Cavendish

A Fragment of English Life.

Originally published in The Keepsake for 1828 (Hurst, Chance, and Co.; Nov 1827).

Dangle. So, here we have it.—THEATRICAL INTELLIGENCE EXTRAORDINARY! We hear there is a new tragedy in rehearsal at Drury Lane Theatre, said to be written by a gentleman well known in the theatrical world; if we may allow ourselves to give credit to the report of the performers, who, truth to say, are in general but indifferent judges, this piece abounds with the most striking and received beauties of modern composition.

The Critic.

        Cavendish was a man of birth and fashionable society. Master of a handsome estate, polished by travel, and at the age of five-and-twenty, he seemed to possess all the elements of popularity with the high world; yet his popularity was by no means decisive.
        On his return from travel, which had been long, and through rarely visited regions, he had certainly applied himself with due vigour to the habitual pursuits of his rank and time. He played at the clubs, he quadrilled at Almack's, and he drove a four-in-hand. Yet he had rapidly found his vigour flag; and began to think, that he had discovered in himself a peculiar inaptitude for the essential purposes of first-rate existence. He had been a Meltonian in the height of the season, rode the most expensive horses, and was in at the death in some of those fox-hunts, which will never be forgotten round a Meltonian table. He began at length to grow weary of the classics of the stable, and involuntarily to ask himself, with Chesterfield, "Does any gentleman ever hunt twice?" He sold his hunters, and took leave of the finest sporting country in Europe.
        At Newmarket he had won a cup, and might have gone on in a career of plates and honours; but of this too he grew weary, and abandoned the standhouse, to the astonishment and very considerable contempt of his right honourable fellow jockeys. Literature seized him in this interregnum. He gave up the day to his pen, and the night to his meditations, lived for a month among visions of beauty and dreams of sentiment, wrote a tragedy, and enraptured himself into a nervous fever. On this production his afterhours enabled him to look with a cooler eye; and it was probably the only effort of his mind, on which he ever looked a second time. His honest opinion of it was, that it was unnatural and impossible, a compound of extravagant language and extravasated feeling. It was accordingly sentenced to death, and thrown into a heap, to be hereafter dealt with according to the rigour of law.
        Jack Touchstone was a gambler; a loose liver through the clubs, and who might have been hanged without the inquiry of any human being. But he had been a neighbour of Cavendish at Oxford, and on the strength of his contiguity he had established himself as a regular borrower.
        On the morning of a general execution of condemned papers, Jack paid his visit, and begged the loan of a few cool hundreds, for "just twenty-four hours." Cavendish on this morning was firmer than usual, and Jack was retiring with a popular air on his lips, and ruin in his heart, when his eye was caught by "FLORANTHE, a tragedy," laid upon the top of a pile of letters, bills, and newspapers, palpably intended for an immediate auto da fé.
        Jack had been a poet at college, and written such verses as men write at college. Hurdis had allowed, that, "favente Minerva," he might, in time, write as good heroics as even himself; and a Sapphic ode on Dr. Parr's wig, the habitual peg to hang junior genius upon, had shook the common room with inextinguishable laughter, from Jackson down to Kett, from the pope of Christchurch down to harmless Horseface, or, more orientally, from the cedar of Lebanon even to the hyssop that groweth on the wall. He now took up the MS., turned over a few pages lightly, was apparently struck, "found himself engrossed," drew a chair, and sat down to a steady perusal.
        Cavendish, who had been busy with some arrangements in his bookshelves, that he might avoid the official ceremony of turning Touchstone out of the room, was awakened by—"Who wrote this tragedy?"
        "Psha! nobody! it is foolery, waste paper, going to expiate its absurdities in that fire," said Cavendish.
        Touchstone rose with the tragedy in his hand. "My dear fellow, I have a request to make of you; it is not to trouble you about your 'shining ducats, good my lord!' Confound all money-matters! they ought not to be thought or talked of out of the infernal dens where stockbrokers and Jews hatch them. But, in sober earnest, will you let me take this MS. with me till to-morrow; a short loan, my boy, and to be returned with interest; ay, compound interest, when you will."
        Cavendish laughed at him, and attempted to get possession of the tragedy. But the resistance was more fortunate than the attack.
        Jack read fragment by fragment, as for his life, was charmed, affected, enraptured, and finally plunged the treasure into his pocket.
        Cavendish had been too long acquainted with Touchstone under his character of living by his wits, to be altogether secure, that this poetic fascination was of the most sincere order.
        But, let no poet be of my privy-council; let no secret of my soul or body be trusted to the keeping of any man who has ever "invoked the nine." If there had been a poet among the priests of Ceres, St. Jerome would not have had to bewilder himself in the inextricable labyrinth of the Eleusinian mysteries, or bishop Warburton to make his unwieldy wisdom ridiculous, or Gibbon to laugh at both, and blunder deeper than either. The "mysteries" would have been, ages ago, mysteries no more. The insidious praise of some sonnet of the Hierophant would have melted its way to his heart, and thawed out the whole rigid secret in return. All men have their weakness, but, as Cicero says of country, "Omnes omnium imbecillitates Poesis sola complectitur."
        In short, Cavendish, contemptuous as he was of the world's opinion, and resolute in his conclusions that he had no "art of poetry" within him, was not altogether insensible to the effect of his tragedy upon his unfortunate and reckless friend. It was now also too completely in Touchstone's possession to be withdrawn, except by that manual force, which it would be unbecoming to employ. But he felt within himself a sudden regret, that "this man, capable of so much better things," should be running the road to ruin with his eyes open. In the course of this inquiry, which Jack acknowledged as a proof that kindness was not yet fled with Astrea from the earth, and that the "noblest feelings were naturally to be found in company with first-rate poetic inspiration;" Cavendish proceeded to discover, "that it was an infinite pity to see a man of Touchstone's taste, native powers, and peculiar susceptibility of poetry," suffering those qualities to be exhausted in the hopeless career of the clubs. Jack was affected to the very depths of his sensorium by this overflowing of the soul of "a friend and man of genius;" and lamented that he had not received such advice before, couched as it was in language, of which, "he must say, with whatever fear of offending, that the wisdom was equalled only by the kindness and the eloquence."
        He now rose to take his leave, and, incapable of speech, was, with a squeeze of the hand and irresistible conviction in every feature of his dejected visage, slowly walking out of the room; when Cavendish, who felt that he could not suffer him to depart to a cheerless meal, or possibly to no meal at all, insisted on his remaining to dinner.
        They dined together: the banquet was worthy of the hotel: the claret and champagne were better than the hotel ever gave but to established connoisseurs. Cavendish was prevailed on, between the third and fourth bottle, even to let his friend read aloud some of his fragments. College remembrances quoted with pleasure, an infallible evidence that the brain is not in the state in which it ought to be; club anecdotes, things equally leaden to the ante-dinner ear; and the tracasseries and involvements of fashionable life, tales to which nothing but a surcharge of Chateau Margot could give freshness or flavour; made the moments fly till an hour even too late to dress for the duchess's evening party. At two in the morning the friends parted more friends than ever; Cavendish plunging himself into bed with a dizzy eye and a boiling brain, and Jack walking off with a programme of anew epic, added to his tragedy, and a cheque on Coutts's for five hundred pounds.
        Cavendish saw no more of his rapturous critic for a fortnight, and then came a hurried note from Bath, apologizing for the non-repayment of the loan; but "business of the most pressing and painful order, family deaths, &c. had hurried him out of town, and the arrangements consequent had detained him at a reluctant distance from his excellent and valued friend."
        Cavendish felt that the money was gone, but money was not among his idols; and he was more disposed to laugh than be angry at Jack's dupery. Accidentally casting his eye over a Bath paper on the same morning, he saw a panegyric in the most professional style upon the peculiar elegance of a "curricle just launched by Mr. Touchstone," with liveries that threw all the beau monde into the shade: into this phenomenon had been melted his five hundred pounds. As the loan was hopeless, he made no effort to reclaim it; but unwilling to trust his name into such hands, he wrote a cool and direct demand for his tragedy. A week after he saw a vision of Jack by the light of a lamp hung over the door of one of those minor hells, which probably give as true a portrait of the greater one as can be given here.
        He went up to him: Touchstone found escape impossible, and without a moment's hesitation came forward open handed, and perfectly rejoiced to see "the very best fellow in the land of the living."
        Cavendish demanded his papers. Touchstone acknowledged, that relying on his friend's kindness, and actually unable to suppress his own delight, he had talked of the work at some soirées in Bath. "The report had got wind, as every thing does in Bath, and finally had induced a particular request of a London manager, a man of very sufficient tact in matters of the kind, to be allowed to look over the MS."
        The permission had been at length unluckily extorted, and the result was, that "the manager had felt such unquestionable certainty of its electrifying the public," that he could not be prevailed on to return it! "It is now," added Jack, "I fear, actually in rehearsal. I know your opinion upon the subject, and having no excuse to make for letting it out of my hands, I will own, that I rather avoided the eclaircissement. However, I am right glad that it is now over."
        Touchstone had directed his friend's steps towards his hotel, and had brought up the detail of his regrets accurately to the door. Cavendish was angry, but his nature was forgiving; the misdemeanour was, after all, only one of zeal, and what was more to the purpose, it was now beyond remedy. He asked Jack to supper.
        The rehearsals went on, and Touchstone's visits were more frequent, as slight alterations were suggested by new ideas of the manager, or, what every one knows to be of the first import in these matters, as the principal actors and actresses thought proper to command.
        Cavendish was amused by his introduction to the gens de comédie. He found more good humour than he could have conjectured among the rival sovereigns of the empire before and behind the curtain. No man had a more sentient eye for beauty; and he found beauty in abundance round him. But he kept his soul in patience, and walked through the fiery ordeal, which has scorched the fine gold of so many coronets, with the coolness of a philosopher. The brightest eyes or the most pathetic lips of syren or soubrette left him heart-whole; and it was soon voted by the whole body of those fair runners at the ring, that there was no chance of adding the Cavendish plate to the Craven and the Derby.
        The rehearsals went on. Touchstone was active, and every day brought up his report of progress from the theatre; generally, like reports in a higher house, accompanied by a proposition for a Supply.
        The tragedy was at length announced: it flourished on post and pillar in gigantic characters; it made brief pilgrimages on poles, in company with the Solar Elixir and the Balm of Gilead; it took its place with British boldness upon walls, where placarding was denounced "with all the rigour of the law;" it covered a share of the chalked renown of patent blacking and British coffee, and flamed in the very gaslight of Pall-mall and royalty.
        Cavendish was a firm-nerved man; but he was not more than man. He felt the agitations of authorship, and when Touchstone came, with glee on his countenance and congratulation on his lips, to announce this approach to consummation, the author could have wished, that his pen had been like that of the famous magician Xarifa Abdoul, which no sooner touched the ink than the bottle blew up like gunpowder. This business hung on his mind, and fretted him into perpetual irritation. He by instinct avoided the more crowded resorts, those Rialtoes of men, where he should have found his offspring impaled before the eyes of the multitude. By dexterous detours he evaded the sight; and, notwithstanding Touchstone's rival dexterity, he had one evening made his way to the steps of Brookes's unassailed by placard, when, as he stopped for a moment to speak to some passer by, he was approached by a miserable object with a parcel of printed papers in his hand. He was about to repel the man, but he saw Touchstone's eye upon him, and in a fit of forced resolution snatched one of the papers. It was not a playbill. He felt suddenly relieved, and threw down a guinea. The mendicant gave him in return a profusion of benedictions and bows, and was turning away, when his back showed an enormous sheet covered with every colour of the rainbow, and bearing in Patagonian letters—"FLORANTHE—A NEW TRAGEDY!"
        Cavendish shrank within the hall, and in after moments has been heard to acknowledge, that he then first could conceive the feelings ofRegulus in his barrel. His name had been kept secret under the strictest injunctions: yet, he "dreaded in each bush an officer," thought every eye in the club fixed on him in full recognition of his crime, and shrank home by the darker and more solitary streets for an hour, doubling, till clear of populace or placard he could dart into his hotel.
        Let no man, sitting in tranquillity over his bottle of port and his County Chronicle, far from the world and the things of the world—but this is too humble a comparison—let no honest prebendary, unperturbed and imperturbable as his own stall, awaking to work but like his parish bell, when some whiteheaded son of toil has gone to sleep among the thorns and thistles grazed on by the vicarial steed; or when its hebdomadal tongue summons him to the use of his own; let no county member with a dissolution of parliament still six years in futurity, or commissioner of woods and forests, or retired statesman, forced to save his country at the rate of three thousand a year, or judge advocate-general, imbedded in peace and five thousand British pounds, exacted duly as the Turk's tribute; let no human epicurean deity, thus cushioned in slumber and sleek prosperity, none of the prize cattle of our unfeathered two-legged rationality, penned and pampered for the mere purpose of showing the depth of adipocire, which can be nurtured round the heart of man, deny the existence of this nervous misery. He may be incapable of feeling it; he may be incapable of any thing on earth beyond scribbling his name in hieroglyphics on the back of a frank, or signing a receipt for his salary; he may think, that there is no other use of the art of Cadmus; but, if he be not of this mind, let him write even a farce, and he shall forthwith know "the nerve where agonies are born." Of all the appeals to nerves, of all the irritations that vex our mortal nature, of all the stings that at once awake and fever human sensibility, the most nervous, stimulant, and feverish, is the having anything whatever to do with the authorship of the stage.
        The last rehearsal had passed, and the awful night was announced in a note from Touchstone, followed by the presence of that most active and enthusiastic of all prôneurs, to arrange a dinner of friends, where he should take it upon himself to relieve Cavendish of all trouble, speak to the landlord, and order the particular Burgundy. This partie was altogether of Jack's selection; a little knot of incomparable persons, "deeply interested in every thing that could interest the world of letters," remarkably delicate in their tastes, and, above all, anxious in the extreme to have the gratification of Mr. Cavendish's acquaintance.
        The proposal was easily acceded to; and a dozen names were invited by Jack, not one of which their entertainer had ever heard before: but it was no time for question. The eventful night hurried on as if time had mounted double wings. Answers of the most obliging kind had been received from all the guests; a morning note from Jack announced, that he had engaged a private box, to which the partie should adjourn after dinner; and that the whole corps dramatique, from the manager down to the most minute appendage that wore a petticoat, were all alike rapturous in their opinion of his "incomparable Floranthe."
        The day passed on dully, drearily, with a leaden retardation unaccountable. Time, which had rushed through a fortnight with feverish velocity, seemed to be taking its final rest. Cavendish acknowledged, in after days, that he never looked so often at his watch, never yawned so consecutively, and never envied with such thorough contrast the light steps of the waiters and chambermaids as they went humming up and down stairs.
        Yet "Time and the hour run through the roughest day." The maitre d'hotel, a grinning Frenchman, was summoned, and announced that "dans une heure," all would be ready à merveille. Exactly thirty minutes before the appointed moment came a note from Touchstone. It deeply regretted, that he must deny himself the pleasure which he expected in attending his valued friend's dinner; but, as the note expressed it, "Why should there be any reserves between them now? The fact is, my dear Cavendish, that a scoundrel holder of a slight security of mine, probably observing my visits to your hotel, has had me followed; and at this most unlucky crisis, when all my feelings were embarked in your cause, and when I should have willingly sacrificed half a life to be present at your triumph to-night, I am in the officer's hands for a sum that, after my friend's generous sacrifices, I actually could not bring myself to name." A postscript, however, saved his blushes, and named the sum, which was three hundred pounds.
        Cavendish, in supreme scorn, tore the billet into a thousand fragments. He knew his correspondent by this time, and was satisfied that the arrest, if it existed at all, was a mere arrangement to extract the money from him. He left the application unanswered, and ordered his carriage, that he might escape all further appeals at least for the day. But he had scarcely congratulated himself on his fortitude, when the successive ringings at the hotel door told him what he had utterly cast out of his mind, that he had a dinner party, and that it was arrived.
        His irritation had now reached its height. What was he to do with a dozen people, every soul of them strangers? To get rid of them was now out of the question; yet to receive them, to do the honours, even to sit out dinner among them, was, in his present vexed and nervous state of spirits, an utter impossibility. There was but one alternative. The cheque was despatched, and in a quarter of an hour in came Jack in full dress and good humour, anticipating the evening's triumph for his friend with a buoyant zeal, which was re-echoed by the company, until even the frowning brow of Cavendish was smoothed. The progress of a first performance has a peculiar interest to every amateur; but how infinitely keener must it be to the author. As Touchstone led the way into the private box, Cavendish felt as if he were making an entrance on the scaffold. Every eye of the two thousand that filled the handsome and crowded theatre seemed flashing criticism on him; and he involuntarily whispered to Jack, that he thought he had never seen so sullen and angry looking an assemblage.
        "Merely a little of the nervousness of authorship, my dear fellow," was the reply. "To be sure, the town is capricious, and tragedy is not supremely popular; but, between ourselves, I have adopted a first-rate contrivance to deprive fortune of her fickleness, for which I must have your pardon." Cavendish listened. The explanation proceeded sotto voce. "I ordered a hundred pounds worth of tickets," said Touchstone, with his glance perusing the countenance of the listener. "With what imaginable purpose?" asked Cavendish. "Hah!" was the reply: "I knew you would not suffer it, customary and even absolutely necessary as it is on all similar occasions; you would talk in your high strain about forcing public opinion, packing an audience, and so forth; so I determined to volunteer the affair, and in consequence supplied the house with well-wishers to us and to our tragedy." He had gradually drawn a fragment of paper from his pocket. "This," said he tardily, "is the memorandum of the transaction." It was a formal account of tickets to the number assigned. Cavendish bore this demand better than the rest: the agony of being driven off the stage haunted him. No price could be too high for security: he placed the hundred pounds in the hands of his indefatigable friend.
        The-tragedy went on amid the bustle of opening and shutting doors, the calling for places, and the clamour of the gallery. "This is always the fate of the first act," was the unanimous consolation of the group in the box, and the author was partially comforted. With the progress of the play, however, the clamour did not die. Bursts of boisterous applause, mingled with roars of disapprobation, kept up the anxiety of the night; yet the tragedy showed the work of a man of genius, though of unpractised theatrical skill. Passages of unquestionable beauty started forth from time to time. A deep interest was stirred for the leading characters, and Cavendish was silently pleased with his own labour. Yet the errors of the design, brought out by the strong light of performance, struck him with tenfold force, and made him pronounce a great tragedy the most difficult exploit of the poetic mind. The fifth act at length came; it fought its way through contending applause and censure; and the fall of the curtain was attended with a battle in the pit between the admirers and the opponents of the "virgin muse." In the private box, however, there was the most admirable unanimity. Every voice was in favour of the brilliancy, the force, the originality, the whole countless sum of excellences, that "must raise the author to the highest pinnacle of fame." Cavendish listened, doubted, denied, yet the honied stream stole into his heart; his opposition was silenced, and the whole party returned with him to supper.
        Touchstone's congratulations knew no bounds; he proposed healths immeasurable: yet even wine palls in time. Cards were called for: Cavendish looked on: he was at length induced to sit down. Morning found them at play, and their host paid for his initiation into the illustrious science of criticism one thousand pounds.
        Evening found him in bed, weary, headached, and irritated by the consciousness of his having been an open dupe. A newspaper lay on his dressing-table; his eye wandered over it till the word "theatre" at the head of a long file of closely printed paragraphs irresistibly fixed him: he found an account of his tragedy. Never was pen less dipped in the milk of human kindness. The fair "Floranthe" was treated with the direct reverse of gallantry. "Feeble dialogue, improbable situation, impossible character," were the gentlest description. He flung the paper from him with a muttered curse upon the art of printing. The critique closed with some palliative acknowledgments of occasional poetic beauty, striking thought, sudden interest, and so forth; but winding up the whole by the unequivocal opinion of the critic, that it must have been the "worn-out work of some veteran scribbler for the stage, who trespassed on the impunity, that had suffered his success hitherto, and in whom it would be a matter not less of common gratitude than of common sense never to molest the public again."
        Cavendish, already fevered by the night, felt his brain boil. It might be weakness to give way to a verdict so often lightly brought in, but he was new to the trial; and his first order, on starting from his pillow, was for horses to whirl him from the city and the land, where newspapers could put a man on the rack, and where every living soul that he met read newspapers. His valet answered the bell, bringing in a note from his friend Touchstone. The note contained an extract from a newspaper. Cavendish shrank at the sight. He, however, summoned his fortitude, and prepared for a repetition of the bitterest draught that he had ever tasted. The extract was a superb panegyric. The fair "Floranthe" was exalted to the third heaven. "Situation, story, character,language, all incomparable. The whole, though not free from some minor deficiencies, yet giving promise of the most splendid day since the golden times of the old English drama."
        But the panegyric came too late. The bitterness could not be washed away; and even the sweet but added to the disgust of the disastrous author. He had spared the satire, but he tore the panegyric, flung it into the fire, and was about to fling its envelope after it, when his eyes absolutely flashed at its contents; a request that he "would pardon the sincere admiration that had induced Touchstone to put the MS. into the hands of a distinguished publisher, who was about to give it to the world in the course of the next day."
        This was the accumulation. To have seen his blunders brought out before an audience was mortifying enough; to have been reviled even anonymously for them through every province and region where an English newspaper can penetrate, was high offence and vexation. But all this was ephemeral, trivial, air and vapour, to the cold detail of them in publication, the perpetual memento, the food for undying ridicule; the weekly, monthly, quarterly, annual pillory of his crimes against the muse and mankind. The partial suppression of his name was nothing. "It would be found out, it must be disclosed by some accident; nay, he would scorn to suppress it. He disdained to throw upon the head of another even the contempt that was determined for his own." Yet there was one resource still: the publisher might be propitiated by money. He despatched his servant with orders to get the MS. out of the profane hands, in which this nestling of his honour lay. The man found it still in Touchstone's possession, who "regretting, as he most sincerely did, the effects of his too hasty zeal, yet had it not now in his power to retract." The valet closed the negotiation by forcing a hundred pounds, the declared douceur to the refractory publisher, into Jack's hands. "Floranthe" was brought back, and instantly committed to the flames. Cavendish fled his country, and traversed Swisserland north and south, east and west, for six months to come. Jack hired his original curricle, drove down to Bath, scattered the story among the clubs with infinite pleasantry, and scattered after it the more than two thousand pounds which he had netted by the help of the fair "Floranthe." The first salutation to Cavendish on his return to England was a note from his "most sincere and unfortunate friend, Jack Touchstone," dated "King's Bench," and begging the loan of five guineas.