The Dodd Family Abroad, Vol. I. Lynde Francis
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a certain sense of pride – when some subaltern of the detachment at Bruff cantered up to the door and sent in his name! Dear me, how the little words 25th Regiment, or 91st, used to make our hearts beat, suggestive as they were of gay balls at the Town-hall with red-coated partners, the regimental band, and the colors tastefully festooning the whitewashed walls. And now, my dear Miss Sarah, we are actually ashamed of the contact with one of those whom once it was our highest glory to be acquainted with! You may remember a certain Captain Morris, who was stationed at Bruff, – dark, with very black eyes, and most beautiful teeth; he was very silent in company, and, indeed, we knew him but slightly, for he chanced to have some altercation with pa on the bench one day, and, as I hear he was all in the right, pa did not afterwards forgive him. Well, here he is now, having left the army, – I don't know if on half-pay, or sold out altogether, – but here he is, travelling for the benefit of his mother's health, – a very old and infirm lady, to whom he is dotingly attached. She fretted so much when she discovered that his regiment was ordered abroad to the Cape, that he had no other resource than to leave the service! He told me so himself.
"I had nobody else in the world," said he, "who felt any interest in my fortunes; she had made a hundred sacrifices for me. It was but fair I should make one for her."
He knew he was surrendering position and prospect forever, – that to him no career could ever open again; but he had placed a duty high above all considerations of self, and so he parted with comrades and pursuit, with everything that made up his hope and his object, and descended to a little station of unobtrusive, undistinguished humility, satisfied to be the companion of a poor, feeble old lady! He has as much as confessed to me that their means are very small. It was an accidental admission with reference to something he thought of doing, but which he found to be too expensive; and the avowal was made so easily, so frankly, so free from any false shame on one side, or any unworthy desire to entrap sympathy on the other! It was as if he spoke of something which indeed concerned him, but in no wise gave the mainspring to his thoughts or actions! He came to visit us here; but his having left the service, coupled with our present taste for grand acquaintance, were so little in his favor that I believed he would not have repeated his call. An accidental service, however, that he was enabled to render mamma and Mary Anne at a railroad station the other day, and where but for him they might have been involved in considerable difficulties, has opened a chance of further intimacy, for he has already been here two mornings, and is coming this evening to tea.
You will, perhaps, ask me how and by what chain of circumstances Captain Morris is linked with the earlier portion of this letter, and I will tell you. It was from him that I learned the history of those high and distinguished individuals by whom we are surrounded; from him I heard that, supposing us to be people of immense wealth, a whole web of intrigue has been spun around us, and everything that the ingenuity and craft of the professional adventurer could devise put in requisition to trade upon our supposed affluence and inexperience! He has told me of the dangerous companions by whom James is surrounded; and if he has not spoken so freely about a certain young nobleman – Lord George Tiverton – who is now seldom or never out of the house, it is because that they have had something of a personal difference, – a serious one, I suspect, and which Captain Morris seems to reckon as a bar to anything beyond the merest mention of his name. It is not impossible, too, that though he might not make any revelations to me on such a theme, he would be less guarded with papa or James. Whatever may be the fact, he does not advance at all in the good graces of the others. Mamma calls him a dry crust, – a confirmed old bachelor. Mary Anne and Lord George – for they are always in partnership in matters of opinion – have set him down as a "military prig;" and papa, who is rarely unjust in the long run, says that "there 's no guessing at the character of a fellow of small means, who never goes in debt" This may or may not be true; but it is certainly hard to condemn him for an honorable trait, simply because it does not give the key to his nature. And now, my last hope is what James may think of him, for as yet they have not met. I think I hear you echo my words, "And why your 'last hope,' Miss Cary? What possible right have you to express yourself in these terms?" Simply because I feel that one man of true and honorable sentiments, one right-judging, right-feeling gentleman, is all-essential to us abroad! and if we reject this chance, I 'm not so sure we shall meet with another.
How ashamed I am not to be able to tell you of all I have seen! But so it is, – description is a very tame performance in good hands; it is a lamentable exhibition in weak ones! As to painters, I prefer Vandyk to Rubens; not that I have even the pretence of a reason for my criticism. I know nothing, whatever, of what constitutes excellence in color, drawing, or design. I understand in a picture only what it suggests to my own mind, either as a correct copy of nature, or as originating new trains of thought, new sources of feeling; and by these tests Vandyk pleases me more than his master. But, shall I own it, there is a class of pictures of a far inferior order that gives me greater enjoyment than either, I meau those scenes of real life, those representations of some little uneventful incident of the every-day world, – an old chemist at work in his dim old laboratory; an old house Vrow knitting in her red-tiled chamber, the sunlight slanting in, and tipping with an azure tint the tortoiseshell cat that purrs beside her; a lover teaching his mistress the guitar; an old cavalier giving his horse a drink at a fountain. These, in all the lifelike power of Gerard Dow, Teerburgh, or Mieris, have a charm for me I cannot express. They are stories, and they are better than stories; for oftentimes the writer conveys his meaning imperfectly, and oftentimes he overlays you with his explanations, stifling within you those expansive bursts of sentiment that ought to have been his aim to evoke, and thus, by elaborating, he obliterates. Now, your artist – I mean, of course, your great artist – is eminently suggestive. He gives you but one scene, it is true, but how full is it of the past, and the future too! Can you gaze on that old alchemist, with his wrinkled forehead, and dim, deep-set eyes, his threadbare doublet, and his fingers tremulous from age? Can you watch that countenance, calm but careworn, where every line exhibits the long struggle there has been between the keen perceptions of science and the golden dreams of enthusiasm, where the coldest passions of a worldly nature have warred with the most glorious attributes of a poetic temperament? Can you see him, as he sits watching the alembic wherein the toil of years is bubbling, and not weave within your own mind the life-long conflict he has sustained? Have you him not before you in his humble home, secluded and forgotten of men, yet inhabiting a dream-world of crowded images? What beautiful stories – what touching little episodes of domestic life – lie in the quiet scenes of those quaint interiors; and how deep the charm that attaches one to these peaceful spots of home happiness! The calm intellectuality of the old, the placid loveliness of the young, the air of cultivated enjoyment that pervades all, are in such perfect keeping that you feel as though they imparted to yourself some share of that gentle, tranquil pleasure that forms their own atmosphere!
Oh, my dear Miss Cox! if there be "sermons in stones," there are romances in pictures, – and romances far more truthful than the circulating libraries supply us with. And, to turn back to real life, shall I own to you that I am sadly disappointed with the gay world? I am fully alive to all the value of the confession. I appreciate perfectly how double-edged is the weapon of this admission, and that I am in reality but pleading guilty to my own unfitness for its enjoyments; but as I never tried to evade or deny that fact, I may be suffered to give my testimony with so much of qualification. When I compare the little gratification that society confers on the very highest classes, with the heartfelt delight intercourse imparts to the humble, I am at a loss to see wherein lies the advantage of all the exclusive regulations of fashionable life. Of one thing I feel assured, and that is, that one must be bora in a certain class, habituated from the earliest years to its ideas and habits, filled with its peculiar traditions, and animated by its own special hopes, to conform gracefully and easily to its laws. We go into society to perform a part, – just as artificial a one as any in a genteel comedy, – and consequently are too much occupied with "our character" to derive that benefit from intercourse which is so attainable by those less constrained by circumstances. If all this amounts to the simple confession that I am by no means at home in the great world, and far more at my ease with more humble associates, it is no more than the fact, and comes pretty near to what you often remarked to me, – that "in criticising external objects one is very frequently but delineating little traits and lineaments of one's own nature."
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