Gryll Grange

GRYLL GRANGE

At intervals in similar afternoons of bad weather some others of the party were requested to favour the company with lectures or recitations in the theatre. Mr. Minim delivered a lecture on music, Mr. Pallet on painting; Mr. Falconer, though not used to lecturing, got up one on domestic life in the Homeric age. Even Mr. Gryll took his turn, and expounded the Epicurean philosophy. Mr. MacBorrowdale, who had no objection to lectures before dinner, delivered one on all the affairs of the world – foreign and domestic, moral, political, and literary. In the course of it he touched on Reform. 'The stone which Lord Michin Malicho – who was the Gracchus of the last Reform, and is the Sisyphus of the present – has been so laboriously pushing up hill, is for the present deposited at the bottom in the Limbo of Vanity. If it should ever surmount the summit and run down on the other side, it will infallibly roll over and annihilate the franchise of the educated classes; for it would not be worth their while to cross the road to exercise it against the rabble preponderance which would then have been created. Thirty years ago, Lord Michin Malicho had several cogent arguments in favour of Reform. One was, that the people were roaring for it, and that therefore they must have it. He has now in its favour the no less cogent argument, that the people do not care about it, and that the less it is asked for the greater will be the grace of the boon. On the former occasion the out- of-door logic was irresistible. Burning houses, throwing dead cats and cabbage-stumps into carriages, and other varieties of the same system of didactics, demonstrated the fitness of those who practised them to have representatives in Parliament. So they got their representatives, and many think Parliament

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would have been better without them. My father was a staunch Reformer. In his neighbourhood in London was the place of assembly of a Knowledge-is-Power Club. The members at the close of their meetings collected mending-stones from the road, and broke the windows to the right and left of their line of march. They had a flag on which was inscribed, "The power of public opinion." Whenever the enlightened assembly met, my father closed his shutters, but, closing within, they did not protect the glass. One morning he picked up, from where it had fallen between the window and the shutter, a very large, and consequently very demonstrative, specimen of dialectical granite. He preserved it carefully, and mounted it on a handsome pedestal, inscribed with "The power of public opinion." He placed it on the middle of his library mantelpiece, and the daily contemplation of it cured him of his passion for Reform. During the rest of his life he never talked, as he had used to do, of "the people": he always said "the rabble," and delighted in quoting every passage of Hudibras in which the rabble-rout is treated as he had come to conclude it ought to be. He made this piece of granite the nucleus of many political disquisitions. It is still in my possession, and I look on it with veneration as my principal tutor, for it had certainly a large share in the elements of my education. If, which does not seem likely, another reform lunacy should arise in my time, I shall take care to close my shutters against "The power of public opinion."

The Reverend Doctor Opimian being called on to contribute his share to these diversions of rainy afternoons, said –

'The sort of prose lecture which I am accustomed to deliver would not be exactly appropriate to the present time and

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place. I will therefore recite to you some verses, which I made some time since, on what appeared to me a striking specimen of absurdity on the part of the advisers of royalty here – the bestowing the honours of knighthood, which is a purely Christian institution, on Jews and Paynim; very worthy persons in themselves, and entitled to any mark of respect befitting their class, but not to one strictly and exclusively Christian; money-lenders, too, of all callings the most anti-pathetic to that of a true knight. The contrast impressed itself on me as I was reading a poem of the twelfth century, by Hues de Tabaret – L'Ordène de Chevalerie – and I endeavoured to express the contrast in the manner and form following: –

A NEW ORDER OF CHIVALRY

Sir Moses, Sir Aaron, Sir Jamramajee,

Two stock-jobbing Jews, and a shroffing Parsee, Have girt on the armour of old Chivalrie,

And, instead of the Red Cross, have hoisted Balls Three.

Now fancy our Sovereign, so gracious and bland,

With the sword of Saint George in her royal right hand, Instructing this trio of marvellous Knights

In the mystical meanings of Chivalry's rites.

'You have come from the bath, all in milk-white array, To show you have washed worldly feelings away,

And, pure as your vestments from secular stain, Renounce sordid passions and seekings for gain.

'This scarf of deep red o'er your vestments I throw, In token, that down them your life-blood shall flow, Ere Chivalry's honour, or Christendom's faith, Shall meet, through your failure, or peril or scaith.

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'These slippers of silk, of the colour of earth,

Are in sign of remembrance of whence you had birth; That from earth you have sprung, and to earth you return, But stand for the faith, life immortal to earn.

'This blow of the sword on your shoulder-blades true Is the mandate of homage, where homage is due,

And the sign that your swords from the scabbard shall fly When "St George and the Right" is the rallying cry.

'This belt of white silk, which no speck has defaced, Is the sign of a bosom with purity graced,

And binds you to prove, whatsoever betides,

Of damsels distressed the friends, champions, and guides.

'These spurs of pure gold are the symbols which say, As your steeds obey them, you the Church shall obey, And speed at her bidding, through country and town, To strike, with your falchions, her enemies down.'

II

Now fancy these Knights, when the speech they have heard, As they stand, scarfed, shoed, shoulder-dubbed,

belted and spurred, With the cross-handled sword duly sheathed on the thigh, Thus simply and candidly making reply:

'By your Majesty's grace we have risen up Knights, But we feel little relish for frays and for fights: There are heroes enough, full of spirit and fire, Always ready to shoot and be shot at for hire.

'True, with bulls and with bears we have battled our cause; And the bulls have no horns, and the bears have no paws; And the mightiest blow which we ever have struck

Has achieved but the glory of laming a duck.52

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CHAPTER XIX

Trincq est ung mot panomphée, célébré et entendu de toutes nations, et nous signifie, beuuez. Et icI maintenons que non rire, ains boyre est le propre de l'homme. Je ne dy boyre simplement et absolument, car aussy bien boyvent les bestes; je dy boyre vin bon et fraiz.

Rabelais: 1. v. c. 45

Some guests remained. Some departed and returned. Among these was Mr. MacBorrowdale. One day after dinner, on one of his reappearances, Lord Curryfin said to him –

'Well, Mr. MacBorrowdale, in your recent observations, have you found anything likely to satisfy Jack of Dover, if he were prosecuting his inquiry among us?'

Mr. MacBorrowdale. Troth, no, my lord. I think, if he were among us, he would give up the search as hopeless. He found it so in his own day, and he would find it still more so now. Jack was both merry and wise. We have less mirth in practice; and we have more wisdom in pretension, which Jack would not have admitted.

The Rev. Dr. Opimian. He would have found it like Juvenal's search for patriotic virtue, when Catiline was everywhere, and Brutus and Cato were nowhere.53

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Lord Curryfin. Well, among us, if Jack did not find his superior, or even his equal, he would not have been at a loss for company to his mind. There is enough mirth for those who choose to enjoy it, and wisdom too, perhaps as much as he would have cared for. We ought to have more wisdom, as we have clearly more science.

The Rev. Dr. Opimian. Science is one thing, and wisdom is another. Science is an edged tool, with which men play like children, and cut their own fingers. If you look at the results which science has brought in its train, you will find them to consist almost wholly in elements of mischief. See how much belongs to the word Explosion alone, of which the ancients knew nothing. Explosions of powder-mills and powder-mag- azines; of coal-gas in mines and in houses; of high-pressure engines in ships and boats and factories. See the complications and refinements of modes of destruction, in revolvers and rifles and shells and rockets and cannon. See collisions and wrecks and every mode of disaster by land and by sea, resulting chiefly from the insanity for speed, in those who for the most part have nothing to do at the end of the race, which they run as if they were so many Mercuries speeding with messages from Jupiter. Look at our scientific drainage, which turns refuse into poison. Look at the subsoil of London, whenever it is turned up to the air, converted by gas leakage into one mass of pestilent blackness, in which no vegetation can flourish, and above which, with the rapid growth of the ever-growing nuisance, no living thing will breathe with impunity. Look at our scientific machinery, which has destroyed domestic manufacture, which has substituted rottenness for strength in the

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thing made, and physical degradation in crowded towns for healthy and comfortable country life in the makers. The day would fail, if I should attempt to enumerate the evils which science has inflicted on mankind. I almost think it is the ultimate destiny of science to exterminate the human race.

Lord Curryfin. You have gone over a wide field, which we might exhaust a good bin of claret in fully discussing. But surely the facility of motion over the face of the earth and sea is both pleasant and profitable. We may now see the world with little expenditure of labour or time.

The Rev. Dr. Opimian. You may be whisked over it, but you do not see it. You go from one great town to another, where manners and customs are not even now essentially different, and with this facility of intercourse become progressively less and less so. The intermediate country – which you never see, unless there is a show mountain, or waterfall, or ruin, for which there is a station, and to which you go as you would to any other exhibition – the intermediate country contains all that is really worth seeing, to enable you to judge of the various characteristics of men and the diversified objects of Nature.

Lord Curryfin. You can suspend your journey if you please, and see the intermediate country, if you prefer it.

The Rev. Dr. Opimian. But who does prefer it? You travel round the world by a hand-book, as you do round an exhibi- tion-room by a catalogue.

Mr. MacBorrowdale. Not to say that in the intermediate country you are punished by bad inns and bad wine; of which I confess myself intolerant. I knew an unfortunate French

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tourist, who had made the round of Switzerland, and had but one expression for every stage of his journey: Mauvaise auberge!

Lord Curryfin. Well, then, what say you to the electric telegraph, by which you converse at the distance of thousands of miles? Even across the Atlantic, as no doubt we shall yet do.

Mr. Gryll. Some of us have already heard the doctor's opinion on that subject.

The Rev. Dr. Opimian. I have no wish to expedite communication with the Americans. If we could apply the power of electrical repulsion to preserve us from ever hearing anything more of them, I should think that we had for once derived a benefit from science.

Mr. Gryll. Your love for the Americans, doctor, seems something like that of Cicero's friend Marius for the Greeks. He would not take the nearest road to his villa, because it was called the Greek Road.54 Perhaps if your nearest way home were called the American Road, you would make a circuit to avoid it.

The Rev. Dr. Opimian. I am happy to say I am not put to the test. Magnetism, galvanism, electricity, are 'one form of many names.' Without magnetism we should never have discovered America; to which we are indebted for nothing but evil; diseases in the worst forms that can afflict humanity, and slavery in the worst form in which slavery can cast. The Old World had the sugar-cane and the cotton-plant, though it did not so misuse them. Then, what good have we got from America? What good of any kind, from the whole continent and its islands, from the Esquimaux to Patagonia?

Mr. Gryll. Newfoundland salt-fish, doctor.

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The Rev. Dr. Opindan. That is something, but it does not turn the scale.

Mr. Gryll. If they have given us no good, we have given them none.

The Rev. Dr. Opimian. We have given them wine and classical literature; but I am afraid Bacchus and Minerva have equally "Scattered their bounty upon barren ground."

On the other hand, we have given the red men rum, which has been the chief instrument of their perdition. On the whole, our intercourse with America has been little else than an interchange of vices and diseases.

Lord Curryfin. Do you count it nothing to have substituted civilised for savage men?

The Rev, Dr. Opimian. Civilised. The word requires definition. But looking into futurity, it seems to me that the ultimate tendency of the change is to substitute the worse for the better race; the Negro for the Red Indian. The Red Indian will not work for a master. No ill-usage will make him. Herein he is the noblest specimen of humanity that ever walked the earth. Therefore, the white man exterminates his race. But the time will come when by mere force of numbers the black race will predominate, and exterminate the white. And thus the worse race will be substituted for the better, even as it is in St. Domingo, where the Negro has taken the place of the Caraib. The change is clearly for the worse.

Lord Curryfin. You imply that in the meantime the white race is better than the red.

The Rev. Dr. Opimian. I leave that as an open question. But I hold, as some have done before me, that the human mind

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