by George Augustus Sala.
Originally published in Belgravia (John Maxwell) vol.1 #4 (Feb 1867).
You have gibed and jeered enough, man with the unresting pen and the interminable flux of words—a flux that coagulates in the furnace, and helps the bringing forth of no brilliant enamel, no long-lost ruby-tint in the storied glass. Intolerable has been your discourse about a hundred cities; and what has been the result? Muchas palabras; "talkee-talkee;" bosh. I use this last term in its strictly Oriental sense, and not with any reference to its modern and debased slang signification in our tongue. Have you told us any thing really definite, tangible, cogitable about the actual and vital aspect, habits, customs, ways of humanity in those streets you profess to have observed, studied, and diagnosed? Psha! In one twelve-shilling volume of Murray—nay, in one page of one such volume, we can find more fibrous, vascular, breathing information than you have given us in a hundred pages. Nay; we will meet you on your own ground. Speciously and ostentatiously you disdain all pretensions to the honest status of a teller of facts—naked, sober facts. You are an essayist, forsooth; a moth fluttering round truth's candle, a born digressor, a radoteur by habit and inclination, a lover of the zig-zag and the tortuous, a Shandyite. So, as the wise old man who wrote the Religio Medici bids us not look for whales in the Euxine Sea, nor for great matters where they are not to be found, we forbear to sift your bushel of chaff for facts; we will leave your pottle of hay alone, searching not for the rem acu which may or not be lurking therein.
But how do you stand when we ask you, "Where is your humour, your discreet waggeries, your keen morsels of observation, your bright glinting reflections on the men and things you have seen?" O, miserably incompetent man! Think with awe and horror on that vast funerary roll—it is forty feet long—which Doctor Professor Lepsius has copied from the Papyrus in the Turin gallery. In that enormous psychical panorama shall you see a trembling shade dragged by Justice before the Tribunal of Amentis. Osiris sits as assessor; forty-two judges are with him in banco, all ranged, a terrible show. The divinity Tot is clerk of the arraigns. Hold up your hand, you shivering shade; answer, caitiff: What have you done? What has come of all the ink you have spilt, of all the quills of which harmless geese have been robbed for your sake? Out with it, man! Have you done any thing to benefit good letters? Have you taught mankind any one thing they did not know before? Have you been worth your salt, or the rather, have you ever hung on to the great army of writers and thinkers—a worthless marauder and camp-follower, fit only to be evicted from Xerxes' host, and triced up to the next tree by a Persian provost-marshal? Words, words, words! Muchas palabras.
Ay, you are glib at those—you would play Parolles in the play well. Never ran a brook or whirled the sails of a mill so fast as your tongue. But where are the thoughts those words should encircle? Where is the lining of rich venison to the stony flour-and-water crust of the warden-pie? It was said of Prynne—a garrulous and verbose author, but still one who had bone and muscle in his mind—that his writings were like thick-skinned fruit, all rind. Yours, man, are like the outer envelope of a walnut, from which the nut itself has been eliminated—a woody, bitter covering of mast, fit only to be pickled in the vinegar of criticism.
This is what my eidolon, my conscience, said to me; this is what I said to myself when I sat down to write another "Street of the World," and remembered how many I had written. 0, futile strivings after excellence! O, never-ending, still beginning attempt upon attempt! Ixion, you are my brother; Sisyphus, you and I have gotten the same term of penal servitude, and we cannot "do that little lot on our heads," as the rogues say at the police-courts. Thus I arraigned myself; thus abashed and shame-stricken did I falter out pleas in answer to the interrogatories by myself to myself propounded. There are many worse mental exercitations than self-examination; only, we men are usually such cowards, that we dare not, for our lives, seize ourselves by the collar, force ourselves into a corner, and then shake the truth out of ourselves as you would a bone from the jaws of an obstinate dog. But anon I cried: "Enough of these beatings of the breast and self-criminatory yelps; enough of these suspiria de profundis. Get up and bar the door of despondency, and set about doing something." I remember, once, being cured of what I deemed a long and a grievous illness by hearing the attendant I had thought an attached and devoted nurse murmur in the next room to a friend, "Drat him! he have been a-grunting and a-groaning day after day, like a hog under a harrow." Eftsoons I jumped out of bed; sent that uncivil attendant to the right about, and got well. You shall hear me grunt and groan no more. You will pardon, perhaps, a gentle melancholy, a soft and subdued sadness. I cannot grin to-day, indeed. My horse-collar hangs up on the wall, like the life-belt in your state-room on board a mail steamer. I feel like that soldier in great Alexander's army, who was nicknamed Agelastos by his comrades for the reason that he had only been known to laugh once in the whole course of his life. When did I laugh last? It must have been at the Olympic, under Madame Vestris' management, and when Mr. Liston—or was it Mr. Wrench, or both?—appeared in a Gentleman in Difficulties. This is not the season for guffaws. I confess that ere now I have sate in the chair of the scorner, and eaten meat with him who is supercilious. But that is all gone and past. Behold one whose barb is curbed, and who has given himself up to humility, contrition, meditation, maceration, and other ascetic practices. I am poor; I am sick; I have had losses; I have been cast in damages; I have been fixed as a contributory to a petroleum company (limited); I have failed to "strike ile;' wicked men have despitefully used me, and I am brought very low.
Let me whisper in your ear, O friendly and forbearing reader. Do you know the cause of all this whining and pining? Without further circumlocution I will tell you. As I sit down to write this paper, not precisely in "the worst inn's worst room," but in the indifferently warmed chamber of an hotel in a foreign town seven hundred miles from home, the clock strikes twelve. The last moment of the last Monday of eighteen sixty-six is gone for ever. This is New Year's morning: this is the first of January eighteen hundred and sixty-seven.
Well! and should that suggest sad thoughts? I think so. Ah! it used to be very merry and jovial as, years agone, we came out of the old chambers by Inigo Jones's watergate in Buckingham-street, and, as the last stroke of midnight chimed, clinked our brimming bumpers, and drank the old year out and the new year in. No more new years can come to half that jovial company. "Poor old Fred's in the Gazette," and the "blithe Carew is hung." The Thames Embankment people may be pulling the very watergate down, now, for aught I know. I have no call to maunder about the "poor old Freds" of the "Ballad of Bouillabaisse," or the "blithe Carews" of "Clapham Academy." Children are born and die every day. It is the condition of humanity. To-day it is your turn; to-morrow it may be mine. Moralising over the deserted board, the thinned branches of the mahogany tree, is but trite platitude after all. Let us concern ourselves with those who remain. Les morts vont vite; and joy go with them! But this toasting of the year that is going out and the year that is coming in; this yelling and bursting and health-quaffing and speech-making,—is there any thing more futile? is there any thing more ephemeral? is there any thing more devoid of real substance and meaning? How many times have we joined hands, put one foot on the table—preparatory to putting our whole bodies under it—and screeched out nonsense about "Auld lang syne"! "We twa hae paidled i' the burn"—better to have had a footbath, with some mustard in the water; we have "pu'd the gowans fine"—we had better have taken some pills; and "we'll tak a richt gude willie waucht for auld lang syne"—a basin of water-gruel would be a much more sensible supper. If you would learn the whole sum of the philosophy of conviviality, here you have it from the lips of one than whom no more joyous boon-companion ever trolled a bowl since the days when Shakespeare and Ben Jonson and Raleigh held wit-combats at the Mermaid. Hear Charles Lamb:
"To be an object of compassion to friends, of derision to foes; to be suspected by strangers, and stared at by fools; to be esteemed dull when you cannot be witty; to be applauded for wit when you know that you have been dull; to be called upon for the extemporaneous display of that faculty which no premeditation can give; to be spurred on to efforts which end in contempt; to be set on to provoke mirth, which procures the procurer hatred; to give pleasure, and be repaid with squinting malice; to swallow draughts of life-destroying wine, which are to be distilled into airy breath; to tickle vain auditors; to mortgage miserable morrows for nights of madness; to waste whole seas of time on those who pay it back in little inconsiderable drops of grudging applause,—these are the wages of buffoonery, and death."
Now these, I take it, are noble, breathing, burning words; the solemn truth of which cannot be questioned, although it might be worth while to inquire whether dear kind-hearted Elia would not have softened the acerbity of his remarks a little, had there been such things as soda-water or granulated effervescent bi-carbonate of magnesia in his day. But on this New-year morning I appreciate the force and wisdom of the passage I have italicised to the very utmost. You see that I do not happen to have brought any letters of introduction to any body in this particular foreign town. In a house on the other side of the Schloss-brücke I can see through the brilliantly-lit windows; they are having a grand New-year's party. A Christmas-tree as tall as a drum-major has been redecked with toys and bon-bons for the occasion. I can see the Prussian Jeames gliding through the apartments with a tray full of tumblers of hot punch. Those people on the other side of the bridge are happy. Even in the room immediately over mine the stout old gentleman whom, with his stout old wife, I have marked for so many days at the table-hôte, is celebrating the anniversary in a merry but peculiar fashion. He took too much Geisenheimer-Rothenburg at dinner, of which the gnädige Frau, his wife, did not disdain her share. He had champagne (Heidseck's) with his sweets, and, I am afraid, took kirsch-wasser with his coffee. He has been having something else, I hear, since he came home from the Schauspiel-Haus, for there is the noise of a heavy body tumbling about overhead; and the glass-drops in the chandelier are gingling in the most excited manner. Is the old gentleman dancing a New-year's jig with his wife? or is he trying to get into bed, and continually missing his tip? But he too is happy—never doubt it.
Remote, unfriended, melancholy, slow, I listen to these sounds of revelry, and grimly sit down to make good resolves for the new year. Did you never make such a set of resolutions? You mean to turn over an entirely new leaf. You have done with the frivolous, unprofitable past; you have "sworn off," like Rip Van Winkle. You have sown all your wild oats, and reaped and garnered them in the barn of remorse. Now is the time for the wise wheat which is to come up so nicely next spring. Yes; you mean to dine on a mutton-chop and a glass of water, and restrict yourself to a cigar and a half three times a week. You will keep an accurate diary and a strict cash-account of your incomings and outgoings. You will pay-up your subscriptions to the coal and blanket fund, and send a five-pound note (anonymously) to Bow-street police-court. You will read Gibbon's "Decline and Fall" and Sir Archibald Alison's "History of Europe," say at the rate of a couple of pages a day. You will rub up your mathematics, and try to learn Hebrew. You will leave off sack, and live cleanly like a gentleman. And how fairly and neatly you transcribe the transactions of January the first 1867 (which I perceive is the festival of the Circumcision) in your bran-new Lett's Diary! They should be bound in pie-crust covers, these Lett's diaries, for the promises in them are made but to be broken.
Not unreasonably you might surmise that this article, with Sackville-street Dublin for its theme, was an essay on the new year, and not a street of the world. Pray disabuse yourself of that notion. I have had Dublin in my eye all along. With malice prepense I strove to work myself into that bland, contemplative, melancholy mood for which I entreated your forbearance at the outset. Such a frame of mind is most suitable, I think, to the writer who takes the metropolis of Ireland for his text; for as there are few cities in the world more charming to me than Dublin, so also are there none more melancholy.
More melancholy! tare and 'ouns, what is the spalpeen thinking of? I will be a spalpeen, or an omadhaun, or an Arrah na Pogue, or whatsoever else you may call me; but I respectfully adhere to the position I have laid down. Yes, Dublin is trisfe, and Sackville-street is as sad as the "last rose of summer." Its melancholy is one of degree, and is all its own. Take Sackville-street about five o'clock on a fine summer or autumn afternoon, and the scene it presents is so cheerful and so bustling, that I should not wonder if, knowing what the street is like, you indignantly flung by this sheet, declaring that its writer was blind or doting. Melancholy! Is the Carnival melancholy? Are the Boulevards? Is Regent-street? From Carlisle Bridge to the Nelson Column there stretches a noble thoroughfare, spacious and regular, with a broad foot-pavement and an ample carriage-way. It is lined with noble mansions, many of which may fairly be called palaces. There are great linendrapers' and mercers' shops; great tailors and outfitters; great milliners and dressmakers; sumptuous hotels; stationers' and booksellers' and print shops; and sparkling Palais-Royal-looking magasins, where, seduced by the apparent cheapness of the articles, you may ruin yourself in twenty-five minutes in the purchase of not more bog-oak ornaments and Irish point-lace than you can conveniently stow in your waistcoat-pocket.
On the macadam there is a constant stream of vehicles. Those outside cars look a trifle rickety, and would be better, perhaps, for a little washing. So, in the last respect, might be their charioteers; but who looks gayer, livelier, than an Irish car-driver, with his twinkling eyes, his saucy laugh, his ever-ready and witty flow of repartee? There go grand carriages, the best that Long Acre can turn out, with satin-skinned horses, glittering harness, plump coachmen, and austere flunkeys behind. Such coats-of-arms too, as those that blaze, in all the majesty of herald-painting, on the panels! Those are doubtless the equipages of the Irish nobility and gentry. Then there are snug broughams; lovely ladies on horseback—trim, well-mounted grooms following them; officers in undress uniform and officers in mufti caracoling and putting their pretty steeds through their paces; orderly dragoons with leathern pouches slung beside them, trotting with the regimental letters to the General Post-Office. Room for that well-padded, well-braced, and laced and strapped-up, well-dyed and waxed and varnished old gentleman, who comes ambling along on a bright bay, with a couple of moustached dandies well up to his stirrups and assisting him to ogle Dublin beauty on the side-walk. That is the commanding-general with his aides-de-camp, Captain Prance of the Heavies and Captain Dance of the High Fliers. There goes the chief secretary in a tearing mail-phaeton. There is the solicitor-general on a cob. Your imagination may run riot as to the identity of these personages. The commanding-general may be a wealthy distiller, and the solicitor-general a sharp Dublin solicitor who has done very well in the Encumbered Estates Court; but, at least, a little castle-building can do you no harm. I knew a man once who had a season-ticket on the South-Western Railway, Richmond branch, and who for two years and a half was under the impression that he came up to town every morning with his Royal Highness the Duke d'Aumale. How he used to cram the scion of the House of Orleans down our throats! With what stories did he entertain us of the Duke's affability, of his not objecting to smoking, of his relating anecdotes concerning the French opera and ballet! I went down to dine with my friend at Richmond one afternoon, stayed all night, and returning to town with him next morning, recognised in the good-looking gentleman with an accurately-cut beard and moustache who occupied one corner of the carriage, and bade us a cheery bonjour, not his Royal Highness the Duke d'Aumale, but a highly respectable French hairdresser from Cranbournstreet, Leicester-square!
General or distiller, solicitor-general or sharp practising attorney, as it may be, the roadway of Sackville-street seems of the liveliest. Turn to the foot-pavement and you will behold even a more exhilarating spectacle. The flags are one parterre of beautiful girls. Were I an American, I should back Broadway New York, from two until five p.m., during the season, and in the space bounded on one side by Canal-street, and on the other by Union-square, for a display of female loveliness not to be equalled in any other street of the world. Indeed the young ladies of Manhattan are exceedingly pretty; but at prettiness their good looks halt. They rarely, very rarely, rise to beauty, lacking as they do the great essentials of beauty—amplitude, colour, roundness, and suppleness of form. Elles sont gentilles, mais pas belles. Sir Joshua's Muscipula is pretty; but Sir Joshua's Nelly O'Brien is beautiful. As a Great Briton, a United Kingdomite, impartially enthusiastic in my admiration of the Rose, Shamrock, and Thistle, I must unhesitatingly—although the decision has not been arrived at without mature consideration—award the palm of peerless beauty to the graces of Sackville-street Dublin. I think you may see there the most beautiful women in the whole world. They seem not only to look better, but to dress better, to walk better than any ladies do elsewhere. The Rose and the Thistle need not be enraged at the preference given to the Shamrock. I was always of opinion that the way in which the Shepherd of Mount Ida finally decided upon his award was by means of a mental toss-up; first the odd goddess out, and then two out of three. I am sure that the rogue thought in his heart that they were all equally beautiful; and if you look at their portraits in P.P. Rubens's picture in the National Gallery, you will admit with me that neither of the defeated candidates had any reason to be cast down.
When you add to a blooming bevy of belles,—fresh and radiant and smiling, disdaining carmine and violet-powder, and who would laugh the cunning sibyl Rachel to scorn were she to whisper them anent "Arabian baths," or propose to make them "beautiful for ever" (are they not beautiful already?);—when we add to these the prettiest, rosiest, gracefullest children that Pater or Materfamilias could wish to set eyes upon, and the comeliest and most comfortable-looking of matrons, and the tallest and stateliest and most unimpeachably-attired swells—real swells, mind you; no provincial bucks, no pinchbeck dandies, no "one-horse" counts; but swells who are undergoing a splendid exile here in the shape of garrison-duty or staff-appointments at the Castle; swells whose natural habitat is in Rotten Row and Pall Mall;—and when you finish the whole picture with a native population vivacious albeit ragged, luminous although slightly unkempt; the best-natured, the easiest-pleased, the most elastic, the most placable, the kindest-hearted people in Europe,—what is there, an' it so please you, to cause you to usurp the attributes of the melancholy Jaques, and profess to find this merry Forest of Arden sad? But I met a fool in the forest,—a spotted fool,—and he told me there was sadness even in Arden. Jaques was not the only melancholy creature there. The Banished Duke had his cares. Touchstone was not always in fettle. Rosalind, gallivanting about in pantaloons, must have had her moments of despondency. Amiens, I am sure, was a sad dog; for, jovially as he could pipe in "Under the greenwood tree," who ever discoursed a ditty more exquisitely plaintive than "Blow, blow, thou wintry wind"? They were all in the dumps sometimes, those light-hearted jousters; yea, even to the huntsmen in their green jerkins and buff boots—an unthinking, pachydermatous race ordinarily. They moped, I have little doubt, and grumbled dolefully when it rained, or the deer were shy, or the beer ran short, or the Banished Duke distributed kicks among them in lieu of halfpence, their monthly stipend.
Belles, and swells, and commanding-generals, and aides-de-camp, and orderly dragoons notwithstanding; carriages, and broughams, and Phœnix-Park hacks, and outside cars all taken for granted; milliners, and mercers, and point-lace, and bog-oak ornaments all credited to the joyous side of the account,—there is something melancholy about Sackville-street. Ay, and cross Carlisle Bridge, and pass through stately Westmoreland-street into College-green. Look up at the noble University, and that glorious architectural creation the Bank of Ireland—the only original building perhaps, save Guarini's Santo Sudario at Turin and the Ducal Palace at Venice, in Europe; all others remind you of something else. Walk your horse up Nassau-street the aristocratic; or turn up Dawson-street by Morrison's Hotel to the lordly Stephen's Green; or push your way through teeming Grafton-street, the Bond-street of Dublin, as Sackville-street is its Regent-street; but every where atra cura will jump up behind you, and Melancholy will mark you for her own. Little by little the sadness of the city will come creeping about you like a garment. That glorious Bank of Ireland! As a Temple of Mammon, as a shop for the money-changers, it is desecrated and profaned. It was once the council-chamber of the Lords and Commons of Ireland. They have made the House of Peers into a pay-office; and bills are discounted where once bills were passed. Those hotels and mercers' shops in Sackville and Westmoreland-street were once the mansions of Ireland's nobility.
Those enormous houses in Merrion-square and Stephen's Green have become ten times too large for their present occupants. Who inhabits them now, I wonder? Does any body sleep in those immense bed-chambers? Are fires ever lit in those vast kitchens? Are guests ever gathered round the social board in those huge dining-rooms? Alas! I am afraid the dinners have gone as much out of date as Sneyd's claret. The windows look dusty; the doorsteps are full of cracks and fissures; grass grows, and broken glass and crockery remain undisturbed in the areas. The door-plates are tarnished, and there is rust on the wire of the visitors' bell. This faded, bygone, mournful woe is common all over Dublin. Splendid as are the mansions of Sackville-street, they belong evidently to a past age. Shop-fronts have been stuck on to their porticoes; but the sutures don't join; the old and the new do not assimilate. Here and there adventurous tradesmen have gone to vast expense in veneering and gilding and plate-glass; and for cheap clothes and articles of female finery there may be, and should be necessarily, a lively sale; but it is easy to see that substantial, genuine commerce stagnates or has declined. Walk down to the quays, and a comparatively idle river, and a Custom-house many sizes too big for the business transacted within its walls, meet your view. Ask for the Linen-hall, and you shall be told that it has been turned into a barrack. I have been informed that the trade of Dublin has considerably augmented within these latter years; and Irishmen have shown me, with pardonable pride, their beautiful International Exhibition, as proof positive that their taste, their skill, their energy, had not declined. I saw in the Exhibition an excellent picture-gallery and an exquisite display of statuary. For the rest, I could recognise only a prettily-arranged bazaar, full of gimcrack upholstery and shining trifles, the principal contributors to which were sharp London tradesmen, anxious to puff their wares. To what a sickening extent has this "Industrial" and "International" Exhibition movement been overdone! A few simple-minded amateurs, who can cut out cathedrals in cork, or design landscapes on a pie-board by means of a red-hot poker, or construct models of the Warrior or the Lord Mayor's coach, are got together; then the advertising tradesmen shovel-in their goods by cartloads, and plenty of flags and a brass band are laid on, and a Bishop or a Lord is secured to open the show, and a prayer is said, the Old Hundredth sung, and an address delivered; and the public are expected to pay sixpence and a shilling each to stare at that which they may see any day in Hanway Yard or the Burlington Arcade for nothing.
Put on your considering-cap, and you will find that Dublin is melancholy. They are doing better business than of old time, I hear, at the handsome and well-appointed Theatre Royal; and there are sparkling entertainments at the Queen's; and as brave singing, I suppose, as of yore at Tuck's. Cabs and ale are to be had, and ginger is hot i' the mouth; and there are Irishman extant who can indulge in the pursuit of toddy, even to the tenth tumbler without turning a hair; and a good deal of fun and jollity reigns among a people who would be funny and jolly on the eve of the Deluge—and on the morning after it, could they contrive to escape drowning. But there are too many lawyers and too many soldiers; there are too many shabby, half-deserted houses; too many brooding, squalid streets; too many untidy, shiftless, hopeless-looking men and women in this beauteous but decadent city. Dublin does not look happy. She does not look prosperous. The statists may tell me that I err; but in the face of whole columns of figures I should be of the same opinion still.