It was an axiom with Mr. Beamish,
our first, if not our only philosophical beau and
a gentleman of some thoughtfulness, that the social
English require tyrannical government as much as the
political are able to dispense with it: and this
he explained by an exposition of the character of
a race possessed of the eminent virtue of individual
self-assertion, which causes them to insist on good
elbowroom wherever they gather together. Society,
however, not being tolerable where the smoothness
of intercourse is disturbed by a perpetual punching
of sides, the merits of the free citizen in them become
their demerits when a fraternal circle is established,
and they who have shown an example of civilization
too notable in one sphere to call for eulogy, are often
to be seen elbowing on the ragged edge of barbarism
in the other. They must therefore be reduced
to accept laws not of their own making, and of an
extreme rigidity.
Here too is a further peril; for the
gallant spirits distinguishing them in the state of
independence may (he foresaw the melancholy experience
of a later age) abandon them utterly in subjection,
and the glorious boisterousness befitting the village
green forsake them even in their haunts of liberal
association, should they once be thoroughly tamed
by authority. Our ‘merrie England’
will then be long-faced England, an England of fallen
chaps, like a boar’s head, bearing for speech
a lemon in the mouth: good to feast on, mayhap;
not with!
Mr. Beamish would actually seem to
have foreseen the danger of a transition that he could
watch over only in his time; and, as he said, ‘I
go, as I came, on a flash’; he had neither ancestry
nor descendants: he was a genius, he knew himself
a solitary, therefore, in spite of his efforts to
create his like. Within his district he did effect
something, enough to give him fame as one of the princely
fathers of our domestic civilization, though we now
appear to have lost by it more than formerly we gained.
The chasing of the natural is ever fraught with dubious
hazards. If it gallops back, according to the
proverb, it will do so at the charge: commonly
it gallops off, quite off; and then for any kind of
animation our precarious dependence is upon brains:
we have to live on our wits, which are ordinarily
less productive than land, and cannot be remitted
in entail.
Rightly or wrongly (there are differences
of opinion about it) Mr. Beamish repressed the chthonic
natural with a rod of iron beneath his rule.
The hoyden and the bumpkin had no peace until they
had given public imitations of the lady and the gentleman;
nor were the lady and the gentleman privileged to
be what he called ‘free flags.’ He
could be charitable to the passion, but he bellowed
the very word itself (hauled up smoking from the brimstone
lake) against them that pretended to be shamelessly
guilty of the peccadilloes of gallantry. His famous
accost of a lady threatening to sink, and already
performing like a vessel in that situation: ’So,
madam, I hear you are preparing to enrol yourself
in the very ancient order?’... (he named it)
was a piece of insolence that involved him in some
discord with the lady’s husband and ’the
rascal steward,’ as he chose to term the third
party in these affairs: yet it is reputed to
have saved the lady.
Furthermore, he attacked the vulgarity
of persons of quality, and he has told a fashionable
dame who was indulging herself in a marked sneer of
disdain, not improving to her features, ’that
he would be pleased to have her assurance it was her
face she presented to mankind’: a thing thanks
perhaps to him chiefly no longer possible
of utterance. One of the sex asking him why he
addressed his persécutions particularly to women:
‘Because I fight your battles,’ says he,
’and I find you in the ranks of the enemy.’
He treated them as traitors.
He was nevertheless well supported
by a sex that compensates for dislike of its friend
before a certain age by a cordial recognition of him
when it has touched the period. A phalanx of
great dames gave him the terrors of Olympus
for all except the natively audacious, the truculent
and the insufferably obtuse; and from the midst of
them he launched decree and bolt to good effect:
not, of course, without receiving return missiles,
and not without subsequent question whether the work
of that man was beneficial to the country, who indeed
tamed the bumpkin squire and his brood, but at the
cost of their animal spirits and their gift of speech;
viz. by making petrifactions of them. In
the surgical operation of tracheotomy, a successful
treatment of the patient hangs, we believe, on the
promptness and skill of the introduction of the artificial
windpipe; and it may be that our unhappy countrymen
when cut off from the source of their breath were
not neatly handled; or else that there is a physical
opposition in them to anything artificial, and it must
be nature or nothing. The dispute shall be left
where it stands.
Now, to venture upon parading a beautiful
young Duchess of Dewlap, with an odour of the shepherdess
about her notwithstanding her acquired art of stepping
conformably in a hoop, and to demand full homage of
respect for a lady bearing such a title, who had the
intoxicating attractions of the ruddy orchard apple
on the tree next the roadside wall, when the owner
is absent, was bold in Mr. Beamish, passing temerity;
nor would even he have attempted it had he not been
assured of the support of his phalanx of great ladies.
They indeed, after being taken into the secret, had
stipulated that first they must have an inspection
of the transformed dairymaid; and the review was not
unfavourable. Duchess Susan came out of it more
scatheless than her duke. She was tongue-tied,
and her tutored walking and really admirable stature
helped her to appease, the critics of her sex; by
whom her too readily blushful innocence was praised,
with a reserve, expressed in the remark, that she
was a monstrous fine toy for a duke’s second
childhood, and should never have been let fly from
his nursery. Her milliner was approved. The
duke was a notorious connoisseur of female charms,
and would see, of course, to the decorous adornment
of her person by the best of modistes. Her
smiling was pretty, her eyes were soft; she might turn
out good, if well guarded for a time; but these merits
of the woman are not those of the great lady, and
her title was too strong a beam on her character to
give it a fair chance with her critics. They
one and all recommended powder for her hair and cheeks.
That odour of the shepherdess could be exorcised by
no other means, they declared. Her blushing was
indecent.
Truly the critics of the foeman sex
behaved in a way to cause the blushes to swarm rosy
as the troops of young Loves round Cytherea in her
sea-birth, when, some soaring, and sinking some, they
flutter like her loosened zone, and breast the air
thick as flower petals on the summer’s breath,
weaving her net for the world. Duchess Susan might
protest her inability to keep her blushes down; that
the wrong was done by the insolent eyes, and not by
her artless cheeks. Ay, but nature, if we are
to tame these men, must be swathed and concealed, partly
stifled, absolutely stifled upon occasion. The
natural woman does not move a foot without striking
earth to conjure up the horrid apparition of the natural
man, who is not as she, but a cannibal savage.
To be the light which leads, it is her business to
don the misty vesture of an idea, that she may dwell
as an idea in men’s minds, very dim, very powerful,
but abstruse, unseizable. Much wisdom was imparted
to her on the subject, and she understood a little,
and echoed hollow to the remainder, willing to show
entire docility as far as her intelligence consented
to be awake. She was in that stage of the dainty,
faintly tinged innocence of the amorousness of themselves
when beautiful young women who have not been caught
for schooling in infancy deem it a defilement to be
made to appear other than the blessed nature has made
them, which has made them beautiful, and surely therefore
deserves to be worshipped. The lectures of the
great ladies and Chloe’s counsels failed to
persuade her to use the powder puff-ball. Perhaps
too, as timidity quitted her, she enjoyed her distinctiveness
in their midst.
But the distinctiveness of a Duchess
of Dewlap with the hair and cheeks of our native fields,
was fraught with troubles outrunning Mr. Beamish’s
calculations. He had perceived that she would
be attractive; he had not reckoned on the homogeneousness
of her particular English charms. A beauty in
red, white, and blue is our goddess Venus with the
apple of Paris in her hand; and after two visits to
the Pump Room, and one promenade in the walks about
the Assembly House, she had as completely divided
the ordinary guests of the Wells into male and female
in opinion as her mother Nature had done in it sex.
And the men would not be silenced; they had gazed
on their divinest, and it was for the women to succumb
to that unwholesome state, so full of thunder.
Knights and squires, military and rural, threw up
their allegiance right and left to devote themselves
to this robust new vision, and in their peculiar manner,
with a general View-halloo, and Yoicks, Tally-ho, and
away we go, pelt ahead! Unexampled as it is in
England for Beauty to kindle the ardours of the scent
of the fox, Duchess Susan did more she turned
all her followers into hounds; they were madmen:
within a very few days of her entrance bets raged
about her, and there were brawls, jolly flings at
her character in the form of lusty encomium, givings
of the lie, and upon one occasion a knock-down blow
in public, as though the place had never known the
polishing touch of Mr. Beamish.
He was thrown into great perplexity
by that blow. Discountenancing the duel as much
as he could, an affair of the sword was nevertheless
more tolerable than the brutal fist: and of all
men to be guilty of it, who would have anticipated
the young Alonzo, Chloe’s quiet, modest lover!
He it was. The case came before Mr. Beamish for
his decision; he had to pronounce an impartial judgement,
and for some time, during the examination of evidence,
he suffered, as he assures us in his Memoirs, a royal
agony. To have to strike with the glaive of Justice
them whom they most esteem, is the greatest affliction
known to kings. He would have done it: he
deserved to reign. Happily the evidence against
the gentleman who was tumbled, Mr. Ralph Shepster,
excused Mr. Augustus Camwell, otherwise Alonzo, for
dealing with him promptly to shut his mouth.
This Shepster, a raw young squire,
‘reeking,’ Beau Beamish writes of him,
‘one half of the soil, and t’ other half
of the town,’ had involved Chloe in his familiar
remarks upon the Duchess of Dewlap; and the personal
respect entertained by Mr. Beamish for Chloe so strongly
approved Alonzo’s championship of her, that in
giving judgement he laid stress on young Alonzo’s
passion for Chloe, to prove at once the disinterestedness
of the assailant, and the judicial nature of the sentence:
which was, that Mr. Ralph Shepster should undergo banishment,
and had the right to demand reparation. The latter
part of this decree assisted in effecting the execution
of the former. Shepster declined cold steel,
calling it murder, and was effusive of nature’s
logic on the subject.
’Because a man comes and knocks
me down, I’m to go up to him and ask him to
run me through!’
His shake of the head signified that
he was not such a noodle. Voluble and prolific
of illustration, as is no one so much as a son of nature
inspired to speak her words of wisdom, he defied the
mandate, and refused himself satisfaction, until in
the strangest manner possible flights of white feathers
beset him, and he became a mark for persecution too
trying for the friendship of his friends. He fled,
repeating his tale, that he had seen ‘Beamish’s
Duchess,’ and Chloe attending her, at an assignation
in the South Grove, where a gentleman, unknown to
the Wells, presented himself to the adventurous ladies,
and they walked together a tale ending
with nods.
Shepster’s banishment was one
of those victories of justice upon which mankind might
be congratulated if they left no commotion behind.
But, as when a boy has been horsed before his comrades,
dread may visit them, yet is there likewise devilry
in the school; and everywhere over earth a summary
punishment that does not sweep the place clear is likely
to infect whom it leaves remaining. The great
law-givers, Lycurgus, Draco, Solon, Beamish, sorrowfully
acknowledge that they have had recourse to infernal
agents, after they have thus purified their circle
of an offender. Doctors confess to the same of
their physic. The expelling agency has next to
be expelled, and it is a subtle poison, affecting our
spirits. Duchess Susan had now the incense of
a victim to heighten her charms; like the treasure-laden
Spanish galleon for whom, on her voyage home from
South American waters, our enterprising light-craft
privateers lay in wait, she had the double attraction
of being desirable and an enemy. To watch above
her conscientiously was a harassing business.
Mr. Beamish sent for Chloe, and she
came to him at once. Her look was curious; he
studied it while they conversed. So looks one
who is watching the sure flight of an arrow, or the
happy combinations of an intrigue. Saying, ‘I
am no inquisitor, child,’ he ventured upon two
or three modest inquisitions with regard to her mistress.
The title he had disguised Duchess Susan in, he confessed
to rueing as the principal cause of the agitation
of his principality. ‘She is courted,’
he said, ’less like a citadel waving a flag
than a hostelry where the demand is for sitting room
and a tankard! These be our manners. Yet,
I must own, a Duchess of Dewlap is a provocation,
and my exclusive desire to protect the name of my
lord stands corrected by the perils environing his
lady. She is other than I supposed her; she is,
we will hope, an excellent good creature, but too
attractive for most and drawbridge and the customary
defences to be neglected.
Chloe met his interrogatory with a
ready report of the young duchess’s innocence
and good nature that pacified Mr. Beamish.
‘And you?’ said he.
She smiled for answer.
That smile was not the common smile;
it was one of an eager exultingness, producing as
he gazed the twitch of an inquisitive reflection of
it on his lips. Such a smile bids us guess and
quickens us to guess, warns us we burn and speeds
our burning, and so, like an angel wafting us to some
heaven-feasting promontory, lifts us out of ourselves
to see in the universe of colour what the mouth has
but pallid speech to tell. That is the very heart’s
language; the years are in a look, as mount and vale
of the dark land spring up in lightning.
He checked himself: he scarce dared to say it.
She nodded.
‘You have seen the man, Chloe?’
Her smiling broke up in the hard lines
of an ecstasy neighbouring pain. ’He has
come; he is here; he is faithful; he has not forgotten
me. I was right. I knew! I knew!’
‘Caseldy has come?’
’He has come. Do not ask.
To have him! to see him! Mr. Beamish, he is here.’
‘At last!’
‘Cruel!’
’Well, Caseldy has come, then!
But now, friend Chloe, you should be made aware that
the man ’
She stopped her ears. As she
did so, Mr. Beamish observed a thick silken skein
dangling from one hand. Part of it was plaited,
and at the upper end there was a knot. It resembled
the commencement of her manufactory of a whip:
she swayed it to and fro, allowing him to catch and
lift the threads on his fingers for the purpose of
examining her work. There was no special compliment
to pay, so he dropped it without remark.
Their faces had expressed her wish
to hear nothing from him of Caseldy and his submission
to say nothing. Her happiness was too big; she
appeared to beg to lie down with it on her bosom, in
the manner of an outworn, young mother who has now
first received her infant in her arms from the nurse.