by Laman Blanchard.
Originally published in Ainsworth's Magazine: A Miscellany of Romance (Chapman and Hall) vol.2 #10 (Nov 1842).
"Yet a fine family is a fine thing.
Provided—" Byron.
Sorrow moves people in many ways. Young ladies have but a single resource, yet a most effectual one; it is always—that of running up stairs, shutting themselves in, and having a good cry. Man is more apt to take down his meerschaum, or fly to the cognac, or to his club.
Now, Mr. Dix the younger, when disturbed in his mind, adopts neither of these plans. He flies for relief to that magic agent, the pen. It is a feather that shews which way the wind of his sighs is blowing. His tears trickle darkly like ink-drops, and he writes his "Confessions" to a sympathizing friend. How many of his blotted sheets are now lying before us—sheets gloomy as night—yet night when the heavens are starry, for they are sprinkled all over with * * * *!
From the tangled threads of his fitful and desultory correspondence we weave the simple narrative of a Father's sorrows.
Dix the younger and his present biographer were schoolfellows; and when we parted outside the hall-door, at the close of our academic career, he looked just boy enough to go back and be taught his first alphabetic lesson. Such an excess of juvenility never before arrived unaltered at years of maturity. At twenty-two, you might have offered him halt-a-crown to buy marbles, and packed him off with a raspberry-tart in his hand to eat as he went along. Five years later, you could not have seen him smoking a cigar without a feeling of disgust at the precocious taste for tobacco evinced by the rising generation.
Yet at that very time the youthful Dix was not only in full legal possession of a fine stag-eyed, stately wife, as large as life, but three full-length, domestic cherubim. This trio has since been doubled, and the age of our young friend is now thirty-nine. But his looks do not acknowledge even that small number. A mere boy in point of years (for thirty-nine are but three-dozen-and-three), his cheek has still the fresh glow, and his step the lively spring of twenty-five.
Hine illæ lachrymæ. It seems that where nature bestows the appearance of youth, she plants the desire to retain the reputation of the reality. Dix—Juvenis Dix, as he is called by his acquaintances—has always entertained a horror of two things—first, of looking old; and next, of being old. Time, instead of making him pay as the tribute fell due, has given him long credit, and in return for such tenderness, he is, like some other debtors, reluctant to pay at all. His spirit pants that its moderate stock of flesh may flourish in immortal youth. He modestly desires that it may continue morning all the day through. He craves, for his own special enjoyment, perpetual spring; and could sit contentedly in the April sunshine, "piping as though he should never grow old." He is ambitious of eclipsing the renown of
"The Marvellous Boy who perished in his pride,"
simply by not perishing in the pride of marvellous boyhood. To lose youth is, to him, like losing all. He fancies that at Time's feast nothing comes after the soup. His idea of the half-way-house of life is that of a living tomb, next door to the actual sepulchre. He shudders at the thought of looking forward—it quite turns his head, the other way.
Tell him that the income-tax will be taken off in three years, and he feels no sensation of pleasure—but mentally ejaculates, with a deep sigh, "I shall then be forty-two!" To turn that terrible corner, forty, is, in his view of things, but to walk onward as chief mournet at the funeral of youth and happiness.
The dreary image which he most frequently conjures up presents a vision of himself, standing shivering upon the verge of the wide, blank, desolate level of Middle-Age, on which he must necessarily enter—walking by the side of Time, but on the wrong side—with the old Traveller's figure evermore between him and the sun, throwing its broad shadow over and around him. He sees himself clad in the livery of mid-life—brown locks, turned up with gray, a tinge of red upon the nose, an enlargement of some inches in the waist, and an ominous stoop in the shoulders.
Dangers are terrible in proportion to their proximity; and as a chimney on fire next door is more alarming than a conflagration at a distance, the image of Middle-Age at noon-day is more appalling to him than the spectral figure of Second-Childishness in the deep midnight of time.
Indeed, of aught that may lie beyond the first fatal turn out of the paradise of youth he has little dread, or none. To be very old is scarcely so bad as to be elderly; and even the elderly period has less to daunt him than the intermediate season which forms the approach to it. He dreams of wigs, spectacles, and flannel; the crutch and the cushion; the uneasy chair and the deaf, self-willed nurse, with the "Whole Duty of Man," read aloud by a good charity-boy, in consideration of an annual guinea subscribed to the parish school;—yet he wakes up from the prophetic vision without affright. Not so, when, with eyes wide open, he surveys the thing into which he is soon to be transformed; and sees the laughing, buoyant, airy Juvenis Dix settling down into a solidity; the very eye-glass which was only ornamental yesterday being useful to-day; the waistcoat widening, the Hoby shrinking into a drab gaiter, the whisker exhibiting symptoms of the coming frost; and that hand, which the conscious kid, deserting its dam, might have exultingly approached, saying, "Skin me!" buried gloveless in the breeches pocket, jingling a bunch of keys.
To avoid the most vague suspicion of his being within a good ten years of such a declension, and to vindicate his really youthful appearance, what desperate course was he to take? The first that occurred to him, seeing these breakers a-head, was to throw some of his domestic cargo overboard. With those six children grouped around him, all pretension to juvenility must be a joke. To affect the "young man" any longer, with that awful union of the ladies' boarding school and Eton College at his heels, was clearly ridiculous. His great girls and boys were living witnesses of the hypocrisy of his young looks, and by the aid of such spectacles, everybody could see the lie in his face. He might as well carry his age, as a cabman his number, upon a badge suspended from his neck.
Nay, worse—much worse! Who would believe his number to be the true one? Who on earth would be so absurdly credulous as to take his word for thirty-nine only? It so happens, most unfortunately, that the flock of the Dixes is an uncommonly "fine" one. The girls are astonishingly tall of their age, and the boys are prodigiously big lads for their years. In fact, a progeny so truly Patagonian is seldom seen. Nobody could guess the father of the youngest to be much short of forty; and as for the eldest, that majestic and magnificent Juno of eighteen, who would dream of asking after her dear papa but with reference to "the old genfleman's health"—adding, that "at his years" these winds must be very trying! To look at her, you must say she was
" Married, charming, chaste, and twenty-three."
How her father idolized her—when she was very little! How fondly he watched her dawning graces, and rejoiced when elderly ladies cried, "Why, she has grown since Tuesday last!" She was his fairest as well as his first—"her mother's image in her face;" but, alas! he little reflected how soon she was to emulate her mother's figure also. As she grew, his paternal joy diminished; as she began to realize all his hopes, he began to be disappointed. He saw in her rising splendour his own sunset. He took vast pride in her—but felt that it was at his own expense. Still she grew apace, with the most undutiful consistency; still, without the smallest regard to her father's feelings, she shot up faster than the years could travel. People would now remark that she really began to make him look quite elderly. If anybody humanely observed that he seemed young to be the father of that fine-grown girl, somebody else would be sure to insinuate—"Yes, at this distance; but see him closer, he looks his age;—forty-five, if he's a day."
This was more than young flesh and blood could bear; and at last, since nothing could restore to that stately nymph the little-girlish appearance which would have charmed her sire, a whisper went forth—at least, it was allowed to be supposed in some quarters—that an elder brother of Dix's had died in India. Juvenis was, of course, the best fellow in the world, and had brought up his niece nobly—quite like one of his own. "And it's the more kind of him, for she's tall enough for two of them," urged a malignant friend, who was in the paternal secret. The eldest thus disposed of, not parentally, but, in a manner, parenthetically, Dix the younger turned with double fondness and joy to his second daughter. At thirteen she was a mere child, and his soul was wrapped up in her infantine simplicity. She, indeed, who was "ever fair" would be "ever young" also. That affectionate little thing was in no hurry to make her papa look prematurely middle-aged, not she; and he felt that had he as many daughters as Danaus, he could love them all passionately, so that they never grew any taller. But at length, to his consternation, the Patagonian principle began again to develop itself; and on his return after a six months' tour on the Continent, he found his diminutive darling lengthened into a gawky of the first class. In fact, Miss Regan Dix had acted as treacherously as Miss Goneril had done before her, and if there had been a Cordelia, she would have done the same. Forgetful of her fond father's wishes, his reasonings, his caresses, the second girl shot up as fast as she could; and people again began to say, in that considerate tone which is more
exasperating than the depreciatory one—"Ah!—well!—he bears his years very tolerably, and might almost be taken for a young man—by candle-light!"
Of course, if an elder brother can be put to death in India, a middle-aged uncle can as readily be despatched in China; and it was not difficult, therefore, in quarters where people knew no better, to whisper off Miss Regan into a convenient cousinship in the background. But then—there were the boys!
Now, if the young ladies were resolute in their growth, the young gentlemen were still more obstinate;—grow they would; and each in turn, as he arrived at the term of fourteen years, elicited the same exclamation from every visitor,—"Well, I declare if Master Sampson hasn't grown quite a man!" So they rose, one above the other—incipient "life-guardsmen, even in their round jackets. All that he could do, as a father, to check them in their unfilial design of superannuating him, failed. It was in vain that he offered them frequent sips of his evening toddy, in the superstitious hope that it might stop the growth of the young giants; they sipped, and flourished "the more; he only hastened on the day when each six-feet of a son would ring the bell for another glass, and mix a tumbler for himself.
How often has he sat contemplating the phenomena of their daily growth; sighing to observe the lamentable shortness of their trowsers, and the surprising length of their straps; wondering as well as grieving at the rapidity with which the cuffs of their jackets continually crept up to their elbows. It was a hopeless case; they were remorselessly bent on making a Methusaleh of him. Already had he been proclaimed, at a little party of young people, "quite the father of a family;" and when he danced, a lady (turned fifty) was charmed to see him so agile—"it was hardly to be expected," she said, "at our time of life."
But what could he do? Master Sampson, lighting his cigar at the lamp-post, might fairly pass for his brother at night; but then poor Juvenis could not go on disowning all his children, providing for each in succession, in a distant part of the world, a deceased parent who never existed. Still, if any simple person chose to mistake them all for his sisters and nephews—or even if the supposition were hazarded that he had married a widow with a prodigiously fine family—he had not the heart to contradict it! How happy he considered Partridge, in not being the real father of that strapping fellow, Tom Jones!
Even now when he looks at the boys, his heart sinks within him. He cannot help thinking that they have stolen a march upon him. He married so very early in life,—and they seem to have taken such an ungenerous advantage of it! To conspire against him at thirty-nine, and try, by a display of physical force, to make him out fifty-two! Degenerate children!
Other curious considerations, moreover, arise out of the largeness of scale on which the youngsters spring up. They have grown too big for correction. He remembers various pleasing experiments of his, with cane and whip, which took place only the other day; and now—he is left to meditate mournfully on the strange possibility of a man whipping his own boy, and getting the worst of it! When he hears the grandmammas of society admiring his boys, crying,—"What splendid fellows!" he sighs to think that he shall cane them no more, and ejaculates,—"Who would be a father!"
Nor does he fail to shudder at the number of daring spirits—the kind of "young France"—he has been bringing about his domestic throne. There is such a want of the venerable in him, that he lacks due authority in his house. He foresees that, one by one, all his privileges will be snatched from him by the ferocious affection of his dutiful young tyrants; who invite their friends, lend his books, ransack his writing-desk, carry off his snuff-box, and break his favourite mare's knees, one and all, just as it may suit their wayward pleasure. And he feels all the time, that if he were destined to mount spectacles tomorrow, no boy of his would shed a tear; that if he were doomed to wear a wig, not one of them would break his heart!
Thus have rolled away his recent years; but the calendar never runs round without some half dozen days especially marked out in black-letter. These are the birthdays.
"The sky is overcast, the morning lowers,"
as often as a birthday may arrive. It tells him that the witnesses against him have come into court with stronger evidence than ever. It tells him that an archer has taken fresh aim at his peace, and that a festival must be held in celebration of the event, And then. the reckless, the cruel boastings of the young carousers. "Well, I don't care now; I'm sixteen, and in 1847, I shall be twenty-one. Oh! wont I!" &e. None stop to consider how old their father will be at that dreary period! The young lady who was eighteen last week felicitates herself on being nineteen now; and the urchin whose birthday will not arrive until May, selfishly wishes it would come to-morrow. No, the consequences to the unfortunate and defenceless parent are never once thought of! As Master Walter in the play says in other words, so much for the instinct of filial love!
But a trouble deeper than all, or rather the concentration of all his troubles, now weighs upon the heart of the unhappy Dix the younger, and threatens to visit with at least one wrinkle his hitherto juvenile brow. Dix's daughter is deep in love, and the Honourable Mr. Phibb has sworn to adore her till death. Already has he demanded her in marriage, and already is Mr. Dix convicted of having no valid excuse for refusing. Good family, good character, good estate, crowned with a daughter's admitted and unalterable attachment! Dix the younger has none but the most inconsequential objections to urge when his daughter looks at him. "You are too young." "Mamma was younger!" "Phibb is not old enough." "He's older than you were, papa!" "But I don't want you to marry." "Phibb does."
Dix goes to bed upon the rack, and rises to walk over burning ploughshares. When his heart leaped at the news of a daughter born, he totally forgot that, by an unerring rule of nature, daughters come of daughters, and that as from the sublime to the ridiculous, so from the father to the grandfather, is but a step. Dix the younger knows instinctively, that although the word of consent be not yet spoken, spoken it must be; and he feels that the finishing blow to his youthful existence is already struck. The die is cast—it is all over with him. He sits down, and reads, for hours together, the "Young Man's best Companion," but finds no consolation. His thoughts are all Night-Thoughts—Young's.
There is, of course, a Dix the elder extant—the white-headed and unfidgetty parent of Dix the younger. He has been a grandfather long, and likes it. He is always rubbing one dry chip of a hand against the other, and saying to his son, as often as they meet, "Well,
my boy, I'm seventy-one, and please God, next year I shall be seventy-two." He dates all recent events from the vicissitudes that have occurred to his grandchildren. "Ay, I remember—it was when poor Jasper had the cough;—You're wrong, I tell you—that happened while little Blue-eyes was knitting me my purse;—True, true, I recollect; why it was the very same day that Sampson, the jolly villain, smashed my cucumber-frame." He feels that it would be still more glorious to be a grandfather, if the objects of his pride were rather more numerous. He is quite happy with the few he has—quite; but secretly—for he never breathed this sentiment to a soul—he thinks six a rather shabby allowance. "If there were but eight more, now," is the speculation that sometimes glances across his mind. He likes to read in the newspapers the pleasant stories about "united ages," and how old Mr. Nevergo left behind him eleven children, thirty-eight grandchildren, and about seventy great-grand ones. "Happy dog!" he mutters; and orders the newsman to send him that paper daily for the next three months.
What his silly boy can mean by setting his face against the proposed marriage is to Dix the elder the most incomprehensible of mysteries. His feelings would be in turn equally incomprehensible to Dix the younger, if that juvenile personage did not recollect that when a man has once become a grandfather, his self-existence is at an end, and he is living not for his own sake but for that of others. He cannot include grandfathers in the present generation of men—they are but links between the past and present—wearers of pigtails, by which succeeding races hold on to connect themselves with the times gone by—conveniences whereby Antiquity just contrives to retain a bird's eye view of Posterity. They are curiosities which, as he conceives, would be better preserved in the British Museum, with the other antediluvian remains. How they venture to walk about, perfectly well aware that everybody knows them to be sixty at the least, is to Juvenis Dix one of Time the Jester's riddle-me-rees.
That Juvenis should ever live to be a grandfather! The bare thought has given sharpness and action to his inherent abhorrence of everything "getting into years." He has taken, since the matter of the marriage was mooted, to drinking off, with unusual celerity, his stock of old port, merely to prevent it growing older. He has already had his collection of coins beautifully polished, and, the mould removed from their antique faces, they really look quite lively, fresh as new shillings from the Mint. He has had the celebrated ruins, which disfigured his place in Shropshire, entirely renovated and modernized;agreeing with Fielding's beau, who objects to the picturesque old buildings in Italy, "that they are so damnably out of-repair." His time-worn pictures of the Destruction of the Armada, he has exchanged for the Battle of Navarino, by Mr. Huggins, Hitherto he has not flinched from acknowledging that he was born about the Trafalgar period, but he now entertains serious thoughts of altering the date to Waterloo. If his remorseless children will not allow him to take his stand at thirty-nine—at that advanced age, of which his face furnishes no certificate—he is resolved, in self-defence, to drop down to a quarter of a century. He intends, in a year or two, to retain but a vague remembrance of the Reform Bill struggle; and to fix, with a graceful loyalty, his first firm recollection upon the coronation of Victoria.
Meantime, the eventful marriage is an engagement all but signed and sealed, and Miss Dix will become, long before Christmas, the Honourable Mrs. Phibb. Only last night, the youngest of the six, little Harriet, whom her papa (she being but eleven years old) can well afford at present to designate "his own darling," jumped upon his knee, and whispered something about her new white sash.
"And you, too," he murmured to himself, looking in the innocent face fondly, but reproachfully, "you, too, will turn against me; you will join the rest; you will grow tall, and rejoice in my misfortunes. Obscuring the last ray of the sunshine of youth, you, the latest and least of the conspirators, will spring up by rapid degrees, and drive me from the garden into the desert of time; strip me of every claim to a junior standing, of every pretension to the early bloom of life which is upon me; offer me up, by your altitude alone, a sacrifice on the altar of Middle-Age; and bring—yes, bring your father's brown locks in sorrow to a wig! Girl, you will help to make me—what misery is in the word!—you will help to make your youthful parent—VENERABABLE!"