Various
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 70, No. 433, November 1851
"Attentions, my dear boy; – the merest civility."
"Oh, – ah! 'twas civility, I suppose, to squeeze her hand in the inn at Algeçiras, in the way she told Juana of – and heaven knows what else you may have done during the flight. Juana is outrageous against you – actually called you a vile deceiver; but Carlota's feeling is more of sorrow than of anger. She is persuaded that nothing but your ignorance of Spanish has prevented your tongue from confirming what your looks have so faithfully promised. I was really quite affected to-day at the appealing look she cast on me after you left the room; she evidently expected me to communicate her destiny."
My grandfather smoked hard.
"Lots of fellows would give their ears for such a wife," pursued the Ensign. "Lovelace, the Governor's aide-de-camp, bribed the waiter of the hotel to lend him his apron to-day, at dinner, that he might come in and look at her – swears she's a splendid woman, and that he'd run away with such another to-morrow."
Still my grandfather smoked hard, but said nothing, though there was a slight gleam of pride in his countenance.
"Poor thing!" sighed Garry. "All her prospects blighted for ever. Swears she never can love another."
At this my grandfather's eyes grew moist, and he coughed as if he had swallowed some tobacco-smoke.
"And as for me, to have Juana at my lips, as it were, and yet not mine – for she's as inflexible as if she'd been born a Mede and Persian – to know that you are coming between me and happiness as surely as if you were an inexorable father or a cruel guardian – worse, indeed; for those might be evaded. Major, major, have you no compassion! – two days of this will drive me crazy."
The Major changed his pipe from his right hand to his left, and, stretching the former across the table, sympathetically pressed that of the Ensign.
"Do, Major," quoth Garry, changing his flank movement for a direct attack – "do consent to make yourself and me happy; do empower me to negotiate for our all going to church to-morrow." (My grandfather gave a little jump in his chair at this, as if he were sitting on a pin.) "I'll manage it all; you shan't have the least trouble in the matter."
My grandfather spoke not.
"Silence gives consent," said the Ensign, rising. "Come, now, if you don't forbid me, I'll depart on my embassy at once; you needn't speak, I'll spare your blushes. I see this delay has only been from modesty, or perhaps a little ruse on your part. Once, twice, thrice, – I go." And he vanished.
The Major remained in his chair, in the same posture. His pipe was smoked out, but he continued to suck absently at the empty tube. His bewilderment and perturbation were so great that, though he sat up till two in the morning, during which time he smoked eleven pipes, and increased the two glasses of grog with which he was accustomed to prepare for his pillow to four, he was still, when he went to bed, as agitated as ever.
In this state of mind he went to the altar, for next day a double ceremony was performed, making Owen happy with Juana, and giving Carlota a husband and me a grandfather. The Major was more like a proxy than a principal in the affair; for Owen, taking the entire management upon himself, left him little more to do than to make the necessary responses.
Carlota made a very good-tempered, quiet, inobtrusive helpmate, and continued to be fond of her spouse even after he was a gray-headed colonel. My grandfather, though credulous in most matters, could with difficulty be brought to consider himself married. He would sometimes seem to forget the circumstance for a whole day together, till it came to be forced on his recollection at bed-time. And when, about a year after his marriage, a new-born female Flinders (now my venerable aunt) was brought one morning by the nurse for his inspection and approval, he gazed at it with a puzzled air, and could not be convinced that he was actually in the presence of his own flesh and blood, till he had touched the cheek of his first-born with the point of his tobacco-pipe, removed from his mouth for that purpose, making on the infant's countenance a small indentation.
The little Governor, Don Pablo, was subsequently induced to forgive his relatives, and frequent visits and attentions were interchanged, till the commencement of the siege put a stop to all intercourse between Gibraltar and Spain.
I have often, on a summer's evening, sat looking across the bay at a gorgeous sunset, and retracing in imagination the incidents I have related. My grandfather's establishment was broken up during the siege by the enemy's shells, but a similar one now stands on what I think must have been about the site of it. The world has changed since then; but Spain is no land of change; and, looking on the imperishable outline of the Andaluçian hills, unaltered, probably, since a time to which the period of my tale is but as yesterday, it is easy for me to "daff aside" the noisy world without, and, dropping quietly behind the age, to picture to myself my old-fashioned grandfather issuing forth from yonder white-walled town of Algeçiras with his future bride.
GERMAN LETTERS FROM PARIS.2
German Professors are altered men since those joyous days when we drank chopines and swang the schlaeger in the thirsty and venerable University of Saxesaufenberg. We remember them studious bookworms, uneasy when removed from library and lecture-room, their meerschaum their only passion, knowledge their sole ambition, beholding the external world through "the loopholes of retreat," – the said embrasures being considerably obscured by tobacco-smoke and misty philosophy. Such is the portrait our memory has preserved of them; and we doubt not that its fidelity will be recognised by our brother-burschen of bygone days. But great has been the change. The quality of a German professor now suggests the idea of a red-hot democrat, fanning revolution, pining in prison, or fugitive in foreign lands. The smoking-cap is exchanged for the bonnet rouge, and the silence of the sage for the clamour of the demagogue. This may not be true of all, perhaps not even of a majority, but it is true of a pretentious and prominent minority. The busy, bustling multitude knows nothing of the others.
Professor Stahr, of the University of Oldenburg, is a gentleman chiefly remarkable for his democratic tendencies, and for the fluent correctness of his literary style. Few men write better German, or profess doctrines more revolutionary. His reputation as a literary man rests principally upon a work on Italy, published after a twelvemonth's residence in that country.3 As a critic of fine art, he is not without merit. As a politician he is wild and speculative. The revolutionary coterie to which he belongs reckons amongst its members Fanny Lewald, the lively Hebrew socialist, and Moritz Hartmann, the bitter radical. Both of these, especially the former, are his intimate friends, and appear to have been his constant companions during two months of last autumn, spent by him in Paris, and which have given occasion and a title to his latest book. With Mr Hartmann he forgathered at Brussels, early in the month of September, and together they proceeded southwards. In consideration of Professor Stahr's acknowledged abilities, we will not apply to him a common rule, and judge him by the company he keeps. But, in spite of his well-turned periods and general moderation of expression, his book is not pleasant to read. There is an ill-conditioned tone about writers of his political class, extremely trying to the patience and temper of the reader. Convinced of the general unfitness of existing human institutions, and of the necessity for radical changes, they inevitably fall into a cavilling and censorious strain. Viewing the condition of society with a jaundiced eye, they adopt the maxim that whatever is, is wrong. Mr Stahr has hardly entered the railway carriage that is to transport him to Paris, when he shows himself querulous and a grumbler. He hoisted his colours before leaving Brussels. Had we never before heard either of him or his principles, we yet should have been at no loss to discover the latter by certain passages in his very first chapter. Sitting in his inn at eventide, after visiting the monument to the slain of 1830, he reads an account of the Belgian revolution. The Dutch troops, he finds, made but one hundred and twenty-two prisoners, whilst the insurgents captured four hundred and ninety-five. On the other hand, the Belgian killed and wounded exceeded by three hundred those of their opponents. Mr Stahr is ready with an inference from these statistics. It takes the form of a slur upon the soldiers who were doing their duty to their king and country. "The inequality in the number of prisoners may well arise from the circumstance that the Dutch, as fighters for loyal tranquillity and order, were least disposed to give quarter. And soldiers against men without uniform – one knows that!" Then he falls foul of the writer of the narrative, for attributing to Providence the preservation of the royal palace, and other public buildings, to which the Dutch attempted to set fire; and, gliding thence into religious speculations, he gets very profound, and rather profane, so that we are not sorry when the current of his ideas is diverted into a more commonplace channel, by the visit, at Valenciennes, of the French customhouse officers, on the look-out for Belgian cigars and reprints. He is sore at this irksome visitation – wonders that powerful France so long endures the literary piracies of her little neighbour – and finally prophesies the abolition of all customhouses. "A time will come," he says, "when this system of legally privileged waylaying will appear just as fabulous to the people of Europe, as do now to us the highway depredations of the robber-knights." Pending the advent of that desirable state of things, he revenges himself on a fellow-traveller for his customhouse annoyances. A German book which he had left in the carriage on alighting had disappeared, and could not be recovered. A douanier had perhaps taken it for a contraband commodity. He should have declared it, opined a fat Frenchman in the same carriage. Mr Stahr was indignant. It was a German book, he tartly replied, and was not printed at Brussels, but at Leipzig – a place, he added, which must still be pretty well remembered in France! A polite and tasteful allusion which did the German radical infinite credit, and to which the fat Frenchman might fairly have retorted, "Jena," and half a dozen other significant names, instead of holding his tongue, and leaving his fellow-traveller to digest at leisure his loss and his ill-humour.
Mr Stahr's volumes, composed of letters to friends, are desultory, and for the most part slight. Picture galleries are favourite haunts of his: now he criticises a pamphlet, now a play; he moralises, after his own peculiar fashion, in deserted palaces, assists at a banquet of workmen, witnesses extravagant dances at Mabille, sits by the bedside of the infirm and suffering Heine. His first walk in Paris was to the Palais Royal, after nightfall. "Stahr," said his companion to him suddenly, on the way, "this is the Place de Grève!" – "Were I to live a century," exclaims the impressionable professor, "I should never forget the shudder that came over me at these words." And he breaks into a tumid rhapsody about the lava-streams of the great European volcano, talks of the guillotine, tells the well-known story of Favras, and proceeds to the Palais Royal, where, at ten o'clock at night, he is unable to obtain a beef-steak for supper, and whose glory he accordingly declares departed. Returning to their quarters, at a hotel beyond the Seine, the two Germans get bewildered in the labyrinth of the Quartier Latin, and are indebted for guidance to some artisans, whose "Good night, citoyens!" at parting, again thrills the sensitive Stahr. The historical and fanciful associations that crowd upon his mind are of a less practical nature than the reflection suggested to his companion by the Republican mode of address – "We must exchange our grey Calabrian hats" (the sort of bandit sombreros affected by travelling students and red republicans) "for the loyal hats of order, or soon we shall have Louis Napoleon's police at our heels." Thus spoke Mr Hartmann – who has a natural aversion to all police, and who gladly sneers at the party of Order, and at Louis Napoleon as its representative. Mr Stahr professes no great liking or tenderness for the chief of the Republic – the first gendarme in France, as he calls him, meaning thereby to cast opprobrium on the President, gentlemen of his political complexion having an instinctive detestation of gendarmes. He saw him for the first time at the celebrated review held at Satory, on the 10th October 1850. On his way thither, Mr Stahr joined in conversation with peasants, who were flocking from all the country round to see the President and the military pageant. Many of them had sons in the regiments that were to be reviewed. They made no mystery of their political creed. It was simple enough: "Peace and moderate taxation," said they, "is what we want. He who gives us those two things is our man, whether as King or President matters not." The review over, the throng of spectators drew up to see Louis Napoleon. After the Minister of War, d'Hautpoul, and the then-all-powerful Changarnier, had passed, each with his staff, "there came by, mounted on a tall gray horse, the elect of six millions of voters. Judiciously-distributed adherents waved their hats and shouted, at the top of their voices, 'Long live the Emperor! Vive Napoleon!' The people were mute. It was a laughable farce. The hero of Strasburg and Boulogne, mounted on a tall charger, in a brilliant general's uniform, the broad riband of the Legion of Honour over his shoulder, in plumed hat and jackboots, was the very model of a circus equestrian." An air of helplessness and exhaustion, according to Mr Stahr, was the main characteristic of the President's appearance. "I stood near enough," he continues, "to see him well, and never did I behold a more unmeaning countenance. An unwholesome grey-brown is its prevailing tint. Of likeness to the great Emperor there is scarcely a trace." There is no chance, Mr Stahr declares, of such a person as Louis Napoleon putting the republic in his pocket. Having given his opinion of the President's exterior, he proceeds in the next chapter to sketch his character, as described by a person who had known him from his youth. "He is naturally goodtempered and harmless," said this anonymous informant, "and by no means without ability. But he is tainted with the moral corruption of all European societies, Italian, French, and English. He has the pourriture of the drawing-room education of all nations. Still he is not devoid of sense, nor of a certain goodness of disposition. He can weep, unaffectedly weep, over a touching case of wretchedness and misery, and he willingly shows clemency, when asked, even to political opponents. But no reliance can be placed in him. In a word, his character is that of a woman. As a result of his wandering and adventurous existence, he appears to-day as a German, to-morrow as a Frenchman, and the day after to-morrow as an Englishman or Italian. He is wholly without fixed principles, and without moral stay. If one represents to him the immorality of an act, he will laugh and say, 'Bah! what is that to me?' But the very next day you shall find him as much oppressed with moral scruples as any German candidate. He has the physical courage of his unusual bodily strength —corporis robore stolide ferox– supported by a fatalist belief in his star; and this belief, which has lately acquired increased strength by his extraordinary vicissitude of fortune, blinds him to his real position, and renders him deaf to the warning voices of his few honest friends. In this respect his mother, who unceasingly stimulated his ambition, did him much harm. Personally he is modest and unassuming, but he is madly vain of his name and of his legitimate claims. That he has done and continues to do himself grievous harm, as it is universally said, by excesses of the most unrefined description, and by opium-smoking, seems unfortunately to be only too true. For the change in him since his youth has been altogether too great. Nevertheless, he is much less the tool of others than might be supposed. He has a way of half-closing his inexpressive light-blue eyes, which he has adopted to prevent persons from reading his thoughts. His chief delusion is that the army is unconditionally devoted to him. This is by no, means the case." We give this curious sketch, in which truth and malignity are ingeniously blended, for no more than it is worth. The reader will have little difficulty in sifting the grain from the chaff, the idle or malicious gossip from the well-founded observations. Mr Stahr supports the assertion of the indifference of the French army to the commonplace nephew of their great idol, by anecdotes derived from personal experience. After the review, he dined for some days in company with three hussar officers, quartered in the house he lived in. His account of them hardly agrees with the popular notion of French officers. "They are modest, reserved, and serious in manner. Nowhere in Paris have I found a trace of that overweening presumption by which German officers, especially cavalrymen, seek to give themselves importance at tables d'hôte and other public places. We spoke of yesterday's manœuvres, and I paid them a compliment on the really splendid bearing of the troops and the capital equipments. There are no longer grounds to depreciate the French cavalry. Africa has been an excellent school for them. 'But there was one thing wanting,' I remarked – 'namely, enthusiasm.' 'You are quite right, sir,' replied one of the officers; 'but there is not much to be enthusiastic about in the position in which we are.' The speaker was a thorough soldier, and anything but an upholder of revolutionary or socialist-democratic ideas. The supporters of the latter he invariably spoke of as 'les Voraces,' and bitterly complained that for years past he and his comrades had had nothing else to do than to 'faire la chasse aux voraces!' But with the 'Nephew of the Uncle' none of the officers showed the least sympathy. Concerning him they all observed a very eloquent silence." In contrast to the ridicule and censure levelled by Mr Stahr at the more recent portion of Louis Napoleon's career, are some anecdotes he tells us of his earlier years. "In his youth," he says, "he must have been very amiable. I have had opportunity to look through a collection of letters written by him to a friend of his family, and extending over more than twenty years. It included even notes written when he was a boy of eleven, some of them in the German language and character. Louis Napoleon is known to be a perfect master of German. The most pleasing and amiable of these letters were a series written from his prison at Ham. Good feeling, hearty gratitude for proofs of faithful adherence and for affectionate little services, and a deep dejection at his lot, were the characteristics of these letters. He read and studied a great deal at Ham, especially military science, but also poetry and literature. Within those prison-walls he now and then began to distrust the 'star' of his destiny." These letters were doubtless the same spoken of elsewhere by Mr Stahr as filling several volumes, and as having been addressed to Madame Hortense Cornu, a well-known writer on fine art, who was long attached to the household of Queen Hortense. She had known Louis Napoleon from his childhood, and retained sufficient influence over him to obtain the rescue from the hands of the Roman priesthood of the Italian republican Cernuschi. The letters, says Mr Stahr, abound in evidence of the esteem and gratitude entertained by the French President for the staunch and trusty friend of his youth. "This correspondence, fragments of which I was favoured with permission to read, includes all the epochs of his adventurous life. It ceases with the day when the infatuated man, having attained to power, laid hands upon the right of universal suffrage which had raised him from the dust. Madame Cornu's last letter was a solemn exhortation to abstain from that step. She laboured in vain, for fate is stronger than humanity. But it is an honourable testimony to the originally good disposition of the blinded man that he did not withdraw his favour from his tried friend. A proof of this is to be found in Cernuschi's deliverance."
During a visit paid by Mr Stahr to Alexander Dumas, the French romance-writer told the German professor an anecdote of Louis Napoleon and the late Duke of Orleans, which is curious, if true. Perhaps it is as well to bear in mind, whilst reading it, that its narrator is a story-teller by profession, and the most imaginative and decorative of historians. Dumas, it appears, had been long acquainted with the imperial pretender and his mother; was aware of the rash schemes of the Prince, then meditating the Strasburg expedition; and advised him, by letter, to abandon them, or at least to adopt a totally different mode of carrying them out. If he would uproot (deraciner) the dynasty of Louis Philippe, wrote Dumas, he must try very different means. He must endeavour to obtain the revocation of his sentence of exile, get himself elected member of the French Chamber of Deputies, and so follow up his plans in opposition to the ruling dynasty. Deaf to this advice, which was certainly sensible enough, Louis Napoleon made his ridiculous attempt at Strasburg, and was taken prisoner. Thereupon his mother, Queen Hortense, hurried to the neighbourhood of Paris under an assumed name, and with one confidential attendant. This person she sent to Dumas, to entreat him to apply to his patron, the Duke of Orleans, to know what the Court had decided with respect to the prisoner's fate. Dumas wrote forthwith for an audience; the Duke received him with a smile. "Well!" he said, "so your protégé has not succeeded in uprooting us?" "Prince, you know – ?" stammered the terrified novelist. "Do you suppose we are so badly served for our money as not to know what brings you here, and where Queen Hortense is at this very moment?" After a short pause, during which he enjoyed the embarrassment of Dumas, the Duke continued, "Tell Madame Hortense," he said, "that the Orleans do not yet feel themselves strong enough to have their Duke d'Enghien."
"It is a bitter answer, your royal highness," replied Dumas, taking his leave, "but still it will console the mother's heart."
"And now," muses Mr Stahr, "the shattered bones of the unfortunate young Duke of Orleans have long been mouldering in the grave, his statue in the court of the Louvre has been dragged down and stowed away in a corner of the Versailles Museum, and the Adventurer of Strasburg rules France as a republic, with power more unlimited than the wily Louis Philippe ever possessed over it as a monarchy! For so long as it lasts, that is to say; for methinks the feet of those who shall carry him out are already before the door. But how did he ever get in? How was it that even his candidature for the presidency was not overwhelmed and rendered impossible by that most dangerous of all opponents in France, the curse of the Ridiculous, which had already decorated with cap and bells the hero of the blunders of Strasburg and Boulogne, the trainer of the tame eagle, the special constable of London?" It has puzzled acuter politicians than Mr Stahr to reply to this question, which millions have asked. The riddle interests him, and he runs about on all sides seeking its solution. He has little success, and evidently himself mistrusts the ingenious and original conclusion to which he at last comes, that the election of Louis Napoleon was a homage to the hereditary principle. "When I recently, on my way across the plain of Satory, asked a countryman if he had given his vote to the President, his reply was, 'Of course! was he not the rightful heir, his uncle's legitimate successor?' This may sound ill for the republican education of the people of the French republic; but it is the truth. The principle of hereditary rule may be perfectly incompatible with that of 'liberty and equality,' but it is, or was, (at the time of Louis Napoleon's election,) the prevailing principle in the heads of the French rural population. 'One must know the French peasantry as I know them, who have grown up amongst them,' lately said to me the representative De Flotte, 'to find their conduct in this matter quite natural. The French peasant has only one fundamental idea in politics, and that is derived from his own family relations. That fundamental idea is the sacredness and necessity of hereditary right. That the territorial property of the father should descend to the son, or next of kin, seems to him the main condition or all human existence.'" Admitting, for argument's sake, the soundness of this statement, and that the French peasant is thus devoted to the hereditary principle, the natural inference is that, when he perceived his country to be in a state of transition, ruled by provisional intruders, and anxiously looking out for a more permanent chief of the state, he should have hoisted the white cockade, and tossed up his beaver for the Fifth Henry. Messrs Stahr and De Flotte explain why he did not do this. "The French peasant has no longer any sort of sympathy with the elder Bourbons. For him the glory of Louis XIV. is far too remote. What else he knows of them is, that they brought the foreigner into his country, and on that account he curses them." In this there is some truth. The old royalist spirit still lingers in certain departments of France, but in the country generally the Count de Chambord's partisans are rather intelligent and influential than numerous. Should he ascend the throne, it will not be in virtue of zeal for the principle of legitimacy or of personal attachment to himself, but because the nation will see in his accession the best guarantee of order and economical administration. These two things are the real wants and desires of the mass of the population. The peasant who told Mr Stahr he wished for peace and light taxation, spoke the feeling of a great majority of Frenchmen. "The dynasty of Orleans," says the professor's informant, continuing his explanation of the concurrence of circumstances which raised Louis Napoleon to the president's chair, "never enjoyed much prestige amongst the rural population, who did not forgive old Louis Philippe for having violated the principle of hereditary right." This is rather far-fetched. If the provinces cared little for Louis Philippe, it was because he had troubled himself little about them. True to his system of centralisation, Paris, to him, was France, and ungrateful Paris it was that finally abandoned and expelled him. It is unnecessary to go out of one's way to seek reasons for the fact, that when, in December 1848, the French, exhausted by nine months' anarchy and misery, and ashamed of those February follies into which a few deluded and designing men had led them, cast about for a ruler under whom they might hope for respite and breathing time, none turned a wishful or expectant eye to any member of the house of Orleans. The family had been weighed and found wanting. From the astute politician, "whose word no man relied on," and who reaped in his latter days those bitter fruits of usurpation and anarchy whose seeds he had sown in his prime, down to the youngest of the sons to whose advancement he had sacrificed his conscience and his country, and who, in the supreme hour of peril and confusion, were found utterly deficient in princely and manly qualities, in self-possession, energy, and resource, there was not one of the line whom France would trust. The time was too short that had elapsed since the picture of selfishness and incapacity had been exhibited to wondering Europe: the cause had been unable to revive from the grievous and self-inflicted shock; it lay supine and seemingly dead, awaiting the day when intrigue and hypocrisy should galvanise it into a precarious vitality. When the crisis of May 1852 arrives, we shall see what has been the effect of the complicated manœuvres of the house of Orleans, which, in December 1848, stood so low in public estimation. Then, according to Mr Stahr, Buonapartism was the only political creed that appealed to the prejudices and feelings of the French peasant, and it required no great skill to get him to write upon his election-ticket the name of the prince whom he looked upon as the rightful heir of the Emperor. "He did it of his own accord, out of a conviction that he was performing an act of justice, and that hereditary right demanded it. Other motives concurred. The forty-five-centime impost had embittered the countryman against the Republic, which had increased instead of lightening his load. Upon the Democrat-Socialists he looked distrustfully. He would have nought to say to those 'partageux' (dividers.) He cared nothing for the fine speeches of parliamentary orators. The peasant is by nature taciturn, and has little confidence in assemblies of great talkers. He was not disposed to make a stir about the freedom of the press, of which he makes no use. His political understanding did not extend beyond one wish, and that wish was, a strong government, which should secure to him the enjoyment and inheritance of his property. And who could do that better than a Napoleon – Napoleon himself, the Emperor of Béranger? – for there are many places where the country people have never believed the Emperor dead." The clever author of Jerome Paturot has expressed a similar opinion as regards the prevalence of this scarcely credible delusion amongst the uneducated classes in certain districts of France. It does not appear to be entirely confined to that country. "I myself am witness," says Mr Stahr, "that, in the year 1848, a peasant of a province of Northern Germany, on hearing of the new French revolution, and of its first consequences in Germany, remarked that, 'without doubt old Buonaparte had a finger in the pie.'" It is Mr Stahr's belief that Louis Napoleon is destined to dispel, by his inability to fulfil the expectations of the ignorant portion of his constituents, that Buonapartist prestige to which he partly owed his election, and that attachment to the hereditary principle which the professor assumes still to exist in France. "The nephew of the great Emperor," he says, "is selected by fate to disturb, if not to destroy, the idolatry with which a large portion of the French nation has hitherto regarded the name and memory of its greatest tyrant. Napoleon the Second throws a grey shadow over Napoleon the First."