The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 01, No. 01, November, 1857

A wit with a mission,—this was the position of Douglas in the last years of his life. Accordingly he was a little ashamed of the immense success of the "Caudle Lectures,"—the fame of which I remember being bruited about the Mediterranean in 1845,—and which, as social drolleries, set nations laughing. Douglas took their celebrity rather sulkily. He did not like to be talked of as a funny man. However, they just hit the reading English,—always domestic in their literary as in their other tastes,—and so helped to establish "Punch" and to diffuse Jerrold's name. He began now to be a Power in popular literature; and coming to be associated with the liberal side of "Punch," especially, the Radicals throughout Britain hailed him as a chief. Hence, in due course, his newspaper and his magazine,—both of which might have been permanently successful establishments, had his genius for business borne any proportion to his genius for literature.

This, however, was by no manner of means the case. His nature was altogether that of a literary man and artist. He could not speak in public. He could not manage money matters. He could only write and talk,—and these rather as a kind of improvvisatore, than as a steady, reading, bookish man, like a Mackintosh or a Macaulay. His politics partook of this character, and I always used to think that it was a queer destiny which made him a Radical teacher. The Radical literature of England is, with few exceptions, of a prosaic character. The most famous school of radicalism is utilitarian and systematic. Douglas was, emphatically, neither. He was impulsive, epigrammatic, sentimental. He dashed gaily against an institution, like a picador at a bull. He never sat down, like the regular workers of his party, to calculate the expenses of monarchy or the extravagance of the civil list. He had no notion of any sort of "economy." I don't know that he had ever taken up political science seriously, or that he had any preference for one kind or form of government over another. I repeat,—his radicalism was that of a humorist. He despised big-wigs, and pomp of all sorts, and, above all, humbug and formalism. But his radicalism was important as a sign that our institutions are ceasing to be picturesque; of which, if you consider his nature, you will see that his radicalism was a sign. And he did service to his cause. Not an abuse, whether from the corruption of something old, or the injustice of something new, but Douglas was out against it with his sling. He threw his thought into some epigram which stuck. Praising journalism once, he said, "When Luther wanted to crush the Devil, didn't he throw ink at him?" Recommending Australia, he wrote, "Earth is so kindly there, that, tickle her with a hoe, and she laughs with a harvest." The last of these sayings is in his best manner, and would be hard to match anywhere for grace and neatness. Here was a man to serve his cause, for he embodied its truths in forms of beauty. His use to his party could not be measured like that of commoner men, because of the rarity and attractive nature of the gifts which he brought to its service. They had a kind of incalculable value, like that of a fine day, or of starlight.

He was now immersed in literary activity. He had all kinds of work on hand. He brought out occasionally a five-act comedy, full as usual of wit. He wrote in "Punch,"—started a newspaper,—started a magazine,—published a romance,—all within a few years of each other. The romance was "A Man made of Money," which bids fair, I think, to be read longer than any of his works. It is one of those fictions in which, as in "Zanoni," "Peter Schlemil," and others, the supernatural appears as an element, and yet is made to conform itself in action to real and every-day life, in such a way that the understanding is not shocked, because it reassures itself by referring the supernatural to the regions of allegory. Shall we call this a kind of bastard-allegory? Jericho, when he first appears, is a common man of the common world. He is a money-making, grasping man, yet with a bitter savour of satire about him which raises him out of the common place. Presently it turns out, that by putting his hand to his heart he can draw away bank-notes,—only that it is his life he is drawing away. The conception is fine and imaginative, and ought to rank with the best of those philosophical stories so fashionable in the last century. Its working-out in the every-day part is brilliant and pungent; and much ingenuity is shown in connecting the tragic and mysterious element in Jericho's life with the ordinary, vain, worldly existence of his wife and daughters. It is startling to find ourselves in the regions of the impossible, just as we are beginning to know the persons of the fable. But the mind reassures itself. This Jericho, with his mysterious fate,—is not he, in this twilight of fiction, shadowing to us the real destiny of real money-grubbers whom we may see any day about our doors? Has not the money become the very life of many such? And so feeling, the reader goes pleasantly on,—just excited a little, and raised out of the ordinary temperature in which fiction is read, by the mystic atmosphere through which he sees things,—and ends, acknowledging that with much pleasure he has also gathered a good moral. For his mere amusement the best fireworks have been cracking round him on his journey. In short, I esteem this Jerrold's best book,—the one which contains most of his mind. Certain aspects of his mind, indeed, may be seen even to better advantage in others of his works; his sentimental side, for instance, in "Clovernook," where he has let his fancy run riot like honeysuckle, and overgrow every thing; his wit in "Time works Wonders," which blazes with epigrams like Vauxhall with lamps. But "A Man made of Money" is the completest of his books as a creation, and the most characteristic in point of style,—is based on a principle which predominated in his mind,—is the most original in imaginativeness, and the best sustained in point and neatness, of the works he has left.

During the years of which I have just been speaking, Jerrold lived chiefly in a villa at Putney, and afterwards at St. John's Wood,—the mention of which fact leads me to enter on a description of him in his private, social, and friendly relations. Now-a-days it is happily expected of every man who writes of another to recognize his humanity,—not to treat him as a machine for the production of this or that—scientific, or literary, or other—material. Homo sum is the motto of the biographer, and so of the humbler biographic sketcher. Jerrold is just one of those who require and reward this kind of personal sympathy and attention;—so radiant was the man of all that he put into his books!—so quick, so warm, so full of light and life, wit and impulse! He was one of the few who in their conversation entirely come up to their renown. He sparkled wherever you touched him, like the sea at night.

The first thing I have to remark, in treating of Jerrold the man, is the entire harmony between that figure and Jerrold the writer. He talked very much as he wrote, and he acted in life on the principles which he advocated in literature. He united, remarkably, simplicity of character with brilliancy of talk. For instance, with all his success, he never sought higher society than that which he found himself gradually and by a natural momentum borne into, as he advanced. He never suppressed a flash of indignant sarcasm for fear of startling the "genteel" classes and Mrs. Grundy. He never aped aristocracy in his household. He would go to a tavern for his oysters and a glass of punches simply as they did in Ben Jonson's days; and I have heard of his doing so from a sensation of boredom at a very great house indeed,—a house for the sake of an admission to which, half Bayswater would sell their grandmothers' bones to a surgeon. This kind of thing stamped him in our polite days as one of the old school, and was exceedingly refreshing to observe in an age when the anxious endeavour of the English middle classes is to hide their plebeian origin under a mockery of patrician elegance. He had none of the airs of success or reputation,—none of the affectations, either personal or social, which are rife everywhere. He was manly and natural,—free and off-handed to the verge of eccentricity. Independence and marked character seemed to breathe from the little, rather bowed figure, crowned with a lion-like head and falling light hair,—to glow in the keen, eager, blue eyes glancing on either side as he walked along. Nothing could be less commonplace, nothing less conventional, than his appearance in a room or in the streets.

His quick, impulsive nature made him a great talker, and conspicuously convivial,—yea, convivial, at times, up to heights of vinous glory which the Currans and Sheridans shrank not from, but which a respectable age discourages. And here I must undertake the task of saying something about his conversational wit,—so celebrated, yet so difficult (as is notoriously the case with all wits) to do justice to on paper.

The first thing that struck you was his extreme readiness in conversation. He gave the electric spark whenever you put your knuckle to him. The first time I called on him in his house at Putney, I found him sipping claret. We talked of a certain dull fellow whose wealth made him prominent at that time. "Yes," said Jerrold, drawing his finger round the edge of his wineglass, "that's the range of his intellect,—only it had never any thing half so good in it." I quote this merely as one of the average bons-mots which made the small change of his ordinary conversation. He would pun, too, in talk, which he scarcely ever did in writing. Thus he extemporized as an epitaph for his friend Charles Knight, "GOOD NIGHT!"—When Mrs. Glover complained that her hair was turning gray,—from using essence of lavender (as she said),—he asked her "whether it wasn't essence of thyme?" On the occasion of starting a convivial club, (he was very fond of such clubs,) somebody proposed that it should consist of twelve members, and be called "The Zodiac,"—each member to be named after a sign. "And what shall I be?" inquired a somewhat solemn man, who feared that they were filled up. "Oh, we'll bring you in as the weight in Libra," was the instant remark of Douglas. A noisy fellow had long interrupted a company in which he was. At last the bore said of a certain tune, "It carries me away with it." "For God's sake," said Jerrold, "let somebody whistle it."—Such dicteria, as the Romans called them, bristled over his talk. And he flashed them out with an eagerness, and a quiver of his large, somewhat coarse mouth, which it was quite dramatic to see. His intense chuckle showed how hearty was his gusto for satire, and that wit was a regular habit of his mind.

I shall set down here some Jerroldiana current in London,—some heard by myself, or otherwise well authenticated. Remember how few we have of George Selwyn's, Hanbury Williams's, Hook's, or indeed any body's, and you will not wonder that my handful is not larger.

When the well-known "Letters" of Miss Martineau and Atkinson appeared, Jerrold observed that their creed was, "There is no God, and Miss Martineau is his prophet."

"I have had such a curious dinner!" said C. "Calves' tails."—"Extremes meet," Douglas said, instantly.

He admired Carlyle; but objected that he did not give definite suggestions for the improvement of the age which he rebuked. "Here," said he, "is a man who beats a big drum under my windows, and when I come running down stairs has nowhere for me to go."

A wild Republican said profanely, that Louis Blanc was "next to Jesus Christ"—"On which side?" asked the wit.

Pretty Miss –, the actress, being mentioned, he praised her early beauty. "She was a lovely little thing," he said, "when she was a bud, and"—(a pause)—"before she was a blowen'."—This was in a very merry vein, and the serious reader must forgive me.

He called a small, thin London littérateur of his acquaintance, "a pin without the head or the point."

When a plain, not to say ugly, gentleman intimated his intention of being godfather to somebody's child, Jerrold begged him not to give the youngster his "mug."

A dedication to him being spoken of,—"Ah!" said he, with mock gravity, "that's an awful power that – has in his hands!"

Carlyle and a much inferior man being coupled by some sapient review as "biographers,"—"Those two joined!" he exclaimed. "You can't plough with an ox and an ass."

"Is the legacy to be paid immediately?" inquired somebody,—apropos of a will which made some noise.—"Yes, on the coffin-nail," answered he.

Being told that a recent play had been "done to order,"—he observed, that "it would be done to a good many 'orders,' he feared."

It may be honestly said that these are average specimens of the pleasantries which flowed from him in congenial society. His talk was full of such, among friends and acquaintance, and he certainly enjoyed the applause which they excited. But in his graver and tenderer moods, in the country walks and lounges of which he was fond, his range was higher and deeper. For a vein of natural poetry and piety ran through the man,—wit and satirist as he was,—and appeared in his speech, occasionally, as in his writings.

A long habit of indulgence in epigram had made him rather apt to quiz his friends. But we are to remember that he was encouraged in this, and that a self-indulgent man is only too liable to have the nicety of his sensitiveness spoiled. Certainly, he had a kind heart and good principles. He would lend any man money, or give any man help,—even to the extent of weakness and imprudence. This was one reason why he died no better off,—and one reason why his friends have so much exerted themselves to pay a tribute to his memory in the shape of an addition to the provision he had made for his family. The quickness of feeling which belonged to him made him somewhat ready to take offence. But if he was easily ruffled, he was easily smoothed. Of few men could you say, that their natural impulses were better, or that, given such a nature and such a fortune, they would have arrived at fifty-four years of age with so young a heart.

The last literary event of any magnitude in Jerrold's life was his assuming the editorship of "Lloyd's Newspaper." This journal, which before his connection with it had no position to brag of, rose under his hands to great circulation and celebrity. Every week, there you traced his hand at its old work of embroidering with queer and fanciful sarcasm some bit of what he thought timely and necessary truth. Against all tyrants, all big-wigged impostors, black, white, or gray, was his hammer ringing, and sparks of wit were flying about as ever under his hand. He was getting up in years; but still there seemed many to be hoped for him, yet. Though not so active in schemes as formerly, he still talked of works to be done; and at "Our Club," and such-like friendly little associations, the wit was all himself, and came to our stated meetings as punctually as a star to its place in the sky. He had suffered severely from illness, especially from rheumatism, at various periods of life; and he had lived freely and joyously, as was natural to a man of his peculiar gifts. But, death! We never thought of the brilliant and radiant Douglas in connection with the black river. He would have sunk Charon's boat with a shower of epigrams, one would have fancied, if the old fellow, with his squalid beard, had dared to ask him into the stern-sheets. To more than one man who knew him intimately the first announcement of his decease was made by the "Times."

On the evening of the 19th of May, I met him,—as I frequently did on Saturday evenings,—and on no evening do I remember him more lively and brilliant. Next Saturday, I believe, he was at the same kindly board; but some accident kept me away;—I never saw him again. Soon after, he was taken ill. There passed a week of much suffering. June had come, warm and rainy, but our friend was dying. The nature of the illness might be doubtful, but there could be no doubt that the end was near. He prepared himself to meet it. He sent friendly messages of farewell to those he loved, begging, too, that if what he had ever said had pained any one, he might now be forgiven. His mind was made up, and his children were all about him. On a fine evening in the first week of June, he was moved to the window, that he might see the sun setting. On Monday, the eighth of that month, being perfectly conscious almost till the very last, he died.

The time is not yet come to discuss what his ultimate place will be in the literature of his century. It will not be denied that he was a man of rare gifts, and of a remarkable experience in life; and his life and the popularity of his writings will by and by help posterity to understand this our generation. Meanwhile I shall leave him in his resting-place in Norwood, among the hills and fields of Surrey, near the grave of the friend of his youth, the gentle and gifted Laman Blanchard, where he was laid on the 15th of June, amidst a concourse of people not often assembled round the remains of one who has begun life as humbly as he did.

His death made a great impression; and the acuteness with which his friends felt it said more than could be said in a long dissertation for the kindly and love-inspiring qualities of the man. As soon as it appeared that his family were left in less prosperous circumstances than had been hoped, their interest took an active form. A committee met to organize a plan by which the genius of those who had known Jerrold might be employed in raising a provision for his family. The rest has been duly recorded in the newspapers, where the success of these benevolent exertions may be read.

FLORENTINE MOSAICS

I

HISTORICAL

The capital of Tuscany—according to its most respectable and veracious chroniclers—is the oldest city extant. Its history is traced with great accuracy up to the Deluge, which is as much as could be reasonably expected. The egg of Florence is Fiesole. This city, according to the conscientious and exhaustive Villani, [Footnote: Cronica. Lib. I. c. vii.] was built by a grandson of Noah, Attalus by name, who came into Italy in order "to avoid the confusion occasioned by the building of the Tower of Babel." [Footnote: "per evitare la confusione creata per la edificazione della torre di Babel," etc.] Noah and his wife had, however, already made a visit to Tuscany, soon after the Deluge; so that it is not remarkable that "King Attalus" should have felt inclined to visit the estates of his ancestor. At the same time, it is obvious that the Noahs had not been satisfied with the locality, and had reëmigrated; for Attalus, upon his arrival, found Italy entirely without inhabitants. He, therefore, with great propriety claimed jurisdiction over the whole country, elected himself king, and his wife Electra queen; built himself a palace, with a city attached to it; and in short, made himself, generally, at home. We are also fortunate in having some genealogical particulars as to his wife's antecedents; and it is to be regretted that modern historians, of the skeptical, the irreverent, and the startling schools, could not imitate the gravity, the good faith, and the respect for things established, by which the elder chroniclers were inspired. The apothecaries of the Middle Ages never dealt so unkindly with the Pharaohs of Egypt, as the historical excavators of more recent times have done with the embalmed, crowned, and consecrated mummies which they have been pleased to denounce as delusions. Your Potiphars or your Mizraims, even when converted into balsam, or employed as a styptic, were at least not denuded of their historical identity by the druggists who reduced their time-honored remains to a powder. Their dust was made merchandise, but their characters were respected. Moreover, there was an object and a motive, even if mistaken ones, on the part of the mediæval charlatans. But what ointment, what soothing syrup, what panacea has been the result of all this pulverizing of Semiramis and Sardanapalus, Mucius Scævola and Junius Brutus? Are all the characters graven so deeply by the stylus of Clio upon so many monumental tablets, and almost as indelibly and quite as painfully upon school-boy memory, to be sponged out at a blow, like chalk from a blackboard? We, at least, cling fondly to our Tarquins; we shudder when the abyss of historic incredulity swallows up the familiar form of Mettus Curtius; we refuse to be weaned from the she-wolf of Romulus. Your unbelieving Guy Faux, who approaches the stately superstructures of history, not to gaze upon them with the eye of faith and veneration, but only that he may descend to the vaults, with his lantern and his keg of critical gunpowder, in order to blow the whole fabric sky-high,—such an ill-conditioned trouble-tomb should be burned in effigy once a year.

Electra, then, wife of Attalus, founder and king of Fiesole, was of very brilliant origin, being no less than one of the Pleiades, and the only one of the sisters who seems to have married into a patriarchal family. "The reason why the seven stars are seven is a pretty reason"; but it is not "because they are not eight," as Lear suggests, but, as we now discover by patient investigation, because one of them had married and settled in Tuscany. We are not informed whether the lost Pleiad, thus found on the Arno, was happy or not, after her removal from that more elevated sphere which she had just begun to move in. But if respectability of connection and a pleasant locality be likely to insure contentment to a fallen star, we have reason to believe that she found herself more comfortable than Lucifer was after his emigration.

Great care must be taken not to confound Attalus with Tantalus,—a blunder which, as Villani observes,1 is often committed by ignorant chroniclers. But Tantalus, as we all very well know, was the son of Jupiter, and grandson of Saturn. Now we are quite sure that Noah never married a daughter of Saturn, because that voracious heathen ate up all his children except Jupiter. This simple fact precludes all possibility of a connection with Saturn by the mother's side, and illustrates the advantage of patient historical investigation, when founded upon a reverence for traditional authority. Had it not been for such an honest chronicler as Giovanni Villani, our historic thirst might have been tantalized for seven centuries longer with this delusion. Certainly, to confound Tantalus, ancestor of all the Trojans, with Attalus, ancestor of all the Tuscans, would be worse than that "confusion of Babel" which the quiet-loving potentate came to Florence to avoid.

Attalus brought with him from Babel an eminent astrologer and civil engineer, who assured him, after careful experiments, that, of all places in Europe, the mount of Fiesole was the healthiest and the best. He was therefore ordered to build the city there at once. When finished, it was called Fia sola, because of its solitariness; Attalus, in consequence of his participation in the Babel confusion, having become familiar with Tuscan several thousand years before that language was invented. The city, thus auspiciously established, flourished forty or fifty centuries, more or less, without the occurrence of any event worth recording, down to the time of Catiline. The Fiesolans, unfortunately, aided and comforted that conspirator in his designs against Rome, and were well punished for their crime by Julius Cæsar, who battered their whole town about their ears, in consequence, and then ploughed up their territory, and sowed it with salt. The harvest of that agricultural operation was reaped by Florence; for the conqueror immediately afterwards, by command of the Roman Senate, converted a little suburb at the bottom of the hill into a city. Into this the Fiesolans removed at once, and found themselves very comfortable there; being saved the trouble of going up and down a mountain every time they came out and went home again. Florence took its name from one Fiorino, marshal of the camp, in the Roman army, who was killed in the battle of Fiesole. As he was the flower of chivalry, his name was thought of good augury; the more so, as roses and lilies sprang forth plenteously from the spot where he fell. Hence the fragrant and poetical name which the City of Flowers has retained until our days; and hence the cognizance of the three flowers-de-luce which it has borne upon its shield. Julius Cæsar, whose sword had severed the infant city from its dead mother in so Cæsarean a fashion, had set his heart upon calling the town after himself, and took the contrary decree of the Roman Senate very much in dudgeon. He therefore left the country in a huff, and revenged himself by annihilating vast numbers of unfortunate Gauls, Britons, Germans, and other barbarians, who happened to come in his way.