the sportsman. Of the stately bustard, once the ornament of all our downs, scarce a solitary straggler now remains – the crane, as well as the stork, which once abounded in the fen districts, has totally disappeared; and though the success which has attended the attempts to re-introduce the capercailzie in Scotland has restored to us one of our lost species, it is much to be feared that unless Mr Waterton's example, in converting his park into a sanctuary, be followed by other country gentlemen of ornithological tastes, the raven, the crow, and the larger species of hawks, in whose preservation no one is interested, and which are already becoming raræ aves, in the agricultural districts, will eventually disappear from the British Fauna.
The great influx of English into Belgium, while scarce any are to be found in Holland, is attributed, probably with reason, to the national love of sight-seeing, which finds gratification in the ceremonies and decorations of the Belgian churches – "up and down which crowds of English are for ever sauntering… 'How have you got over your time to-day?' I said one afternoon to an acquaintance, who, like Mr Noddy's eldest son in Sterne, was travelling through Europe at a prodigious speed, and had very little spare time on his hands. He said he had knocked off thirteen churches that morning!" The headquarters of the English residents appear to be at Bruges, and Mr Waterton highly approves of the selection: – "Did my habits allow me to prefer streets to woods and green fields, I could retire to Bruges, and there end my days." But after visiting the convent of English nuns, where some of the ladies of Mr Waterton's family had received their education, and the portrait of "that regal profligate, Charles II." (Mr Waterton's love of truth here gets the better of his ancestral predilections for the house of Stuart) in the hall of the ancient society of archers, of which he was a member during his exile, the travellers continued their route by Ghent and along the valley of the Meuse, "which, on a fine warm day in July, appears as rich and beautiful as any valley can well be on this side of ancient Paradise," to Aix-la-Chapelle. At this famous Prussian watering-place Mr Waterton found much to move his bile, not only in the sight of ladies risking their fortunes at the public gaming-tables authorised and protected by government, but in the folly of the valetudinarians, who perversely counteract the beneficial effects of the waters by "resorting to the salle-à-manger, and there partaking of all the luxuries from the cornucopia of Epicurus, Bacchus, and Ceres." He derived some consolation, however, from the contemplation of the magnificent and varied prospect from the wooded heights of the Louisberg above the town; and the sight, on his last visit, of a pair of ravens circling over his head in aërial revolutions, and then winging their way towards the forest of Ardennes, awakened recollections of home, and "of the rascally cobbler who desecrated the Sunday morning by robbing the last raven's nest in this vicinity." At Freyburg they encountered a phenomenon, in the shape of a poetical German waiter – and a poet, too, in the English language, though he had never been in England, nor much among English; but the waiter's effusions, the subject of which was the cathedral of Freyburg, were never destined to reach England, but now lie, with the rest of Mr Waterton's travelling goods and chattels, in the wreck of the Pollux, at the bottom of the Mediterranean sea.
The passage of the Alps disappointed our traveller's hopes of finding among their heights some of the rarer European birds: – "the earth appeared one huge barren waste, and the heavens produced not a single inhabitant of air." On descending the southern side of the mountains, they at length received ocular demonstration of their being really in Italy, by observing matronly-looking woman engaged in certain offices touching the long black hair of her daughter, which showed that combs were still as scarce as when Horace stigmatized the "incomptum caput" of Canidia; and the necessity of lavender water, to pass with any thing like comfort through the town and villages which looked so enchanting at a distance in the midst of their olive groves and cypresses, is feelingly commented upon. But before entering Rome, we must give Mr Waterton's own account of an exploit which made some noise at the time of its performance, and the motives at least of which appear to have been mis-stated. On a former visit, he had gained great renown by climbing, in company with Captain Alexander of the royal navy, to the summit of the cross surmounting the ball of St Peter's, and leaving his gloves on the point of the conductor! and as a pendant to this notable achievement, it was announced about this time, in most of the English papers, that in a fervour of religious enthusiasm, on approaching the Eternal City, he had walked barefoot as a pilgrim the last twenty miles, and thus so severely lacerated his feet as to be incapable for some time of moving. "Would that my motives had been as pure as represented! The sanctity of the churches, the remains of holy martyrs which enrich them, the relics of canonized saints placed in such profusion throughout them, might well induce a Catholic traveller to adopt this easy and simple mode of showing his religious feeling. But, unfortunately, the idea never entered my mind at the time; I had no other motives than those of easy walking and self-enjoyment." The enjoyment to be derived from walking without shoes or stockings over a rough pavement, in sharp frost, proved as problematical in practice as it would be to most persons in theory; and Mr Waterton found to his cost, that the fifteen years which had elapsed since he went barefoot with impunity in the forests of Guiana, had materially impaired his soles' power of endurance. After sustaining a severe injury in his right foot, of which the intensity of the cold prevented his being sensible at the instant, he was glad to resume his chaussure, and was laid up on the sofa for two months after his arrival. "It was this unfortunate adventure which gave rise to the story of my walking barefooted into Rome, and which gained me a reputation by no means merited on my part."