Devereux — Complete by Baron Edward Bulwer Lytton Lytton (ebook offline txt) 📗
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“O Lord!” groaned Don Saltero, “O Lord! my monsters—my monsters—the pagoda—the mandarin, and the idol where are they?—broken—ruined— annihilated!”
“No, Sir; all safe, Sir,” said the drawer, a smart, small, smug, pert man; “put ‘em down in the bill, nevertheless, Sir. Is it Alderman Atkins, Sir, or Mr. Higgins?”
“Pooh,” said Tarleton, “bring me some lemonade; send the pagoda to the bricklayer, the mandarin to the surgeon, and the idol to the Papist over the way! There’s a guinea to pay for their carriage. How are you, Don?”
“Oh, Mr. Tarleton, Mr. Tarleton! how could you be so cruel?”
“The nature of things demanded it, my good Don. Did I not call you a Chinese Adam? and how could you bear that name without undergoing the fall?”
“Oh, Sir, this is no jesting matter,—broke the railing of my pagoda, bruised my arm, cracked my fiddle, and cut me off in the middle of that beautiful air!—no jesting matter.”
“Come, Mr. Salter,” said I, “‘tis very true! but cheer up. ‘The gods,’ says Seneca, ‘look with pleasure on a great man falling with the statesmen, the temples, and the divinities of his country;’ all of which, mandarin, pagoda, and idol, accompanied your fall. Let us have a bottle of your best wine, and the honour of your company to drink it.”
“No, Count, no,” said Tarleton, haughtily; “we can drink not with the Don; but we’ll have the wine, and he shall drink it. Meanwhile, Don, tell us what possible combination of circumstances made thee fiddler, barber, anatomist, and virtuoso!”
Don Saltero loved fiddling better than anything in the world, but next to fiddling he loved talking. So being satisfied that he should be reimbursed for his pagoda, and fortifying himself with a glass or two of his own wine, he yielded to Tarleton’s desire, and told us his history. I believe it was very entertaining to the good barber, but Tarleton and I saw nothing extraordinary in it; and long before it was over, we wished him an excellent good day, and a new race of Chinese monsters.
That evening we were engaged at the Kit-Cat Club, for though I was opposed to the politics of its members, they admitted me on account of my literary pretensions. Halifax was there, and I commended the poet to his protection. We were very gay, and Halifax favoured us with three new toasts by himself. O Venus! what beauties we made, and what characters we murdered! Never was there so important a synod to the female world as the gods of the Kit-Cat Club. Alas! I am writing for the children of an after age, to whom the very names of those who made the blood of their ancestors leap within their veins will be unknown. What cheek will colour at the name of Carlisle? What hand will tremble as it touches the paper inscribed by that of Brudenel? The graceful Godolphin, the sparkling enchantment of Harper, the divine voice of Claverine, the gentle and bashful Bridgewater, the damask cheek and ruby lips of the Hebe Manchester,—what will these be to the race for whom alone these pages are penned? This history is a union of strange contrasts! like the tree of the Sun, described by Marco Polo, which was green when approached on one side, but white when perceived on the other: to me it is clothed in the verdure and spring of the existing time; to the reader it comes covered with the hoariness and wanness of the Past!
CHAPTER VII.
A DIALOGUE OF SENTIMENT SUCCEEDED BY THE SKETCH OF A CHARACTER, IN WHOSE EYES SENTIMENT WAS TO WISE MEN WHAT RELIGION IS TO FOOLS; NAMELY, A SUBJECT OF RIDICULE.
ST. JOHN was now in power, and in the full flush of his many ambitious and restless schemes. I saw as much of him as the high rank he held in the state, and the consequent business with which he was oppressed, would suffer me,—me, who was prevented by religion from actively embracing any political party, and who, therefore, though inclined to Toryism, associated pretty equally with all. St. John and myself formed a great friendship for each other, a friendship which no after change or chance could efface, but which exists, strengthened and mellowed by time, at the very hour in which I write.
One evening he sent to tell me he should be alone, if I would sup with him; accordingly I repaired to his house. He was walking up and down the room with uneven and rapid steps, and his countenance was flushed with an expression of joy and triumph, very rare to the thoughtful and earnest calm which it usually wore. “Congratulate me, Devereux,” said he, seizing me eagerly by the hand, “congratulate me!”
“For what?”
“Ay, true: you are not yet a politician; you cannot yet tell how dear—how inexpressibly dear to a politician—is a momentary and petty victory,—but—if I were Prime Minister of this country, what would you say?”
“That you could bear the duty better than any man living; but remember Harley is in the way.”
“Ah, there’s the rub,” said St. John, slowly, and the expression of his face again changed from triumph to thoughtfulness; “but this is a subject not to your taste: let us choose another.” And flinging himself into a chair, this singular man, who prided himself on suiting his conversation to every one, began conversing with me upon the lighter topics of the day; these we soon exhausted, and at last we settled upon that of love and women.
“I own,” said I, “that, in this respect, pleasure has disappointed as well as wearied me. I have longed for some better object of worship than the trifler of fashion, or the yet more ignoble minion of the senses. I ask a vent for enthusiasm, for devotion, for romance, for a thousand subtle and secret streams of unuttered and unutterable feeling. I often think that I bear within me the desire and the sentiment of poetry, though I enjoy not its faculty of expression; and that that desire and that sentiment, denied legitimate egress, centre and shrink into one absorbing passion,—which is the want of love. Where am I to satisfy this want? I look round these great circles of gayety which we term the world; I send forth my heart as a wanderer over their regions and recesses, and it returns, sated and palled and languid, to myself again.”
“You express a common want in every less worldly or more morbid nature,” said St. John; “a want which I myself have experienced, and if I had never felt it, I should never, perhaps, have turned to ambition to console or to engross me. But do not flatter yourself that the want will ever be fulfilled. Nature places us alone in this hospitable world, and no heart is cast in a similar mould to that which we bear within us. We pine for sympathy; we make to ourselves a creation of ideal beauties, in which we expect to find it: but the creation has no reality; it is the mind’s phantasma which the mind adores; and it is because the phantasma can have no actual being that the mind despairs. Throughout life,
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