Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 22, August, 1878

Meanwhile I watched the soldiers whenever an opportunity offered. My opportunities, I confess, were moderate, for it was not often my fortune to encounter an imposing military array. In London there are a great many red-coats, but they rarely march about the streets in large masses. The most impressive military body that engages the attention of the contemplative pedestrian is the troop of Life Guards or of Blues which every morning, about eleven o'clock, makes its way down to Whitehall from the Regent's Park barracks. (Shortly afterward another troop passes up from Whitehall, where, at the Horse Guards, the guard has been changed.) The Life Guards are one of the most brilliant ornaments of the metropolis, and I never see two or three of them pass without feeling shorter by several inches. When, of a summer afternoon, they scatter themselves abroad in undress uniform—with their tight red jackets and tight blue trousers following the swelling lines of their manly shapes, and their little visorless caps perched neatly askew on the summit of their six feet two of stature—it is impossible not to be impressed, and almost abashed, by the sight of such a consciousness of neatly-displayed physical advantages and by such an air of superior valor. It is true that I found the other day in an amusing French book (a little book entitled Londres pittoresque, by M. Henri Bellenger) a description of these majestic warriors which took a humorous view of their grandeur. A Frenchman arriving in London, says M. Bellenger, stops short in the middle of the pavement and stares aghast at this strange apparition—"this tall lean fellow, with his wide, short torso perched upon a pair of grasshopper's legs and squeezed into an adhesive jacket of scarlet cloth, who dawdles himself along with a little cane in his hand, swinging forward his enormous feet, curving his arms, throwing back his shoulders, arching his chest, with a mixture of awkwardness, fatuity and stiffness the most curious and the most exhilarating.... In his general aspect," adds this merciless critic, "he recalls the circus-rider, minus the latter's flexibility: skin-tight garments, simpering mouth, smile of a dancing-girl, attempt to be impertinent and irresistible which culminates only in being ridiculous."

This is a very heavy-handed picture of those exaggerated proportions and that conquering gait which, as I say, render the tall Life Guardsman one of the most familiar ornaments of the London streets. But it is when he is armed and mounted that he is most picturesque—when he sits, monumentally, astride of his black charger in one of the big niches on either side of the gate of the Horse Guards, cuirassed and helmeted, booted and spurred. I never fail to admire him as I pass through the adjacent archway, as well as his companions, equally helmeted and booted, who march up and down beside him, and, as Taine says, alluding in his Notes sur l'Angleterre to the scene, "posent avec majesté devant les gamins." If I chance to be in St. James's street when a semi-squadron of these elegant warriors are returning from attendance upon royalty after a Drawing-Room or a Levee, I am sure to make one of the gamins who stand upon the curbstone to see them pass. If the day be a fine one at the height of the season, and London happen to be wearing otherwise the brilliancy of supreme fashion—with beautiful dandies at the club-windows, and chariots ascending the sunny slope freighted with wigged and flowered coachmen, great armorial hammercloths, powdered, appended footmen, dowagers and débutantes—then the rattling, flashing, prancing cavalcade of the long detachment of the Household troops strikes one as the official expression of a thoroughly well-equipped society. It must be added, however, that it is many a year since the Life Guards or the Blues have had harder work than this. To escort their sovereign to the railway-stations at London and Windsor has long been their most arduous duty. They were present to very good purpose at Waterloo, but since their return from that immortal field they have not been out of England. Heavy cavalry, in modern warfare, has gone out of fashion, and in case of a conflict in the East those nimble, pretty fellows the Hussars, with their tight, dark-blue tunics so brilliantly embroidered with yellow braid, would take precedence of their majestic comrades. The Hussars are indeed the prettiest fellows of all, and if I were fired with a martial ambition I should certainly enlist in their ranks. I know of no military personage more agreeable to the civil eye than a blue-and-yellow hussar, unless indeed it be a young officer in the Rifle Brigade. The latter is perhaps, to a refined and chastened taste, the most graceful, the most truly elegant, of all military types. The little riflemen, the common soldiers, have an extremely useful and durable aspect: with their plain black uniforms, little black Scotch bonnets, black gloves, total absence of color, they suggest the rigidly practical and business-like phase of their profession—the restriction of the attention to the simple specialty of "picking off" one's enemy. The officers are of course more elegant, but their elegance is sober and subdued. They are dressed all in black, save for a broad, dark crimson sash which they wear across the shoulder and chest, and for a very slight hint of gold lace upon their small, round, short-visored caps. They are furthermore adorned with a small quantity of broad black braid discreetly applied to their tight, long-skirted surtouts. There is a kind of severe gentlemanliness about this costume which, when it is worn by a tall, slim, neat-waisted young Englishman with a fresh complexion, a candid eye and a yellow moustache, is of quite irresistible effect. There is no such triumph of taste as to look rich without high colors and picturesque without accessories. The imagination is always struck by the figure of a soberly-dressed gentleman with a sword.

The little riflemen, the Hussars, the Life Guards, the Foot Guards, the artillerymen (whose garments always look stiffer and more awkwardly fitted than those of their confrères) have all, however, one quality in common—the appearance of extreme, of even excessive, youth. It is hardly too much to say that the British army, as a stranger observes it now-a-days, is an army of boys. All the regiments are boyish: they are made up of lads who range from seventeen to five-and-twenty. You look almost in vain for the old-fashioned specimen of the British soldier—the large, well-seasoned man of thirty, bronzed and whiskered beneath his terrible bearskin and with shoulders fashioned for the heaviest knapsack. This was the ancient English grenadier. But the modern grenadier, as he perambulates the London pavement, is for the most part a fresh-colored lad of moderate stature, who hardly strikes one as offering the elements of a very solid national defence. He enlists, as a general thing, for six years, and if he leave the army at the end of this term his service in the ranks will have been hardly more than a juvenile escapade. I often wonder, however, that the unemployed Englishman of humble origin should not be more often disposed to take up his residence in Her Majesty's barracks. There is a certain street-corner at Westminster where the recruiting-sergeants stand all day at the receipt of custom. The place is well chosen, and I suppose they drive a tolerably lively business: all London sooner or later passes that way, and whenever I have passed I have always observed one of these smart apostles of military glory trying to catch the ear of one of the dingy London lazzaroni. Occasionally, if the hook has been skilfully baited, they appear to be conscious of a bite, but as a general thing the unfashionable object of their blandishments turns away, after an unillumined stare at the brilliant fancy dress of his interlocutor, with a more or less concise declaration of incredulity. In front of him stretches, across the misty Thames, the large commotion of Westminster Bridge, crowned by the huge, towered mass of the Houses of Parliament. To the right of this, a little effaced, as the French say, is the vague black mass of the Abbey; close at hand are half a dozen public-houses, convenient for drinking a glass to the encouragement of military aspiration; in the background are the squalid and populous slums of Westminster. It is a characteristic congregation of objects, and I have often wondered that among so many eloquent mementos of the life of the English people the possible recruit should not be prompted by the sentiment of social solidarity to throw himself into the arms of the agent of patriotism. Speaking less vaguely, one would suppose that to the great majority of the unwashed and unfed the condition of a private in one of the queen's regiments would offer much that might be supremely enviable. It is a chance to become, relatively speaking, a gentleman—more than a gentleman, a "swell"—to have the grim problem of existence settled at a stroke. The British soldier always presents the appearance of scrupulous cleanliness: he is scoured, scrubbed, brushed beyond reproach. His hair is enriched with pomatum and his shoes are radiantly polished. His little cap is worn in a manner determined by considerations purely æsthetic. He carries a little cane in one hand, and, like a gentleman at a party, a pair of white gloves in the other. He holds up his head and expands his chest, and bears himself generally like a person who has reason to invite rather than to evade the fierce light of modern criticism. He enjoys, moreover, an abundant leisure, and appears to have ample time and means for participating in the advantages of a residence in London—for frequenting gin-palaces and music-halls, for observing the beauties of the West End and cultivating the society of appreciative housemaids. To a ragged and simple-minded rustic or to a young Cockney of vague resources all this ought to be a brilliant picture. That the picture should seem to contain any shadows is a proof of the deep-seated relish in the human mind for our personal independence. The fear of "too many masters" weighs heavily against the assured comforts and the opportunity of cutting a figure. On the other hand, I remember once being told by a communicative young trooper with whom I had some conversation that the desire to "see life" had been his own motive for enlisting. He appeared to be seeing it with some indistinctness: he was a little tipsy at the time.

I spoke at the beginning of these remarks of the brilliant impressions to be gathered during a couple of days' stay at Aldershot, and I have delayed much too long to attempt a rapid and grateful report of them. But I reflect that such a report, however friendly, coming from a visitor profoundly uninitiated into the military mystery, can have but a relative value. I may lay myself open to contempt, for instance, in making the simple remark that the big parade held in honor of the queen's birthday, and which I went down more particularly to see, struck me, as the young ladies say, as perfectly lovely. I will nevertheless hazard this confession, for I should otherwise seem to myself to be grossly irresponsive to a delightful hospitality. Aldershot is a very charming place—an example the more, to my sense, if examples were needed, of the happy variety of this wonderful little island, its adaptability to every form of human convenience. Some twenty years ago it occurred to the late prince consort, to whom so many things occurred, that it would be a good thing to establish a great camp. He cast his eyes about him, and instantly they rested upon a spot as perfectly adapted to his purpose as if Nature from the first had had an eye to pleasing him. It was a matter of course that the prince should find exactly what he looked for. Aldershot is at but little more than an hour from London—a high, sunny, breezy expanse surrounded by heathery hills. It offers all the required conditions of liberal space, of quick accessibility, of extreme salubrity, of contiguity to a charming little tumbled country in which the troops may indulge in ingenious imitations of difficult manœuvres; to which it behooves me to add the advantage of enchanting drives and walks for the entertainment of the impressible visitor. In winter, possibly, the great circle of the camp is rather a prey to the elements, but nothing can be more agreeable than I found it toward the end of May, with the light fresh breezes hanging about, and the sun-rifts from a magnificently cloudy sky lighting up all around the big yellow patches of gorse.

At Aldershot the military class lives in huts, a generic name given to certain low wooden structures of small dimensions and a single story, covering, however, a good many specific variations. The oblong shanty in which thirty or forty common soldiers are stowed away is naturally a very different affair from the neat little bungalow of an officer. The buildings are distributed in chessboard fashion over a very large area, and form two distinct camps. There is also a substantial little town, chiefly composed of barracks and public-houses; in addition to which, at crowded seasons, far and near over the plain there is the glitter of white tents. "The neat little bungalow of an officer," as I said just now: I learned, among other things, what a charming form of habitation this may be. The ceilings are very low, the partitions are thin, the rooms are all next door to each other; the place is a good deal like an American "cottage" by the seaside. But even in these narrow conditions that homogeneous English luxury which is the admiration of the stranger blooms with its usual amplitude. The specimen which suggests these observations was cushioned and curtained like a pretty house in Mayfair, and yet its pretensions were tempered by a kind of rustic humility. I entered it first in the dark, but the next morning, when I stepped outside to have a look at it by daylight, I burst into pardonable laughter. The walls were of plain planks painted a dark red: the roof, on which I could almost rest my elbow, was neatly endued with a coating of tar. But, after all, the thing was very pretty. There was a matting of ivy all over the front of the hut, thriving as I had never known ivy to thrive upon a wooden surface: there was a tangle of creepers about all the windows. The place looked like a "side-scene" in a comic opera. But there was a serious little English lawn in front of it, over which a couple of industrious red-coats were pulling up and down a garden-roller; and in the centre of the drive before the door was a tremendous clump of rhododendrons of more than operatic brilliancy. I leaned on the garden-gate and looked out at the camp: it was twinkling and bustling in the morning light, which drizzled down upon it in patches from a somewhat agitated sky. An hour later the camp got itself together and spread itself, in close battalions and glittering cohorts, over a big green level, where it marched and cantered about most effectively in honor of a lady living at a quiet Scotch country-house. One of this lady's generals stood in a corner, and the regiments marched past and saluted. This simple spectacle was in reality very brilliant. I know nothing about soldiers, as the reader must long since have discovered, but I had, nevertheless, no hesitation in saying to myself that these were the handsomest troops in the world. Everything in such a spectacle is highly picturesque, and if the observer is one of the profane he has no perception of weakness of detail. He sees the long squadrons shining and shifting, uncurling themselves over the undulations of the ground like great serpents with metallic scales, and he remembers Milton's description of the celestial hosts. The British soldier is doubtless not celestial, but the extreme perfection of his appointments makes him look very well on parade. On this occasion at Aldershot I felt as if I were at the Hippodrome. There was a great deal of cavalry and artillery, and the dragoons, hussars and lancers, the beautiful horses, the capital riders, the wonderful wagons and guns, seemed even more theatrical than military. This came, in a great measure, from the freshness and tidiness of their accessories—the brightness and tightness of uniforms, the polish of boots and buckles, the newness of leather and paint. None of these things were the worse for wear: they had the bloom of peace still upon them. As I looked at the show, and then afterward, in charming company, went winding back to camp, passing detachments of the great cavalcade, returning also in narrow file, balancing on their handsome horses along the paths in the gorse-brightened heather, I allowed myself to wish that since, as matters stood, the British soldier was clearly such a fine fellow and a review at Aldershot was such a delightful entertainment, the bloom of peace might long remain.

H. James, Jr.

A SAXON GOD

In the year of grace 1854, Ernest Philip King, a young attaché of the English embassy at Athens, married Haidée Amic, the most beautiful woman in that city. Neither of the pair possessed a fortune, and their united means afforded a not abundantly luxurious style of living; but they loved each other, and the fact that he was the portionless son of a Church of England divine, and she the daughter of an impecunious Greek of noble family and royal lineage, was no drawback to the early happiness of their wooing and wedding. They had two children, a boy and a girl, born within two years of each other in Athens: the girl, the elder of the two, they named Hyacinthe; the boy was called Tancredi.

Five years after this marriage had taken place King lost his position at the embassy, and only received in exchange for it a mean government clerkship in Rome at a meagre salary. Thither he removed, and after dragging out a miserable and disappointed existence five years longer, he died in the arms of his beautiful and still young wife. Thereafter the youthful widow managed to keep life in herself and her two little ones by dint of pinching, management and contrivance on the pittance that had come to her from the estate of her impecunious father. They lived in a palace, it is true—but who does not live in a palace in Rome?—high up, where the cooing doves built their nests under the leaden eaves, and where the cold winds whistled shrilly in their season.

Such accomplishments as the mother was mistress of she imparted to her children. What other education they received was derived from intercourse with many foreigners, English, French, Russians, and from familiarity with the sights and wonders of Rome, its galleries, ruins, palaces, studios.

At eighteen Tancredi had obtained a situation as amanuensis to an English historian resident in Italy; and Hyacinthe already brooded over some active and unusual future that spread itself as yet but dimly before her. She inherited from her mother her unparalleled beauty—the clear, colorless, flawless skin, the straight features, the lustrous eyes with their luxuriant lashes and long level brows, her lithe and gracious figure and slender feet and hands: of the English father her only physical trace was the large, full, mobile mouth with its firm white teeth. She had from him the modern spirit of unrest and the modern impetus and energy: from the Greek mother, a counteracting languor of temperament and an antique cast of mind.

Such, in a measure, was Hyacinthe King at twenty—a curious compound of beauty, unspent verve, irritated longings, half-superstitious imaginings, and half-developed impulses, ideas and mental powers; practically, an assistant to the worn mother in her household duties, a haunter of the beautiful places in the city of her adoption, an occasional mingler in the scant festivities of artists, a good linguist, knowing English thoroughly and speaking French and German with fluent accuracy. Watch her, with me, as she walks one spring day along the narrow Via Robbia, down which a slip of sunlight glints scantily on her young head, and, emerging into a wider thoroughfare, ascends at last the Scala Regia of the Vatican. The girl is known there, and the usually not over-courteous officials allow her to pass on at her will through hall after hall of splendor and priceless treasure. She is neither an English tourist with Baedeker, Murray and a note-book, nor an American traveller with pencil, loose leaves and a possible photographic apparatus in her pocket: therefore to the vigilant eye of the guardian of the pope's palace she is an innocuous being. Hyacinthe glides quietly through the Clementino Museum, with never a glance for the lovely, blooming Mercury of the Belvedere, or even one peep in at the cabinet where the sad Laocoön for ever writhes in impotent struggles, or a look of love for rare and radiant Apollo, or one of surprise for Hercules with the Nemean lion. She has reached the Hall of Statues—that superb gallery with its subtly-tesselated pavement, its grand marble columns with their Ionic capitals, its arches and walls of wondrous marbles—and here she stops with a little sigh before the Cupid of Praxiteles, shorn of his wings by ruthless Time or some still more ruthless human destroyer. But oh the lovesomeness of that wingless Love, the sensuous psalmody that seems about to part the young lips, and the glad eyes one may fancy glancing under that careless infant brow! Hyacinthe stands before it a long, long time while many parties come in and go out, and only moves on a little when an insolent young Frenchman offers a surmise as to her being a statue herself. She moves only as far as Ariadne: the jeune Français has made a progressive movement also, and notes behind his Paris hat to his companion that the girl looks something like the marble. She does. Though the grief of the face of the daughter of Minos as she lies deserted by her lover on the rocky shore of Naxos be a poignant and a present woe, there is the shadow of its mate on the brow and lips of the girl who gazes at its pure and pallid and all-unavailing loveliness.

The Frenchmen have gone with their guide, and there is a great stillness falling on the place, and no more tourists come that way. The light is fading, but Hyacinthe turns back to the mutilated Cupid, and ere long sits down at the base of the statue, and her head rests well on the cold marble while the darkness grows, and the guardians of the Vatican either forget or do not distinguish the white of her gown from the blurred blanchedness of the Greek Love.

So, while the mother waits at home, and wails and prays and wonders and seeks comfort among her neighbors, the daughter sleeps and dreams; and her dream is this: The wingless Love looks up and laughs as in welcome, and Hyacinthe looks up too, and they both see a new marble standing there in front of them: nay, not a marble, though white as Parian, for the eyes that laugh back at Love's and hers are blue as the blue Italian summer skies, and the curling locks of hair on the brow are of shining gold, and the palms of the beautiful hands are rosy with the bright blood of life.

And Love asks, "What would you?"

And the strange comer answers, "They say I need nothing."

And Hyacinthe in her dream says, "Is what they say the truth?" But even while she speaks the stranger sinks farther and farther from her sight, his glad blue eyes still laughing back at Love and her as he fades into one with the darkness afar off where Ariadne slumbers in sorrow. And the wingless Love smiles sadly as he speaks: "Seek your art, O daughter of a Greek mother! and you will find in it the answer to your question." And Hyacinthe, sighing, wakes in the dreary dusk of the first dawn.

She was affrighted at first, and then slowly there came upon her, with the fast-increasing daylight, a great peace.

"'Seek your art!'" the girl murmured to herself, pushing back her dark locks and gazing away toward the spot where the hero of her dream had vanished. "So will I, Cupid, and there I shall find the answer to my question, to all questions; for I shall find him whom my soul loveth. Who was he, what was he, so resplendent and shining among all these old Greeks? Where shall I seek? Say, Cupid? But you are a silent god, and will not answer me. I know, I know," she cried, clasping her slender hands together. "I will go to my father's country, where, he used to tell me, all the men are fair and all the women good. There I shall find my art and you, my Saxon god."

When the mother heard of the dream and the resolution she was sad at first, but decided finally to write to the two maiden sisters of Ernest King, who had idolized their young, handsome brother, and who answered promptly that they would gladly receive his only daughter. Hyacinthe took a brave and smiling leave of the madre and Tancredi, after having gone to look her farewell at the wingless Love and the sleeping stricken Ariadne. "Ah, dear Cupid," she whispered, "I am going to-day to find my art and the Saxon whom my soul loveth. Addio, you and Ariadne!"