Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 56, No. 345, July, 1844

"I have heard a good deal of your proceedings from my correspondent and kinsman in Paris. You have acquitted yourself well, and it shall not be unknown in the quarter where it may be of most service to you.—I have been stopped by Mariamne's singing in the next room, and her voice has almost unmanned me; she is melancholy of late, and her only music now is taken from those ancestral hymns which our nation regard as the songs of the Captivity. Her tones at this moment are singularly touching, and I have been forced to lay down my pen, for she has melted me to tears. Yet her colour has not altogether faded lately, and I think sometimes that her eyes look brighter than ever! Heaven help me, if I should lose her. I should then be alone in the world.

"You may rely on my intelligence—a war is inevitable. You may also rely on my conjecture—that it will be the most desperate war which Europe has yet seen. One that will break up foundations, as well as break down superstructures; not a war of politics but of principles; not a war for conquest but for ruin. All the treasuries of Europe will be bankrupt within a twelvemonth of its commencement; unless England shall become their banker. This will be the harvest of the men of money.—It is unfortunate that your money is all lodged for your commission; otherwise, in the course of a few operations, you might make cent per cent, which I propose to do. Apropos of commissions. I had nearly omitted, in my own family anxieties, to mention the object for which I began my letter. I have failed in arranging the affair of your commission! This was not for want of zeal. But the prospect of a war has deranged and inflamed every thing. The young nobility have actually besieged the Horse-guards. All the weight of the aristocracy has pressed upon the minister, and minor influence has been driven from the field. The spirit is too gallant a one to be blamed;—and yet—are there not a hundred other pursuits, in which an intelligent and active mind, like your own, might follow on the way to fortune? You have seen enough of campaigning to know, that it is not all a flourish of trumpets. Has the world but one gate, and that the Horse-guards? If my personal judgment were to be asked, I should feel no regret for a disappointment which may have come only to turn your knowledge and ability to purposes not less suitable to an ambitious spirit, nor less likely to produce a powerful impression on the world—the only thing, after all, worth living for! You may laugh at this language from a man of my country and my trade. But even I have my ambition; and you may yet discover it to be not less bold than if I carried the lamp of Gideon, or wielded the sword of the Maccabee.—I must stop again; my poor restless child is coming into the room at this moment, complaining of the chill, in one of the finest days of summer. She says that this villa has grown sunless, airless, and comfortless. Finding that I am writing to you, she sends her best wishes; and bids me ask, what is the fashionable colour for mantles in Paris, and also what is become of that 'wandering creature,' Lafontaine, if you should happen to recollect such a personage."

"P.S.—My daughter insists on our setting out from Brighton to-morrow, and crossing the Channel the day after. She has a whim for revisiting Switzerland; and in the mean time begs that if, during our absence, you should have a whim for sea air and solitude, you may make of the villa any use you please.—Yours sincerely,

"J.V. MORDECAI."

After reading this strange and broken letter, I was almost glad that I had not seen Mariamne. Lafontaine was in her heart still, in spite of absence. At this I did not wonder, for the heart of woman, when once struck, is almost incapable of change: but the suspense was killing her; and I had no doubt that her loss would sink even her strong-headed parent to the grave. Yet, what tidings had I to give? Whether her young soldier was shot in the attempt to escape from St Lazare, or thrown into some of those hideous dungeons, where so many thousands were dying in misery from day to day, was entirely beyond my power to tell. It was better that she should be roving over the bright hills, and breathing the fresh breezes of Switzerland, than listening to my hopeless conjectures at home; trying to reconcile herself to all the chances which passion is so painfully ingenious in creating, and dying, like a flower in all its beauty, on the spot where it had grown.

But the letter contained nothing of the one name, for which my first glance had looked over every line with breathless anxiety. There was not a syllable of Clotilde! The father's cares had absorbed all other thoughts; and the letter was to me a blank in that knowledge for which I panted, as the hart pants for the fountains. Still, I was not dead to the calls of friendship; and that night's mail carried a long epistle to Mordecai, detailing my escapes, and the services of his kindred in France; and for Mariamne's ear, all that I could conceive cheering in my hopes of that "wandering creature, Lafontaine."

But I was forced to think of sterner subjects. I had arrived in England at a time of the most extraordinary public excitement. Every man felt that some great trial of England and of Europe was at hand; but none could distinctly define either its nature or its cause. France, which had then begun to pour out her furious declamations against this country, was, of course, generally looked to as the quarter from which the storm was to come; but the higher minds evidently contemplated hazards nearer home. Affiliated societies, corresponding clubs, and all the revolutionary apparatus, from whose crush and clamour I had so lately emerged, met the ear and the eye on all occasions; and the fiery ferocity of French rebellion was nearly rivalled by the grave insolence of English "Rights of Man." But I am not about to write the history of a time of national fever. The republicanism, which Cicero and Plutarch instil into us all at our schools, had been extinguished in me by the squalid realities of France. I had seen the dissecting-room, and was cured of my love for the science. My spirit, too, required rest. I could have exclaimed with all the sincerity, and with all the weariness too, of the poet:—

Oh, for a lodge in some vast wilderness, Some boundless contiguity of shade, Where rumour of oppression and deceit, Of unsuccessful or successful war, Might never reach me more!"

But, perhaps fortunately for my understanding, if not for my life, I was not suffered to take refuge in the wilderness. London was around me; rich and beggared, splendid and sullen, idle and busy London. I was floating on those waves of human being, in which the struggler must make for the shore, or sink. I was in the centre of that huge whispering gallery, where every sound of earth was echoed and re-echoed with new power; and where it was impossible to dream. My days were now spent in communication with the offices of government, and a large portion of my nights in carrying on those correspondences, which, though seldom known in the routine of Downing Street, form the essential part of its intercourse with the continental cabinets. But a period of suspense still remained. Parliament had been already summoned for the 13th of December. Up to nearly the last moment, the cabinet had been kept in uncertainty as to the actual intents of France. There had been declamation in abundance in the French legislature and the journals; but with this unsubstantial evidence the cabinet could not meet the country. Couriers were sent in all directions; boats were stationed along the coast to bring the first intelligence of actual hostilities suddenly; every conceivable expedient was adopted; but all in vain. The day of opening the Session was within twenty-four hours. After lingering hour by hour, in expectancy of the arrival of despatches from our ambassador at the Hague, I offered to cross the sea in the first fishing-boat which I could find, and ascertain the facts. My offer was accepted; and in the twilight of a winter's morning, and in the midst of a snow-storm, I was making my shivering way homeward through the wretched lanes which, dark as pitch and narrow as footpaths, then led to the centre of the diplomatic world; when, in my haste, I had nearly overset a meagre figure, which, half-blinded by the storm, was tottering towards the Foreign office. After a growl, in the most angry jargon, the man recognized me; he was the clerk whom I had seen at Mordecai's house. He had, but an hour before, received, by one of the private couriers of the firm, a letter, with orders to deliver it with all expedition. He put it into my hand: it was not from Mordecai, but from Elnathan, and was simply in these words:—"My kinsman and your friend has desired me to forward to you the first intelligence of hostilities. I send you a copy of the bulletin which will be issued at noon this day. It is yet unknown; but I have it from a source on which you may perfectly rely. Of this make what use you think advantageous. Your well-wisher."

With what pangs the great money-trafficker must have consigned to my use a piece of intelligence which must have been a mine of wealth to any one who carried it first to the Stock Exchange, I could easily conjecture. But I saw in it the powerful pressure of Mordecai, which none of his tribe seemed even to have the means of resisting. My sensations were singular enough as I traced my way up the dark and lumbering staircase of the Foreign office; with the consciousness that, if I had chosen to turn my steps in another direction, I might before night be master of thousands, or of hundreds of thousands. But it is only due to the sense of honour which had been impressed on me, even in the riot and roughness of my Eton days, to say, that I did not hesitate for a moment Sending one of the attendants to arouse the chief clerk, I stood waiting his arrival with the bulletin unopened in my hands. The official had gone to his house in the country, and might not return for some hours. My perplexity increased. Every moment might supersede the value of my priority. At length a twinkling light through the chinks of one of the dilapidated doors, told me that there was some one within, from whom I might, at least, ask when and how ministers were to be approached. The door was opened, and, to my surprise, I found that the occupant of the chamber was one of the most influential members of administration. My name and purpose were easily given; and I was received as I believe few are in the habit of being received by the disposers of high things in high places. The fire had sunk to embers, the lamp was dull, and the hearer was half frozen and half asleep. Yet no sooner had he cast his eyes upon the mysterious paper which I gave into his grasp, than all his faculties were in full activity.

"This," said he, "is the most important paper that has reached this country since the taking of the Bastile. THE SCHELDT IS OPENED! This involves an attack on Holland; the defence of our ally is a matter of treaty, and we must arm without delay. The war is begun, but where it shall end"—he paused, and fixing his eyes above, with a solemnity of expression which I had not expected in the stern and hard-lined countenance, "or who shall live to see its close—who shall tell?"

"We have been waiting," said he, "for this intelligence from week to week, with the fullest expectation that it would come; and yet, when it has come, it strikes like a thunderclap. This is the third night that I have sat in this hovel, at this table, unable to go to rest, and looking for the despatch from hour to hour.—You see, sir, that our life is at least not the bed of roses for which the world is so apt to give us credit. It is like the life of my own hills—the higher the sheiling stands, the more it gets of the blast."

I do not give the name of this remarkable man. He was a Scot, and possessed of all the best characteristics of his country. I had heard him in Parliament, where he was the most powerful second of the most powerful first that England had seen. But if all men were inferior to the prime minister in majesty and fulness of conception, the man to whom I now listened had no superior in readiness of retort, in aptness of illustration—that mixture of sport and satire, of easy jest and subtle sarcasm, which forms the happiest talent for the miscellaneous uses of debate. If Pitt moved forward like the armed man of chivalry, or rather like the main body of the battle—for never man was more entitled to the appellation of a "host in himself"—never were front, flanks, and rear of the host covered by a more rapid, quick-witted, and indefatigable auxiliary. He was a man of family, and brought with him into public life, not the manners of a menial of office, but the bearing of a gentleman. Birth and blood were in his bold and manly countenance; and I could have felt no difficulty in conceiving him, if his course had followed his nature, the chieftain on his hills, at the head of his gallant retainers, pursuing the wild sports of his romantic region; or in some foreign land, gathering the laurels which the Scotch soldier has so often and so proudly added to the honours of the empire.

He was perfectly familiar with the great question of the time, and saw the full bearings of my intelligence with admirable sagacity; pointed out the inevitable results of suffering France to take upon herself the arbitration of Europe, and gave new and powerful views of the higher relation in which England was to stand, as the general protectress of the Continent. "This bulletin," said he, "announces the fact, that a French squadron has actually sailed up the Scheldt to attack Antwerp. Yet it was not ten years since France protested against the same act by Austria, as a violation of the rights of Holland. The new aggression is, therefore, not simply a solitary violence, but a vast fraud; not merely the breach of an individual treaty, but a declaration that no treaty is henceforth to be held as binding; it is more than an act of rapine; it is an universal dissolution of the principles by which society is held together. In what times are we about to live?"

My reply was—"That it depended on the spirit of England herself, whether the conflict was to be followed by honour or by shame; that she had a glorious career before her, if she had magnanimity sufficient to take the part marked out for her by circumstances; and that, with the championship of the world in her hands, even defeat would be a triumph."

He now turned the conversation to myself; spoke with more than official civility of my services, and peculiarly of the immediate one; and asked in what branch of diplomacy I desired advancement?

My answer was prompt. "In none. I desired promotion but in one way—the army." I then briefly stated the accidental loss of my original appointment, and received, before I left the chamber, a note for the secretary at war, recommending me, in the strongest terms, for a commission in the Guards.—The world was now before me, and the world in the most vivid, various, and dazzling shape; in the boldest development of grandeur, terror, and wild vicissitude, which it exhibited for a thousand years—ENGLAND WAS AT WAR!

There is no sight on earth more singular, or more awful, than a great nation going to war. I saw the scene in its highest point of view, by seeing it in England. Its perfect freedom, its infinite, and often conflicting, variety of opinion—its passionate excitement, and its stupendous power, gave the summons to hostilities a character of interest, of grandeur, and of indefinite but vast purposes, unexampled in any other time, or in any other country. When one of the old monarchies commenced war, the operation, however large and formidable, was simple. A monarch resolved, a council sat, less to guide than to echo his resolution; an army marched, invaded the enemy's territory, fought a battle—perhaps a dubious one—rested on its arms; and while Te Deum was sung in both capitals alike for the "victory" of neither, the ministers of both were constructing an armistice, a negotiation, and a peace—each and all to be null and void on the first opportunity.

But the war of England was a war of the nation—a war of wrath and indignation—a war of the dangers of civilized society entrusted to a single championship—a great effort of human nature to discharge, in the shape of blood, a disease which was sapping the vitals of Europe; or in a still higher, and therefore a more faithful view, the gathering of a tempest, which, after sweeping France in its fury, was to restore the exhausted soil and blasted vegetation of monarchy throughout the Continent; and in whose highest, England, serene and undismayed, was to

"Ride in the whirlwind, and direct the storm."

I must acknowledge, that I looked upon the coming conflict with a strange sense of mingled alarm and rejoicing. For the latter feeling, perhaps I ought to make some apology; but I was young, ardent, and ambitious. My place in life was unfixed; standing in that unhappy middle position, in which stands a man of birth too high to suffer his adoption of the humbler means of existence, and yet of resources too inadequate to sustain him without action—nay, bold and indefatigable exertion. I, at the moment, felt a very inferior degree of compunction at the crisis which offered to give me at least a chance of being seen, known, and understood among men. I felt like a man whose ship was stranded, and who saw the storm lifting the surges that were to lift him along with them; or like the traveller in an earthquake, who saw the cleft in the ground swallowing up the river which had hitherto presented an impassable obstacle—cities and mountains might sink before the concussion had done its irresistible will, but, at all events, it had cleared his way.

In thoughts like these, rash and unconnected as they were, I spent many a restless day, and still more restless night. I often sprang from a pillow which, if I had lived in the days of witchcraft, I should have thought spelled to refuse me sleep; and walking for hours, endeavoured to reduce into shape the speculations which filled my mind with splendours and catastrophes worthy of oriental dreams. Why did I not then pursue the career in which I had begun the world? Why not devote myself to diplomacy, in which I had hitherto received honour? Why not enter into Parliament, which opened all the secrets of power? For this I had two reasons. The first—and, let me confess, the most imperious—was, that my pride had been deeply hurt by the loss of my commission. I felt that I had not only been deprived of a noble profession, accidental as was the loss; but that I had subjected myself to the trivial, but stinging remarks, which never fail to find an obnoxious cause for every failure. While this cloud hung over me, I was determined never to return to my father's house. Good-natured as the friends of my family might be, I was fully aware of the style in which misfortune is treated in the idleness of country life; and the Honourable Mr Marston's loss of his rank in his Majesty's guards, or his preference of a more pacific promotion, was too tempting a topic to lose any of its stimulants by the popular ignorance of the true transaction. My next reason was, that my mind was harassed and wearied by disappointment, until I should not have regreted to terminate the struggle in the first field of battle. The only woman whom I loved, and whom, in the strange frenzy of passion, I solemnly believed to be the only woman on earth deserving to be so loved, had wholly disappeared, and was, by this time, probably wedded. The only woman whom I regarded as a friend, was in another country, probably dying. If I could have returned to Mortimer Castle—which I had already determined to be impossible—I should have found only a callous, perhaps a contemptuous, head of the family, angry at my return to burden him. Even Vincent—my old and kind-hearted friend Vincent—had been a soldier; and though I was sure of never receiving a reproach from his wise and gentle lips, was I equally sure that I could escape the flash, or the sorrow, of his eye?

In thoughts like these, and they were dangerous ones, I made many a solitary rush out into the wild winds and beating snows of the winter, which had set in early and been remarkably severe; walking bareheaded in the most lonely places of the suburbs, stripping my bosom to the blast, and longing for its tenfold chill to assuage the fever which burned within me. I had also found the old delay at the Horse-guards. The feelings of this period make me look with infinite compassion on the unhappy beings who take their lives into their own hands, and who extinguish all their earthly anxieties at a plunge. But I had imbibed principles of a firmer substance, and but upon one occasion, and one alone, felt tempted to an act of despair.

Taking my lonely dinner in a tavern of the suburbs, the waiter handed me a newspaper, which he had rescued for my behoof from the hands of a group, eager, as all the world then was, for French intelligence. My eye rambled into the fashionable column; and the first paragraph, headed "Marriage in high life," announced that, on the morrow, were to be solemnized the nuptials of Clotilde, Countess de Tourville, with the Marquis de Montrecour, colonel of the French Mousquetaires, &c. The paper dropped from my hands. I rushed out of the house; and, scarcely knowing where I went, I hurried on, until I found myself out of the sight or sound of mortal. The night was pitch-dark; there was no lamp near; the wind roared; and it was only by the flash of the foam that I discovered the broad sheet of water before me. I had strayed into Hyde Park, and was on the bank of the Serpentine. With what ease might I not finish all! It was another step. Life was a burden—thought was a torment—the light of day a loathing. But the paroxysm soon gave way. Impressions of the duty and the trials of human nature, made in earlier years, revived within me with a singular freshness and force. Tears gushed from my eyes, fast and flowing; and, with a long-forgotten prayer for patience and humility, I turned from the place of temptation. As I reached the streets once more, I heard the trumpets of the Life Guards, and the band of a battalion returning to their quarters. The infantry were the Coldstream. They had been lining the streets for the king's procession to open the sitting of Parliament. This was the 13th of December—the memorable day to which every heart in Europe was more or less vibrating; yet which I had totally forgotten. What is man but an electrical machine after all? The sound and sight of soldiership restored me to the full vividness of my nature. The machine required only to be touched, to shoot out its latent sparks; and with a new spirit and a new determination kindling through every fibre, I hastened to be present at that debate which was to be the judgment of nations.

My official intercourse with ministers had given me some privileges, and I obtained a seat under the gallery—that part of the House of Commons which is occasionally allotted to strangers of a certain rank. The House was crowded, and every countenance was pictured with interest and solemn anxiety. Grey, Sheridan, and other distinguished names of party, had already taken their seats; but the great heads of Government and Opposition were still absent. At length a buzz among the crowd who filled the floor,—and the name of Fox repeated in every tone of congratulation, announced the pre-eminent orator of England. I now saw Fox for the first time; and I was instantly struck with the incomparable similitude of all that I saw of him to all that I had conceived from his character and his style. In the broad bold forehead, the strong sense—in the relaxed mouth, the self-indulgent and reckless enjoyment—in the quick, small eye under those magnificent black brows, the man of sagacity, of sarcasm, and of humour; and in the grand contour of a countenance and head, which might have been sculptured to take its place among the sages and sovereigns of antiquity, the living proof of those extraordinary powers, which could have been checked in their ascent to the highest elevation of public life, only by prejudices and passions not less extraordinary. As he advanced up the House, he recognized every one on both sides, and spoke or smiled to nearly all. He stopped once or twice in his way, and was surrounded by a circle with whom, as I could judge from their laughter, he exchanged some pleasantry of the hour. When at length he arrived at the seat which had been reserved for him, he threw himself upon it with the easy look of comfort of a man who had reached home—gave nod to Windham, held out a finger to Grey, warmly shook hands with Sheridan; and then, opening his well-known blue and buff costume, threw himself back into the bench, and laughingly gasped for air.