Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (2221 page)

As to dialogue, thus it runs through hundreds upon hundreds of pages, and thus it makes up the book (that can’t be made in France), in combination with a most ludicrous disparagement of all those base writers of fiction who are not inspired by Pusey and his late blessed Majesty King Charles the First.

“What a delicious day!” next exclaimed Guy, following Philip’s example by throwing off hat and neck-tie.

“A spontaneous tribute to the beauty of the day,” said Charles.

“Really it is so ultra-splendid as to deserve notice!” said Philip, throwing himself completely back, and looking up.

“One cannot help revelling in that deep blue,” said Laura.

“To-morrow’ll be the happiest time of all the glad new year,” hummed Guy.

“Ah, you will teach us all now,” said Laura, “after your grand singing-lessons.”

“Do you know what is in store for you, Guy?” said Amy. “O, haven’t you heard of Lady Kilcoran’s ball?”

“You are to go, Guy,” said Charlotte. “I am glad I am not. I hate dancing.”

“And I know as much about it as Bustle,” said Guy, catching the dog by his fore-paws, and causing him to perform an uncouth dance.

“Never mind, they will soon teach you,” said Mrs. Edmonstone.

“Must I really go?”

“He begins to think it serious,” said Charles.

“Is Philip going?” exclaimed Guy, looking as if be was taken by surprise.

Doctor Dulcamara and Monsieur Guizot may rest assured that France will have no such book as this, until she has the two classes which such a book addresses. The first class, drawn from a large and wealthy section of the so-called religious world, which looks to the obtrusively professed intention of a book solely, and knows and cares nothing about the execution. The second class, represented by a body of romantic young ladies, whose ideal Man (name and all) is exactly represented by such a character as Sir Guy Morville. We believe it was Mrs. Kenwigs who invented the name, Morleena, for her eldest daughter; from a kindred spirit of gentility, we derive the masculine, Morville.

For anything we know, representatives of these two classes may have come together in Warminster, to be prescribed for by Doctor Dulcamara and Monsieur Guizot. If so, they have their reward. If otherwise, a suspicion will, by this time, have dawned upon them that they have been benighted and bemuddled in the usual Dulcamarian manner.

To go from Warminster to Bradford, which is a long way, we are pained to notice an appearance of Doctor Dulcamara in the Bradford market-place, under the guise of the EARL OF SHAFTESBURY. Very few men of this age, if any, have done more good than Lord Shaftesbury, or are deserving of higher respect. We differ from him on many points of opinion, but we hold his labours in the highest respect. Precisely for this reason, we are unusually grieved and mortified to find Doctor Dulcamara in such good company. However, here was the Doctor at Bradford, vending an antidote against fiction in general, and against tragedies in particular; and THE TIMES reports the Doctor as addressing the multitude to this amazingly quackish effect:

“He remembered a very hard-hearted man, a most profligate and wicked man, but he once made a very true remark, “I never go to hear a tragedy,” he said, “but it wears out my heart.” That was just what it did; and that was the case with all reading of this description; he (Lord Shaftesbury) meant, if indulged in to excess.”

Now, Lord Shaftesbury, at the head of the Lunacy Commission, knows very well that Bedlam has often come of indulging in the Bible to excess, and that the balance of good and evil in anything is always to be struck, by sane men, with a reference to the use of that thing, and not to its abuse. The Sea, if indulged in to excess, would swallow up the land; the Sun, if indulged in to excess, would consume all animal and vegetable life. But, Doctor Dulcamara, putting off his antidote among the crowd, puts it off anyhow and every how, and will strike the scales out of the hand of Justice herself, that his light weight may pass. Lord Shaftesbury, as an upright man, knows perfectly well, when separated from Doctor Dulcamara, that this story (of the feeblest and most unreliable, at the best), has another honest and plain interpretation on the face of it: to wit, that the “most profligate and wicked man,” whose detestable authority is to consign to oblivion the noblest flights of human genius, and the Art that of all others strikes to the Soul like Reality, could not endure a Tragedy, because he was “a guilty creature sitting at a Play,” and felt that it awoke the conscience slumbering within him.

For the love of Heaven, let there be hope that men like Lord Shaftesbury, at least, will keep out of the company of the ubiquitous Dulcamara! Let the Doctor go about, addressing Athenaeums, of the Warminster, Warminster, and other kinds; let the Athenaeums take his physic, if they like it, and feel the better for it if they can; let the Doctor sin,, duets with Monsieur Guizot, to any extent; let him render accounts of his stewardship without end; let him puff off altar-cloths, altar-candlesticks, and the rubric of the Fancy Ball; let his eagle eye start out of his head, if it will, at the martyrdom of King Charles the First; but let him be held at a distance by earnest men with definite objects before earnest minds, and those objects tending not to the retrogression of their country into the dark ages, but to its advancement in a plain road that was opened eighteen hundred and fifty-eight years ago.

First published
Household Words
18 December 1858

A SHORT time since, we took occasion to notice some of the curious outrages on good taste and good sense committed by official people who happen to be entrusted with the duty of receiving the Queen when she travels. We drew, it may be remembered, a strange, but perfectly true picture of towns turning themselves into travelling Circuses, and railway refreshment rooms trying to look like Royal boudoirs, under the amazing delusion that the Sovereign of this country would approve of them all the more for appearing to be ashamed of themselves in their own characters. We thought it hard at that time, and we think it bard still, that persistent Mayors, should besiege the Royal carriage-windows, and pitiless Corporations pour out all the vials of bad grammar on the Royal head, whenever they can catch the first Personage in these realms on her travels. And we then expressed a very decided opinion (which we now reiterate) that the practice of concealing from our Queen the true aspect of towns, stations, and, where it is possible, even of the people themselves, amounts in effect to a species of positive disloyalty, for the plain reason that it deprives her, in her relation to her subjects and to all that surrounds them, of every fair means of judging accurately for herself.

Certain events have lately happened which oblige us to return to this subject. The official persecution of her Majesty has extended its abject range of action, and has now overtaken her Majesty’s second son, Prince Alfred.

When we first heard of the profession that had been chosen for the young Prince, we could not divest ourselves of the idea that the Queen had been to some slight extent influenced, in arriving at her decision, by a natural wish to preserve one of her children, at least, from falling a victim to the municipal authorities of his native country. Any hope of rescue for her eldest son was clearly out of the question. We are all of us born to a drawback of some kind; and the Prince of Wales, as heir to the throne, is necessarily born to a drawback of Mayors and Corporations. Prince Alfred, however, it was still possible to save from being Addressed at his carriage-window, from being bewildered by make-shift drawing-rooms, and from being loyally leapt over, as it were, by sprightly pole-and-canvas arches, whenever he attempted to drive through the streets of a strange town. The one apparently safe means of accomplishing his preservation from these and other equally unendurable nuisances, in the present Mayor-and-Corporation-burdened-condition of all civilised land, was clearly to send him to sea and that is exactly what his Royal mother has done with him.

Whether we are right or wrong in venturing to set up this theory-, one thing at least is certain. Prince Alfred was not sent to sea as a Prince of the blood royal, but as a midshipman of the Euryalus. The Queen has determined, with excellent good sense, that he shall learn his noble profession exactly as other English lads learn it; that he shall rank with his brother officers on a footing of perfect equality; and that if he rises (as we all hope he will rise) to a position of eminence in the Navy, he shall have something higher and better something infinitely more satisfactory to his country and to himself to thank for it, than the accident of his birth. It is gratifying to know this; it is doubly gratifying to know that the son is worthy of the mother’s confidence; that he frankly and gladly accepts his position; and that, finding himself in a new sphere of action (in which, be it remembered, his social standing is really and truly decided by his individual merit), he is as happy and as popular with his messmates as any other sensible, good-humoured, high-spirited English boy might be in his place.

These things are matters of public notoriety. It is perfectly well known, that the Prince eats and drinks and sleeps as other midshipmen eat and drink and sleep; that his outfit has been exactly regulated (though
 
the tradesman who made his chest is rumoured to have gone the loyal length of french-polishing it) by the outfits of other midshipmen; and that every distinction, in short, (except the too-enthusiastic polishing of the chest) has been most strictly and sensibly levelled between the many young officers who are the sons of gentlemen, and the one young officer who is the son of the Queen. Under these circumstances, it would seem hardly necessary that her Majesty should have been obliged to express a wish (as she is understood, however, to have expressed a wish) that no public receptions of the Prince should take place when the Euryalus happened to touch at any particular port. Every circumstance connected with the manner in which the Queen has sent her son to sea, must surely speak for itself, to the same plain and direct purpose, in the case of any official personage, in any part of the world, who Possesses one atom of tact or one grain of common sense? Here is the man-of-war, Euryalus; and one of the midshipmen on board bears the Christian name of Alfred. Surely, the clumsiest of mankind may be trusted Dot to commit the gross blunder of tearing off the wisely assumed incognito of the young officer, and setting him up before his messmates and companions (in flat defiance of the principle on which his own parents have so considerately and so sensibly acted) as a Prince of the Blood Royal, who is not, and never can be, one of themselves!

Alas! alas! the clumsiest of mankind must and will blunder, to the end of the world, even in the plainest and simplest matters. Exactly as the disastrous tradesman at home french-polished the chest, so the disastrous diplomatic tradesmen, abroad, french-polish Midshipman Alfred, the moment they get hold of him, with a royal reception.

The good ship Euryalus arrives in the Bay of Tangier; and the royal midshipman probably looks forward to a run on shore along with some of his friends in the gun-room. No such good fortune awaits him. We learn from the correspondent of the Gibraltar Chronicle, that Her Majesty’s Charg’ d’Affaires, Mr. D. Hay, proceeded in a Moorish-more properly, as we think, a Mayorish launch, to wait upon his Royal Highness. Mr. D. Hay is instantly saluted by eleven honourary explosions from the guns of the Euryalus not one of which, we regret to find, was sufficiently powerful to blow him back instantly to his office on shore. The Prince disembarks (as midshipmen invariably do) with twenty-one honourary explosions from the joyful town; which are immediately returned (captains being always particularly attentive where salutes to their midshipmen are concerned) by more explosions from the Euryalus. His Royal Highness Midshipman Alfred no longer is received by a perfect Corporation of civil and military authorities. Saddle-horses are in attendance; but the Prince not being quite nautical enough yet to get on horseback the moment he gets on shore, walks up to his quarters with his wearisome escort after him. The same day he has to make calls of ceremony on the minister and the Governor; and, the next morning, by way of showing him a particularly interesting and useful sight to a sailor, he is taken into the country to witness the manoeuvring of a large body of cavalry possibly, the Horse Marines-in which case, we think it hard on the ship’s company not to have invited them all to see the review. It is only fair to the authorities to conclude by mentioning that they seem to have remembered, at the eleventh hour, that they had a midshipman to deal with, and that they then did what they could to gratify the Prince’s sailor-like enthusiasm for the fair sex, by taking him to see the marriage of a beautiful young Jewess. Shortly afterwards, he appears to have been happily rescued from the civil and military Corporation; to have got back to his ship; and to have there re-assumed, let us hope, the natural position in which he had been placed by his parents, and from which the blundering local authorities had done their mischievous utmost to separate him.