Charles Lever, His Life in His Letters, Vol. II

“I’m glad you like my talk. How I’d like to read you my opening of ‘Kilgobbin.’ They like it much here, but I don’t know how much may have been said to cheer me. I’m not able to write beyond a very short time, but I must do something or my head will run clean away with me.

“My wife’s state keeps me in intense anxiety, but on the whole she is better than heretofore.

“Is there anything out worth reviewing? I’d like to have something would take me off myself for a while.

“That poor fellow Baker, who was shot, was a cousin of my wife, – a good, amiable, soft-hearted fellow, I hear, and incapable of a severe thing.”

To Mr John Blackwood.

“Trieste, July 16, 1869.

“I kept over the O’Ds., at your nephew’s suggestion, till I heard from you, but am glad now to see that you have no change to advise, for I don’t think I could make them better, especially by dictation. Any value these things have is as a sort of ‘schnaps,’ and nobody likes water with his glass of curaçoa.

“The heat is so overpowering here that I can do nothing, and I am afraid, in my wife’s critical state, to leave home for the Styrian mountains, where some hospitable invitations are tempting me. From all I can learn, there is a fine field for story-writing in those unvisited lands on the Hungarian frontier, and I may one of these days perhaps be able to profit by it.

“I am glad the chestnut turns out so well, but I was sure she would improve every day she was ridden. If I were Mrs B. I’d strongly demur to putting a collar on her, at least till she was thoroughly made for the saddle; for it is a curious fact that you may harness your saddle-horse but you can’t ride your harness-horse. Mrs B. will understand me, and I am sure agree with me. Whether she does or not, give her my kindest regards.”

To Mr William Blackwood.

“July 16, 1869.

“You are a bad boy not to have come up to town and let us have a shake hands together. I’ll forgive you, however, if you make some pretext for seeing Venice, and come over here for a few days to me. There must surely be some dead time of the year, when magazines, like their writers, grow drowsy and dozy; at all events make time and take a short run abroad, and it will do you a world of good.”

To Mr John Blackwood.

“Trieste, Aug. 4,1869.

“I send you two O’Ds. which I have just done, and hope you will think them good. I imagine you will insert the small benefaction – which I think well enough – in next batch.

“The heat has been nigh killing us all here. Sydney was thrown down by sunstroke on Sunday coming from church, and is still in bed, but now better. The heat was 94° in the shade, and people who had come from Egypt say they had never suffered anything like it there. My poor wife has felt it severely, and the strongest of us have had to give up food and exercise, and merely wait for evening to breathe freely.

“Pray make them send me June No., for I can’t follow the story till I get it.

“Don’t you think that they have hunted down that blackguard, Grenville Murray, too inhumanly even for a blackguard! – I do. (I mean Knox’s decision.)”

To Mr John Blackwood.

“Trieste, Sept. 6.

“I thank you much for your generous remittance. I have not been doing anything lately for a heavy feverish cold, which has kept me in a dark room and a low diet.

“I want to write to you about Byron, but I will wait till I see if General Mengaldo (Byron’s old Venetian friend) will give me leave to tell his story of Byron’s separation, and confute the Yankee woman whose name I have not temper to write.

“Mengaldo lived more in Byron’s intimacy as an equal (not a dependant) than any one during Byron’s life at Venice, and would be a mine of curious information if he could be led to open it. Hudson alone has influence with him, and since I saw that woman’s book I wrote to H. about it.

“There is a most curious little volume just out by Persano, ‘The Hero of Lessa,’ all about Cavour and Garibaldi, confirming everything I once wrote you about Cavour’s complicity and duplicity. Would you like a short notice or review of it?

“My wife is most seriously ill, the rest all well.”

To Mr John Blackwood.

“Sept. 26,1869.

“I have just read the O’D. about Canning to the Chief Baron, who has been dining here with me, and I send it hoping you will laugh at it as much as he did: he also liked the Fenian paper much, and I send them both at once, as if you have anything to add, &c, there will be ample time.

“I never write a line now but O’D., and I only send you about one in every five I invent, for the time is not propitious in new subjects.

“My poor wife continues seriously ill, and I am myself so worn by watching and anxiety that I am scarcely alive.”

To Mr John Blackwood.

“Trieste, Oct. 8,1869.

“I don’t like delaying this O’D., though I thought at one time to keep it till I had heard from you. The ‘Austrian Free Press’ has translated the Austrian O’D. and the Persano one, and the German party seems greatly pleased with the tone of the first, though of course the Italians are indignant.

“I think you will like the bit about Baron Warde in this O’D. It was to Lord Normanby I presented him, at a party at Scarlett’s, who was then British Chargé d’Affaires.

“I have little heart to do anything. My wife has had to submit to a third operation, and cannot rally from the great nervous depression, and has now ceased her only nourishment, wine.

“Loss of rest at night and want of fresh air by day have worn me so much that I have no more energy left in me. Of course years have their share in this, and I don’t try to blink that.

“Chas. Reade has found a sympathetic critic who has forgotten none of his merits; not but that on the whole I agree with him, and certainly concur in the belief that Reade has got nothing like his deserts in popular favour. The coarsenesses that disfigure him (and they do) are, after all, not worse than many in Balzac, and no one disputes his supremacy.

“They tell me that the Cabinet can’t agree about the Irish robbery bill; but I don’t think the thieves will fall out, seeing how much booty they have to divide elsewhere. It’s rather a good joke to see a Whig Radical Government trying to revive the Holy Alliance, and sending Lord Clarendon over Europe to concoct alliances against France. The fear of what will happen when L. N. dies is a strong bond of interest, and in the common fear of a great Democratic revolution even Austria and Prussia are willing to shake hands. Would it be well to O’Dowd them?

“I wish I had three days with you in your breezy atmosphere to shake off my dumps and my dreariness.”

To Mr William Blackwood.

“Trieste, Sunday, Oct. 10.

“As I have made a slight addition to the ‘Canning’ O’D., I do not like to delay the proof beyond to-day, to which I waited in hope of a letter from your uncle.

“I have no good news to send of my poor wife, and I am very low and dispirited in consequence.

“I had a capital O’D. in my head this morning, but a bad sermon I have just heard has driven it clean out of my mind. I am quite ready to disendow my consular chaplain, and won’t give him his Sunday dinner in consequence.”

To Mr John Blackwood.

“Trieste, Oct. 14,1869.

“Many thanks for your cheque, which I have this moment received.

“You are not, I think, quite just about the last two O’Ds. First of all, an O’D. need not, nor can it, be always an epigram; it must occasionally be an argument epigrammatically treated, and ‘Close and the Carmelite’ is, I believe, such. The changed position of two Churchmen (representatives as they are of schools of thought) is well worth notice, and it would be well to show that the Dean’s Protestantism is not the national religion.

“As to the Volunteers, respect for what you think of them (and I do not) always holds my hands when I allude to them. I would not take a foreigner’s opinion on an English institution, though I would respectfully listen to his judgment on a professional matter, – as, for instance, if N. were to talk of a cancer or an aneurism, I would accept his competence to pronounce in the same way [as] when a French soldier like MacMahon or Pallitan, or an Austrian such as Hess, or a Russian like T., derides the idea of such bodies being called soldiers, and advises England not to trust to such defence if the hour of invasion approach. I really feel that it requires great self-restraint not to speak out on an inefficiency made all the more insufferable by an overweening vanity and bumptiousness of conduct (as witness the walk past t’other day at Brussels) that makes one anything but proud of the common countyship.

“Fortunately for your patience I am writing near the post hour, and I must spare you a long discourse on these two themes that you do not seem to think the world will much care for, but that I believe are both of them the very subjects men will be inclined to talk over.

“I half doubted whether, after your dissatisfaction with what I thought good and well-timed, I should forward this O’D. on ‘Irish Queries ‘; but it is a mere argument, treated Hibernically, and you will do what you like with it.

“My home is a very sad one, and I see little prospect of brighter fortune.

“A serious revolt has just broken out in Dalmatia. The peasants refuse to be enrolled in the Landwehr, and have risen, and, up to this, resisted the troops with success. Of course the thing is deeper than a mere local row, and being on the Montenegrin frontier, has an uncommonly ugly look. Three thousand men have been despatched and two gunboats this morning to Cáttaro, and there will be warm work there before to-morrow evening. Austria is in that state that any one movement of her incongruous nationalities may bring down the whole rotten edifice with a run.

“I think Sydney is ‘brewing an MS.,’ for I scarcely see her all day, and she has a half conscious air of authorship at dinner.”

To Mr John Blackwood.

“Trieste, Oct. 27, 1869.

“I send you I think a smart O’Dowd ‘On the Misery of Singing without an Accompaniment’ (or rather, speaking without a brogue). I’m terribly hipped: I wish to God I could get out of this! If nothing else offers, perhaps I could get Elizabeth Barry to steal me: I’d make no objection to her cutting off my curls, and as to my clothes, I’ll be shot if she could change them for worse.”

To Mr John Blackwood.

“Trieste, Nov. 9, 1869.

“I have detained these proofs that I might hear from you; but the snow has begun to make the passes difficult for the post, and I think it better to despatch them. I hope you’ll think them good. There was a slaughter of the innocents last month – that is, if they ever reached you.

“If my poor wife had not been so dreadfully ill I believe I’d have managed a trip to Suez. I had a pressing invitation, and it would have been exciting enough for the mere strange gathering it brought about, but my home anxieties are thickening every hour.

“You know we are in trouble here in Dalmatia. So far back as July I warned Lord Bloomfield that there was mischief brewing, and that Montenegro was preparing for an outbreak. Of course I never supposed that a consular report would carry weight, but I wrote in a light jocular strain that I thought might be attended to. The reply was: ‘I showed Beust your note, and he thinks you have been humbugged.’ Now I have the satisfaction of seeing B. make a very humble amende, admitting that I knew more of what was menaced than his agent at Cáttaro.

“Still the Austrians believe, or affect to believe, that Russia is not in it; nor is she more than certain American politicians are in Fenianism – that is, they want to see the chances of success before they go farther. I hear that Gladstone has got a fright about Ireland, and that his Land Bill will be ‘Moderate and even Conservative’ – in fact, he begins to feel that dealing with Ireland means ‘concession,’ and when you have given all you have, you’ve to make way for somebody else who’ll give something more. Bright is very much disgusted at the moderation of the measure intended, and the Cabinet, I hear, not one-minded.

“All these things, however, open no prospect for a Tory Government, and out of pure fear of what Gladstone would do, if pushed to it, the squires will vote for him rather than risk – not their seats, but their acres.

“The indifference foreign statesmen feel about England, and what she thinks on anything now, exceeds belief. I declare to you I believe Holland has as much weight in Europe.

“Would you like something about Suez? – I mean, about the trade prospects, &c, – that is, if anything could be had new or striking. Up to this the only speculation I have seen worth anything is how greatly to our benefit the route would be if we had a war with America, for we could certainly ‘make the police’ of the Mediterranean and Levant, though not of the Atlantic and Pacific.”

To Mr John Blackwood.

“Trieste, Nov. 29, 1869.

“I am still confined to the house with a feverish cold, and overrun by travellers to and from Suez.

“The Dalmatian revolt is becoming a very serious affair. The peasants are beating the troops, and now the season must stop all operations till spring. Whether by that time the complication will not take wider limits and embrace Servia and the Balkans, is not easy to see. That blessed ally of ours, Louis Napoleon, is now intriguing to get a Russian alliance and undo all the work of the Crimean campaign, and of course our ‘Non-interference Policy’ will leave the coast free to him! Thank God, his home troubles may overtake him before he goes much farther!”

To Mr John Blackwood.

“Trieste, Dec. 11, 1869.

“Thanks for your note and its enclosure, and thanks, too, for telling me that the deferred O’Ds. are not rejected ones, for I was getting low-spirited at the number of recruits sent back as below the standard. When I asked you to send me the unused, it was a painful confession. It was like a manufacturer owning to his being reduced to work up his old material. Perhaps I shall one of these days make an O’Dowd on ‘Devil’s Dust in Literature.’ What do you think of it?

“I hope you will like the ‘O’Dowd’ I send. It is meant to expose a very common blunder respecting the influences of the better classes abroad. You must ensure the correction yourself, and it will be the last I shall forward this month. For the last week I have been keeping a dark room with a severe ophthalmia. It was a dreary time, and I am glad it is over.

“Gladstone is going to propose a sort of Court of Arbitration for land purposes – that is, another body of men to be shot at when the peasants find landlords scarce, or what the sportsmen call ‘wild.’

“This Dalmatian revolt must sleep during the winter, but it will be a serious mischief yet, especially if this Franco-Russian alliance takes place. Our policy now ought to be to reconcile Austria and Prussia at once, and prepare for the big struggle that is coming to undo the results of the Crimean War. I wish, if it be decided to represent England abroad by old women, that at least they would send us old ladies.”

To Mr John Blackwood.

“Trieste, Dec. 14, 1860.

“I hope for both our sakes you are not quite just about the ‘Pope’ O’D. I think it has a smack of Swift – a very faint one it may be, but still enough to recall the flavour. The anecdote of the Yankee was not made for the occasion, only it occurred to Sir J. Hudson, and not to O’Dowd. Take them all in all, I have done better and worse; but I think with those you have already on hand, they will make a fair batch.

“I hope you will like the ‘Dr Temple’ O’D. It, at least, is worked out.

“I am very poorly, and very low in spirits; my wife grows weaker every day, and our anxieties are great. For the first time in my life I find it a ‘grind’ to write a few lines. Le commencement du fin, maybe – who knows?”

XX. TRIESTE 1870

To Mr John Blackwood.

“Trieste, Jan. 4,1870.

“When I saw ‘Maga’ without me I began to feel as if I had died (hitherto at Trieste I only believed I had been buried), and when your cheque reached me this morning I pictured myself as my own executor! You are most kind to bethink you of the necessities of this pleasant season, – indeed I scarcely know anything of Christmas but its bills I Still, I should be well content to have nothing heavier on my heart than money cares, and I believe that is about as dreary a confession as a man can well make.

“I am sorry to hear you have not been well, but I trust it is a thing of the past already: I don’t think either of us would be what is called a good patient. I like the Homer Odyssey (?) greatly. I suspect I guess the writer – that is, from a mere accident. ‘Suez’ is excellent, and Stanley’s opinion is that of the best German engineers also. Aren’t you flattering to my Lord of Knebworth? It was not, however, a ‘good fairy’ gave him a wife.

“Sydney sends her love. She is going over to England in spring (at least she says so, and I suppose I am bound to believe it) to pay that Devonshire visit I interrupted last year.”

To Mr John Blackwood.

“Trieste, Feb. 3,1870.

“In Stanley’s clever article on ‘Suez’ for January there is a sketch of an Italian travelling companion so like a portrait that we all here fancy we recognise the man. It is the same who addresses the Empress Eugénie so brusquely. If we be right, he is an old acquaintance of ours called ‘Campereo.’ Pray, if occasion serve, ask if this be the man. It is wonderfully like him at all events, and I could almost bet on it.

“I have been hoping to hear from you, and delaying to tell you – what for me is a rare event – a piece of pleasant news. Sydney is about to be married. The sposo, an Englishman, young, well educated, well-mannered, and well off; he is the great millowner, paper manufacturer, and shipbuilder of Austria, and has about £7000 a-year.

“I need not say it is a great match for a poor ‘tocherless lass,’ but I can say that the man’s character and reputation would make him acceptable if he had only £500 a-year.

“To myself, overborne and distressed by the thought of how little I had done for my children, and how wastefully and foolishly I had lived, – spending my means pretty much as I did my brains, in bursts of spendthrift extravagance, and leaving myself in both cases with nothing to fall back on, – it is a relief unspeakable that one of my poor girls at least is beyond the straits of penury.

“I know that you and Mrs Blackwood have a warm and kindly feeling towards us, and you will be glad to hear of such good fortune. I do not know that the excitement has been very favourable to my poor wife, who can only look as yet to the one feature – that is, that she loses a child’s companionship; but I trust that in time she will see with me that the event is one to be truly thankful for.

“The marriage is to take place on the 21st, and after a trip to Rome, &c, they visit Paris, and on to London some time in April. Sydney ardently hopes that you and Mrs Blackwood may be in town this season: she longs to see you both again.

“I need not say I have done nothing but answer and write notes for the last few weeks, and sit in commission over trousseau details, for which how I am ever to pay I hope somebody knows – but I do not. I remember Fergus O’Connor saying that he could ‘get in’ for Mallow ‘if he could stand a dinner to his committee,’ and I can fully appreciate that nice situation at present.

“Mr Cook has been at me again in a pamphlet. It was only a few days back he went through here with a gang, and I had determined to dine at table d’hôte with them, but was laid up with a heavy cold and sorely disappointed accordingly.

“I hear from London that Dizzy is hopeful and in good heart, but of what or why I cannot guess. Certainly the country is not Conservatively-minded now, nor could the Tories succeed to power except by repeating the Reform Bill dodge of outbidding the Whigs and then strengthening the Radical party. That Dizzy is ready for this, and that he would push a Land Bill for Ireland to actual commission, I can easily believe; but are we not all sick of being ‘shuttlecocked’ between two ambitious and jealous rivals? And is there not something else to be thought of than who is to be First Lord of the Treasury?

“I see a book advertised called ‘Varieties of Viceregal Life.’ If I had it I suspect I could make an amusing paper on it – that is, if the book bore out its title.”

To Mr John Blackwood.

“Trieste, Feb. 9, 1870.

“I have been hoping and hoping to have a line from you, and would still go on waiting for it only that the ‘O’Dowd’ I now send is too ‘apropos’ for delay. It is the only one I have written, but think you have still one or two by you – ‘The Pope,’ and ‘Landlords and Limits.’ I am terribly knocked up, – such an attack on the chest, – and not able to leave my room, and at a time when I am full of care and occupation.

“Lord Clarendon has written me a private and confidential about ‘Cook and the Excursionists,’ who have petitioned him against me. Lord Clarendon evidently foresees a ‘question’ to be asked in the House, and wants an answer. Mine was that Cornelius O’Dowd was not in the Consular service, nor, so far as I was aware, had he any relations with F. O.; that he was a person who amused himself and, when he could, other people, by ridiculing whatever was absurd, or in bad taste or manners, or hypocritical in morals; and that being one who had followed the avocation of a writing man for thirty years, he must be understood to have acquired some notions, not only of the privileges but the responsibilities of the pen; and that, finally, as Consul Lever, I had no explanation to make Mr Cook, who first blackguarded me in print and then appealed to my official superior.

“Sydney’s marriage comes off Monday 21st. I am forced to say, like King Frederic of Prussia, ‘Another such victory would ruin me.’ To be sent to one’s grave by milliners does seem a very ignoble destiny! – but a bad bronchitis, aided by Brussels lace, has brought me to a state of feverish irritability that, if it does not terrify me, certainly alarms my family, and con ragione.”

To Mr John Blackwood.

“Trieste, March 3,1870.

“Perhaps you’ll say ‘dull as ditch water’ was the inspiration as well as the title of this ‘O’Dowd/ and mayhap I won’t deny it. It is, however, a heartfelt cry over the dreariness of the time the ‘whole world over,’ and I am sure many will acknowledge the truth of it.

“I know nobody jolly but Sydney. She writes me full accounts of Venetian Carnival doings, – masques and gondoliers, &c, &c., and music on the Grand Canal till daybreak.

“Here I am hipped and out of heart, – waiting, too, but for the undertaker, I believe, for it is the only ‘carriage exercise’ I should now care for.

“We had two smart shocks of earthquake yesterday. I thought that Cumming was going to be right after all, but it passed off with nothing worse than some tinkling of the teacups and a formidable swinging of the lustre over our heads.”

To Mr John Blackwood.

“Trieste, March 6, 1870.

“The Whigs would like to blend up Fenianism and agrarian crime. Now they are not to be so confounded. The National party is anti-English, rebel, violent, cruel, anything you like, but the men who shoot the landlords are not the Fenians! It is a brief I should like well to plead on, and you will see ere long that there will be many to acknowledge its truth.

“Gladstone will carry his Bill, I’m sure, but if the Tories are adroit they will make a complete schism in the Irish party and throw the Catholic set so completely on the side of the Ministry as to disgust the Protestant feeling of England. How I wish I had half an hour with Dizzy, and that he would condescend to listen to me!”

To Mr John Blackwood.

“March 15, 1870.

“I was glad to hear from you, and gladder to hear you liked the O’Ds.

“Sydney is away to Rome honeymooning it very pleasantly, and meeting all manner of attentions, &c. The trousseau has spoilt my trip to town. I have ‘taken out’ in white lace what I meant for ‘whitebait,’ and I must try and screw on in life for one year more if I mean to see London again. It was the celebrated Betty O’Dwyer that said to her legs, ‘I’ll take another season out of you before I’ll give you to Tom O’Callaghan.’”