Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General Part 13

will speedily adopt them, and call them their own.

FOREIGN CLUBS.

How is it, will any one tell me, that all foreign Clubs are so ineffably stupid? I do not suspect that we English are pre-eminent for social gifts; and yet we are the only nation that furnishes clubable men.

Frenchmen are wittier, Germans profounder, Russians--externally at least--more courteous and accommodating; and yet their Clubs are mere _tripots_--gambling establishments; and, except play, no other feature of Club-life is to be found in them.

To give a Club its peculiar "cachet"--its, so to say, trade-mark--you require a cla.s.s of men who make the Club their home, and whose interest it is that all the internal arrangements should be as perfect, as well ordered, and frictionless as may be. Good furniture, good servants, good lighting, good cookery, well-adjusted temperature, and a well-chosen cellar, are all essentials. In a word, the Club is to be the realisation of what we all think so much of--comfort. Now, how very few foreigners either understand or care for this! Every one who has travelled abroad has seen the "Cercle," or "L'Union," or whatever its name be, where men of the highest station--ministers, amba.s.sadors, generals, and suchlike--met to smoke and play whist, with a sanded floor, a dirty attendance, and yet no one ever complained. They drank detestable beer, and inhaled a pestilent atmosphere, and sat in draughts, without a thought that there was anything to be remedied, or that human skill could or need contrive anything better for their accommodation.

When these establishments were succeeded by the modern Club, with its carpeted floor, silk hangings, ormolu lamps, and velvet couches, the change was made in a pure spirit of Anglomanie; somebody had been over to London, and come back full of the splendours of Pall-Mall. The work of imitation, so far as decoration went, was not difficult. Indeed, in some respects, in this they went beyond us, but there ended the success.

The Club abroad is a room where men gamble and talk of gambling, but no more; it is not a Club.

For the working of the Club, as for that of const.i.tutional government, a special cla.s.s are required. It, is the great ma.s.ses of the middle ranks in England, varied enough in fortune, education, habits, and tastes, but still one in some great condition of a status, that supply the materials for the work of a parliamentary government; and it is through the supply of a large community of similar people that Clubs are maintained in their excellence with us.

For the success of a Club you need a number of men perfectly incapable of all life save such as the Club supplies; who repair to the Club, not alone to dine and smoke and sup, and read their paper, but to interchange thought in that blended half-confidence that the Club imparts; to hear the gossip of the day told in the spirit of men of their own leanings; to ascertain what judgments are pa.s.sed on public events and public characters by the people they like to agree with;--in fact, to give a sort of familiar domestic tone to intercourse, suggesting the notion that the Club is a species of sanctuary where men can talk at their ease. The men who furnish this category with us are neither young nor old, they are the middle-aged, retaining some of the spring and elasticity of youth, but far more inclining to the solidity of riper years. If they frequent the Opera, it is to a stall, not to the _coulisses_, they go. They are more critical than they used to be about their dinners, and they have a tendency to mix seltzer with their champagne. They have reached that bourne in which egotism has become an inst.i.tution; and by the transference of its working to the Club, they accomplish that marvellous creation by which each man sees himself and his ways and his wants and his instincts reflected in a thousand varied shapes.

Now, there are two things no nation of the Continent possesses--Spring, and middle-aged people. You may be young for a good long spell--some have been known, by the judicious appliances of art, to keep on for sixty years or so; but when you do pa.s.s the limit, there is no neutral territory--no _mezzo termine_. Fall out of the Young Guard, and you must serve as a Veteran. The levity and frivolity, the absence of all serious interest in life, which mark the leisure cla.s.ses abroad, follow men sometimes even to extreme old age. The successive changes of temperament and taste which we mark at home have no correlatives abroad.

The foreigner inhabits at sixty the same sort of world he did at six-and-twenty: he does not dance so much, but he lingers in the ballroom, and he is just as keenly alive to all the little naughty talk that amused him forty years ago, and folly as much interested to hear that the world is just as false and as wicked as it used to be when he was better able to contribute to its frailty and wickedness.

Not one of these men, with their padded pectorals and dyed whiskers, will admit that they are of an age to require comfort. They are ardent youths all of them, turning night into day as of old, and no more sensible of fatigue from late hours, hot rooms, and dissipation, than they were a quarter of a century back.

Can you fancy anything less clubable than a set of men like this? You might as well set before me the stale bon-bons and sugar-plums of a dessert for a dinner, as ask me to take such people for a.s.sociates and companions. The tone of everlasting trifling disgraces even idleness; and these men contrive in their lives to reverse the laws of physics, since it is by their very levity that they fall.

The humoristic temperament is the soul of Club-life. It is the keen appreciation of others in all their varied moods and shades of feeling that imparts the highest enjoyment to that strange democracy, the Club; and foreigners are immensely deficient in this element. They are infinitely readier, smarter, and wittier than Englishmen. They will hit in an epigram what we would take an hour to embrace in an argument; but for the racy pleasure of seeing how such a man will listen to this, what such another will say to that, how far individuality, in fact, will mould and fas.h.i.+on the news of the day, and a.s.similate its mental food to its own digestive powers, there is nothing like the Englishman--and especially the Englishman of the Club.

There is nothing like Major Pendennis to be found from Trolhatten to Messina, and yet Pendennis is a cla.s.s with us; and it is in the nicely-blended selfishness and complaisance, the egotism and obligingness, that we find the purest element of Club-life.

The Parisian are the best--far and away the best--of all foreign Clubs; best in their style of "get-up," decoration, and arrangement, and best also in tone and social manner. The St Petersburg Club is the most gorgeous, the habits the most costly, the play the highest. It is not very long since that a young Russian n.o.ble lost in one evening a sum equal to a hundred thousand pounds. The Vienna Club is good in its own stiff German way; but, generally speaking, German Clubs are very ill arranged, dirty, and comfortless. The Italian are better. Turin, Naples, and Florence have reasonably good Clubs. Home has nothing but the thing called the English Club, a poorly-got-up establishment of small whist-players and low "points."

It is a very common remark, that costume has a great influence over people's conduct, and that the man in his shooting-jacket will occasionally give way to impulsive outbursts that he had never thought of yielding to in his white-cravat moments. Whether this be strictly true or not, there is little doubt that the style and character of the room a man sits in insensibly affects his manner and his bearing, and that the habits which would not be deemed strange in the low-ceilinged chamber, with the sanded floor and the "mutton lights," would be totally indecorous in the richly-carpeted room, a blaze of wax-light, and glittering with decoration. Now this alternating between Club and _Cafe_ spoils men utterly. It engenders the worst possible style--a double manner. The over-stiffness here and the over-ease there are alike faulty.

The great, the fatal defect of all foreign Clubs is, the existence of some one, perhaps two tyrants, who, by loud talk, swagger, an air of presumed superiority and affectation of "knowing the whole thing,"

browbeat and ride rough-shod over all their fellows. It is in the want of that wholesome corrective, public opinion, that this pestilence is possible. Of public opinion the Continent knows next to nothing in any shape; and yet it is by the unwritten judgments of such a tribunal that society is guided in England, and the same law that discourages the bully supports and encourages the timid, without either the one or the other having the slightest power to corrupt the court, or coerce its decrees. Club-life is, in a way, the normal school for parliamentary demeanour; and until foreigners understand the Club, they will never comprehend the etiquette of the "Chamber."

A HINT FOR C. S. EXAMINERS.

I have frequently heard medical men declare that no test of a candidate's fitness to be admitted as a physician was equal to a brief examination at the bedside of a sick man. To be able to say, "There is a patient; tell us his malady, and what you will do for it," was infinitely better than long hours spent in exploring questions of minute anatomy and theoretical physic. In fact, for all practical purposes, it was more than likely he would be the best who would make the least brilliant figure in an examination; and the man whose studies had familiarised him with everything from Galen to John Hunter, would cut just as sorry a figure if called on to treat a case of actual malady.

It cannot possibly be otherwise. All that mere examination can effect, is to investigate whether an individual has duly prepared himself for the discharge of certain functions; but it never can presume to ascertain whether the person is one fitted by nature, by habit, by taste, or inclination, for the duties before him. Why, the student who may answer the most abstruse questions in anatomy, may himself have nerves so weak as to faint at the sight of blood. The physician who has Paracelsus by heart, may be so deficient in that tact of eye, or ear, or touch, as to render his learning good for nothing. Half an hour in an hospital would, however, test these qualities. You would at once see whether the candidate was a mere ma.s.s of book-learning, or whether he was one skilled in the aspect of disease, trained to observe and note all the indications of malady, and able even instantaneously to p.r.o.nounce upon the gravity of a case before him. This is exactly what you want. No examination of a man's biceps and deltoid, the breadth of his chest or the strength of his legs, would tell you whether he was a good swimmer--five minutes in deep water would, however, decide the matter.

Now, I shall not multiply arguments to prove my position. I desire to be practical in these "O'Dowdiana," and I strive not to be prosy. What I would like, then, is to introduce this system of--let us call it--Test-examination, into the Civil Service.

I have the highest respect for the pedagogues of Burlington House. I think highly of Ollendorff and I believe Colenso's Arithmetic a great inst.i.tution. I venerate the men who invent the impossible questions; but I own I have the humblest opinion of those who answer them. I'd as soon take a circus-horse, trained to fire a pistol and sit down like a dog, to carry me across a stiff country, as I'd select one of these fellows for an employ which required energy, activity, or ready-wittedness.

There is no such inefficiency as self-sufficiency; and this is the very quality instilled by the whole system. Ask the veterans of the Admiralty, the War Office, the Board of Trade, and the Customs, and you will get but the same report, that for thorough incompetency and inordinate conceit there is nothing like the prize candidate of a Civil Service examination. Take my word for it, you could not find a worse pointer than the poodle which would pick you out all the letters of the alphabet.

What I should therefore suggest is, to introduce into the Civil Service something a.n.a.logous to this clinical examination; something that might test the practical fitness of the candidate, and show, not whether the man has been well prepared by a "grinder," but whether he be a heaven-born tide-waiter, one of Nature's own gaugers or vice-consuls.

I know it is not easy to do this in all cases. There are employments, too, wherein it is not called for. Mere clerks.h.i.+p, for instance, is an occupation of such uniformity that a man is just like a sewing-machine, and where, the work being adjusted to him, he performs it as a matter of routine. There are, however, stations which are more or less provocative of tact and ready-wittedness, and which require those qualities which schoolmasters cannot give nor Civil Service examiners take away; such as tact, prompt.i.tude, quickness in emergency, good-natured ease, patience, and pluck above all. These, I say, are great gifts, and it would be well if we knew how to find them. Let us take, by way of ill.u.s.tration, the Messenger Service. These Foreign Office Mercuries, who travel the whole globe at a pace only short of the telegraph, are wonderful fellows, and must of necessity be very variously endowed. What capital sleepers, and yet how easily awakened! What a deal of b.u.mping must their heads be equal to! What an indifference must they be endowed with to bad roads and bad dinners, bad servants and bad smells! How patient they must be here--how peremptory there! How they must train their stomach to long fastings, and their skins to little soap! What can Civil Service examination discover of all or any of these apt.i.tudes? Is it written in Ollendorf, think you, how many hours a man can sit in a caleche? Will decimal fractions support his back or strengthen his lumbar vertebrae?

What system of inquiry will declare whether the weary traveller will not oversleep himself, or smash the head of his postilion for not awaking him at a frontier? How will you test readiness, endurance, politeness, familiarity with 'Bradshaw' and Continental moneys?

I think I have hit on a plan for this, suggested to me, I frankly own, by a.n.a.logy with the clinical system. I would lay out the Green Park--it is convenient to Downing Street, and well suited to the purpose--as a map of Europe, marking out the boundaries of each country, and stationing posts to represent capital cities. At certain frontiers I would station representatives of the different nations as distinctly marked as I could procure them: that is to say, I'd have a very polite Frenchman, a very rude and insolent Prussian, a sulky Belgian, a roguish Italian, and an extremely dirty Russian. Leicester Square could supply all. It being all duly prepared, I'd start my candidate, with a heavy bag filled with its usual contents of, let us say, a large box of cigars, a set of fire-irons, twenty pots of preserved meats, a case of stuffed birds, four cricket-b.a.l.l.s, and a photograph machine, some blue-books, and a dozen of blacking. I'd start him with this, saying simply, "Vienna, calling at Stuttgart and Turin;" not a word more; and then I'd watch my man--how he'd cross the Channel--how he'd cajole Moossoo--and whether he'd make straight for the Rhine or get entangled in Belgian railroads. I'd soon see how he dealt with the embarra.s.sments of the roads and relished the bad diet; and not alone would I test him by hards.h.i.+ps and hunger, fatigue and occasional upsets; but I'd try his powers of self-resistance by surrounding him with dissolute young _attaches_ given to blind hookey and lansquenet. I'd have him invited to ravis.h.i.+ng orgies, and tempted in as many ways as St Anthony; and all these after long privations. Then, I'd have him kept waiting either under a blazing sun or a deep snow, or both alternately, to test his cerebral organisation; and I'd try him with impure drinking water and damp sheets; and, last of all, on his return, I'd make him pa.s.s his accounts before some old monster of official savagery, who would repeatedly impugn his honesty, call out for vouchers, and d--n his eyes. The man "who came out strong" after all these difficulties I would accept as fully equal to his responsibilities, for it would not be alone in intellectuals he had been tested: the man's temper, his patience, his powers of endurance, his physical strength, his resources in emergency, his readiness to meet difficulty, and, last of all, his self-devotion in matters of official discipline, enabling him to combine with all the n.o.ble qualities of a man the submissive attractions of a spaniel.

"Are you sure," asks some one, "that all these graces and accomplishments can be had for 500 per annum?" Not a doubt of it. It is a cheap age we live in; and if you wanted a s.h.i.+pload of clever fellows for a new colony, I'd engage to supply you on easier terms than with the same number of gardeners or strong-boned housemaids.

Last of all, this scheme might be made no small attraction in this economical era--what is called self-supporting; for the public might be admitted to paid seats, whence they could learn European geography by a new and easy method. "Families admitted at a reduced rate--Schools and Seminaries half-price."

OF SOME OLD DOGS IN OFFICE.

Whenever the Budget comes on for discussion there are some three or four speakers, of whom Mr Williams of Lambeth is sure to be one, ready to suggest certain obvious economies by the suppression of some foreign missions, such as Dresden, Hanover, Stuttgart, &c. They have not, it is true, anything forcible or pungent to say on the subject; but as they say the same thing every year, the chances are that, on the drip-drip principle, they will at last succeed either in abolis.h.i.+ng these appointments, or reducing the salaries of those who hold them.

Ministers of course defend them, and Opposition leaders, who hope one day to be Ministers, will also blandly say a word or two in their favour. For my own part, I don't think the country cares much about the matter, or interests itself more deeply who drones away life at Hanover than who occupies an apartment at Hampton Court. In each case it is a sort of dowager asylum, where antiquated respectability may rest and be thankful.

The occupants of these snug berths, however far from England--at least in so far as regards any knowledge of public opinion--are sure to be greatly alarmed at these suggestions for their suppression. Poor pigeons! if you only knew what a sorry sportsman it is who fires at you, you'd never flutter a wing. Be of good heart, I say. Even if Williams's gun go off at all, the recoil may hurt himself, but it will never damage you. Take my word for it, "the smooth-Bore of Lambeth never hit anything yet." This a.s.surance of mine--I have given it scores of times personally--never gives the comfort that it ought; for these timid souls, bullied by long dealings with the Office--tormented, as Mr Carlyle would say, with much First Clerk--grow to be easily panic-stricken, and have gloomy nightmares of a time when there shall be no more life-certificates nor any quarter-days.

I cannot enter into their feelings, but I suppose they are reasonable.

I conclude that one would like to have a salary, and to be paid it punctually. Self-preservation is a law that we all recognise; and some of these officials may possibly feel that there is no other line of life open to them, and that, if you take away from them their mission, they will be poor indeed. You will think me perhaps as absurd as Mrs Nickleby, who connected roast-pork and canaries, if I confess to you that it is an old mastiff that my father had when I was a boy that brought these people very forcibly to my mind. Poor old Turco!--I can't know how old he was, but he was nearly blind, exceedingly feeble, intensely stupid, and much given to sleep. Still, whenever any one of the family--he didn't mind the servants--would go out to the stableyard, he'd rouse himself up, and, affecting to believe it was an intruder, he'd give a fierce bark or two, when, discovering his error, he'd wag his tail and go back to his den--all this being evidently done to show that he was as vigilant as ever--a sort of protest, that said, "Don't believe one word about my being blind and toothless, still less flatter yourself that the place is secure. It requires all my activity and watchfulness to protect; but go back in peace, I'm ready for them."

Now, this is exactly what Turco is doing at Munich and Dresden. Whenever Williams comes out with a hint that he is not wanted, Turco makes a furious noise, rushes here and there after a turkey-c.o.c.k if he can find one, and thoroughly satisfies the family that he is an invaluable beast, and could not be dispensed with.

Like Turco, too, who always barked, or tried to bark, whenever he heard any noise or commotion going on outside, these people are sure to make an uproar if there be any excitement in their neighbourhood. No sooner did Schleswig-Holstein begin to trouble the world, than despatches began to pour in from places that a few weeks before even the messengers scarcely knew on the map. They related interviews with unknown princes and unheard-of ministers, and spoke of hopes, fears, wishes, and anxieties of people who had not, to our appreciation, a more palpable existence than the creatures of the heathen mythology! Much grumbling, and sore of ear, Williams goes back to his kennel.

"What! suppress the mission at Hohen-Schwein-stadt, when I hold here,"

exclaims the Minister, "the admirable report of our diplomatic agent on the state of public feeling in that important capital? Will the honourable gentleman, to whose long experience of foreign politics I am ready to bow, inform me how the relations of England with the Continent are to be carried on unless through the intervention of such appointments? Can the honourable member for ------" (a s.h.i.+powner, perhaps) "carry on his great and important business without agencies?

Can the honourable gentleman himself" (a brewer) "be certain that the invigorating and admirable produce of his manufacture will attain the celebrity that it merits, or become the daily beverage of countless thousands in the tropics, una.s.sisted by those aids which to commerce or diplomacy are alike indispensable?" This is very like the Premier's eloquence. I almost think I am listening to him, and even see the smile of triumph with which he appeals at the peroration to his friends to cheer him. Turco is safe this time; and, better still, he need never bark again till next Easter and another Budget.

It is a very curious thing--it opens a whole realm of speculation--how small and few are the devices of humanity. We fancy we are progressing simply because we change. We give up alchemy, and we believe in medicine; we scout witchcraft, and we take to spirit-rapping; and instead of monasteries and monks, we have missions and plenipotentiaries. If it be a fine thing to die for one's country, it's a pleasant one to live for it; to know that you inhabit an impenetrable retreat, which no "Own Correspondents" ever invade, and where, if it was not for Williams, no sense of fear or alarm could come to disturb the tranquil surface of a stagnant existence.

It is astonis.h.i.+ng, too, what a wholesome dread and apprehension of England and English power is maintained through the means of these small legations in secluded spots of the Continent, in remote little duchies, without trade or commerce, far away from the sea, where no one ever heard of imports or exports, and the name of Gladstone had never been spoken. In such places as these, a meddlesome old envoy, with plenty of spare time on hand, often gets us thoroughly hated, always referring to England as a sort of court of last appeal on every question, social, moral, religious, or political, and dimly alluding to Lord Palmerston as a kind of Rhadamanthus, whose judgments fall heavily on ill-doers.

The helpless hopeless condition of small states in all such conflicts was actually pitiable. The poor little trembling King Charles dog in the cage of the lion, and who felt that he only lived on sufferance, was the type of them. I remember an incident which occurred some years ago at the Bagni di Lucca, which will ill.u.s.trate what I mean. An English stranger at one of the hotels, after was.h.i.+ng his hands, threw his basinful of soap-and-water out of the window just as the Grand-duke was pa.s.sing, deluging his imperial highness from head to foot. The stranger hurried at once to the street, and, throwing himself before the dripping sovereign, made the most humble and apologetic excuses for his act; but the Grand-duke stopped him short at once, saying, "There, there! say no more of it: don't mention the matter to any one, or I shall get into a correspondence with Palmerston, and be compelled to pay a round sum to you for damages!"

After all, one could say for these small posts in diplomacy what, I think it was Croker said for certain rotten boroughs in former days, "If you had not had such posts, you would have lost the services of a number of able and instructive men, who, entering public life by the small door, are sure to leave it by the grand entrance."

These small missions are very often charming centres of society in places one would scarcely hope for it; and from these little-known legations, every now and then, issue men whom it would not be safe for Williams to bark at, and whom, even if he were rabid, he would not bite.

DECLINE OF THE DRAMA.

What a number of ingenious reasons have been latterly given for the decline of the Drama, and the decrease of interest now felt for the stage. Some aver that people are nowadays too cultivated, too highly educated, to take pleasure in a play; others opine that the novel has supplanted the drama; others again declare that it is the prevalence of a religious sentiment on the subject that has damaged theatrical representation. For my own part, I take a totally different view of the subject. My notion is this: the world will never pay a high price for an inferior article, if it can obtain a first-rate one for nothing; in other words, people are come to the conclusion that the best actors are not to be found on the boards of the Haymarket or the Adelphi, but in the world at large--at the Exchange, in the parks, on railroads or river-steamers, at the soirees of learned societies, in Parliament, at Civic dinners or Episcopal visitations.