The Celt and Saxon, Complete

G >> George Meredith >> The Celt and Saxon, Complete

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He was besides of an unsuspicious and an unexacting temperament. The
things he would strongly object to he did not specify to himself because
he was untroubled by any forethought of them. Business, political,
commercial and marine, left few vacancies in his mind other than for the
pleasures he could command and enjoy. He surveyed his England with a
ruddy countenance, and saw the country in the reflection. His England saw
much of itself in him. Behind each there was more, behind the country a
great deal more, than could be displayed by a glass. The salient features
wore a resemblance. Prosperity and heartiness; a ready hand on, and over,
a full purse; a recognised ability of the second-rate order; a stout hold
of patent principles; inherited and embraced, to make the day secure and
supply a somniferous pillow for the night; occasional fits of anxiety
about affairs, followed by an illuminating conviction that the world is a
changing one and our construction not of granite, nevertheless that a
justifiable faith in the ship, joined to a constant study of the chart,
will pull us through, as it has done before, despite all assaults and
underminings of the common enemy and the particular; these, with the
humorous indifference of familiarity and constitutional annoyances,
excepting when they grew acute and called for drugs, and with
friendliness to the race of man of both colours, in the belief that our
Creator originally composed in black and white, together with a liking
for matters on their present footing in slow motion, partly under his
conductorship, were the prominent characteristics of the grandson of the
founder of the house, who had built it from a spade.

The story of the building was notorious; popular books for the inciting
of young Englishmen to dig to fortune had a place for it among the
chapters, where we read of the kind of man, and the means by which the
country has executed its later giant strides of advancement. The first
John Mattock was a representative of his time; he moved when the country
was moving, and in the right direction, finding himself at the auspicious
moment upon a line of rail. Elsewhere he would have moved, we may
suppose, for the spade-like virtues bear their fruits; persistent and
thrifty, solid and square, will fetch some sort of yield out of any soil;
but he would not have gone far. The Lord, to whom an old man of a mind
totally Hebrew ascribed the plenitude of material success, the Lord and
he would have reared a garden in the desert; in proximity to an oasis,
still on the sands, against obstacles. An accumulation of upwards of four
hundred thousand pounds required, as the moral of the popular books does
not sufficiently indicate, a moving country, an ardent sphere, to produce
the sum: and since, where so much was done, we are bound to conceive
others at work as well as he, it seems to follow that the exemplar
outstripping them vastly must have profited by situation at the start,
which is a lucky accident; and an accident is an indigestible lump in a
moral tale, real though the story be. It was not mentioned in the popular
books; nor did those worthy guides to the pursuit of wealth contain any
reminder of old John Mattock's dependence upon the conjoint labour of his
fellows to push him to his elevation. As little did they think of
foretelling a day, generations hence, when the empty heirs of his fellows
might prefer a modest claim (confused in statement) to compensation
against the estate he bequeathed: for such prophecy as that would have
hinted at a tenderness for the mass to the detriment of the individual,
and such tenderness as that is an element of our religion, not the drift
of our teaching.

He grumbled at the heavy taxation of his estate during life: yearly this
oppressed old man paid thousands of pounds to the Government. It was poor
encouragement to shoulder and elbow your way from a hovel to a mansion!

He paid the money, dying sour; a splendid example of energy on the road,
a forbidding one at the terminus. And here the moral of the popular books
turned aside from him to snatch at humanity for an instance of our
frailness and dealt in portentous shadows:--we are, it should be known,
not the great creatures we assume ourselves to be. Six months before his
death he appeared in the garb of a navvy, humbly soliciting employment at
his own house-door. There he appealed to the white calves of his footmen
for a day's work, upon the plea that he had never been a democrat.

The scene had been described with humanely-moralising pathos in the
various books of stories of Men who have come to Fortune, and it had for
a length of seasons an annual position in the foremost rank (on the line,
facing the door) in our exhibition of the chosen artists, where, as our
popular words should do, it struck the spectator's eye and his brain
simultaneously with pugilistic force: a reference to the picture in the
catalogue furnishing a recapitulation of the incident. 'I've worked a
good bit in my time, gentlemen, and I baint done yet':--SEE PROFESSOR
SUMMIT'S 'MEN WHO HAVE COME TO FORTUNE.' There is, we perceive at a
glance, a contrast in the bowed master of the Mansion applying to his
menials for a day's work at the rate of pay to able-bodied men:--which he
is not, but the deception is not disingenuous. The contrast flashed with
the rapid exchange of two prizefighters in a ring, very popularly. The
fustian suit and string below the knee, on the one side, and the purple
plush breeches and twinkling airy calves (fascinating his attention as he
makes his humble request to his own, these domestic knights) to right and
left of the doorway and in front, hit straight out of the canvas. And as
quickly as you perceive the contrast you swallow the moral. The dreaded
thing is down in a trice, to do what salutary work it may within you.
That it passed into the blood of England's middle-class population, and
set many heads philosophically shaking, and filled the sails of many a
sermon, is known to those who lived in days when Art and the classes
patronising our Native Art existed happily upon the terms of venerable
School-Dame and studious pupils, before the sickly era displacing
Exhibitions full of meaning for tricks of colour, monstrous atmospherical
vagaries that teach nothing, strange experiments on the complexion of the
human face divine--the feminine hyper-aethereally. Like the first John
Mattock, it was formerly of, and yet by dint of sturdy energy, above the
people. They learnt from it; they flocked to it thirsting and retired
from it thoughtful, with some belief of having drunk of nature in art, as
you will see the countless troops of urchins about the one cow of London,
in the Great City's Green Park.

A bequest to the nation of the best of these pictures of Old John, by a
very old Yorkshire collector, makes it milk for all time, a perpetual
contrast, and a rebuke. Compared with the portrait of Jane Mattock in her
fiery aureole of hair on the walls of the breakfast-room, it marks that
fatal period of degeneracy for us, which our critics of Literature as
well as Art are one voice in denouncing, when the complex overwhelms the
simple, and excess of signification is attempted, instead of letting
plain nature speak her uncorrupted tongue to the contemplative mind.
Degeneracy is the critical history of the Arts. Jane's hair was of a
reddish gold-inwoven cast that would, in her grandfather's epoch, have
shone unambiguously as carrots. The girl of his day thus adorned by
Nature, would have been shown wearing her ridiculous crown with some
decent sulkiness; and we should not have had her so unsparingly crowned;
the truth would have been told in a dexterous concealment--a rope of it
wound up for a bed of the tortoise-shell comb behind, and a pair of tight
cornucopias at the temples. What does our modern artist do but flare it
to right and left, lift it wavily over her forehead, revel in the
oriental superabundance, and really seem to swear we shall admire it,
against our traditions of the vegetable, as a poetical splendour. The
head of the heiress is in a Jovian shower. Marigolds are in her hand. The
whole square of canvas is like a meadow on the borders of June. It causes
blinking.

Her brother also is presented: a fine portrait of him, with clipped red
locks, in blue array, smiling, wearing the rose of briny breezes, a
telescope under his left arm, his right forefinger on a map, a view of
Spitzbergen through a cabin-window: for John had notions about the
north-west passage, he had spent a winter in the ice, and if an amateur,
was not the less a true sailor.

With his brass-buttoned blue coat, and his high coloured cheeks, and his
convict hair--a layer of brickdust--and his air of princely wealth, and
the icebergs and hummocks about him, he looks for adventure without a
thought of his heroism--the country all over.

There he stands, a lover of the sea, and a scientific seaman and engineer
to boot, practical in every line of his face, defying mankind to suspect
that he cherishes a grain of romance. On the wall, just above his
shoulder, is a sketch of a Viking putting the lighted brand to his ship
in mid sea, and you are to understand that his time is come and so should
a Viking die: further, if you will, the subject is a modern Viking, ready
for the responsibilities of the title. Sketches of our ancient wooden
walls and our iron and plated defences line the panellings. These
degenerate artists do work hard for their money.

The portrait of John's father, dated a generation back, is just the man
and little else, phantomly the man. His brown coat struggles out of the
obscurity of the background, but it is chiefly background clothing him.
His features are distinguishable and delicate: you would suppose him
appearing to you under the beams of a common candle, or cottage
coalfire--ferruginously opaque. The object of the artist (apart from the
triumph of tone on the canvas) is to introduce him as an elegant and
faded gentleman, rather retiring into darkness than emerging. He is the
ghost of the painter's impasto. Yet this is Ezra Mattock, who multipled
the inheritance of the hundreds of thousands into millions, and died,
after covering Europe, Asia, and the Americas with iron rails, one of the
few Christians that can hold up their heads beside the banking Jew as
magnates in the lists of gold. The portrait is clearly no frontispiece of
his qualities. He married an accomplished and charitable lady, and she
did not spoil the stock in refining it. His life passed quietly; his
death shook the country: for though it had been known that he had been
one of our potentates, how mightily he was one had not entered into the
calculations of the public until the will of the late Ezra Mattock, cited
in our prints, received comments from various newspaper articles. A
chuckle of collateral satisfaction ran through the empire. All England
and her dependencies felt the state of cousinship with the fruits of
energy; and it was an agreeable sentiment, coming opportunely, as it did,
at the tail of articles that had been discussing a curious manifestation
of late--to-wit, the awakening energy of the foreigner--a prodigious
apparition on our horizon. Others were energetic too! We were not, the
sermon ran, to imagine we were without rivals in the field. We were
possessed of certain positive advantages; we had coal, iron, and an
industrious population, but we were, it was to be feared, by no means a
thrifty race, and there was reason for doubt whether in the matter of
industry we were quite up to the mark of our forefathers. No
deterioration of the stock was apprehended, still the nation must be
accused of a lack of vigilance. We must look round us, and accept the
facts as they stood. So accustomed had we become to the predominance of
our position that it was difficult at first to realise a position of
rivalry that threatened our manufacturing interests in their hitherto
undisputed lead in the world's markets. The tale of our exports for the
last five years conveys at once its moral and its warning. Statistics
were then cited.

As when the gloomy pedagogue has concluded his exhortation, statistics
birched the land. They were started at our dinner-tables, and scourged
the social converse. Not less than in the articles, they were perhaps
livelier than in the preface; they were distressing nevertheless; they
led invariably to the question of our decadence. Carthage was named; a
great mercantile community absolutely obliterated! Senatorial men were
led to propose in their thoughtfullest tones that we should turn our
attention to Art. Why should we not learn to excel in Art? We excelled in
Poetry. Our Poets were cited: not that there was a notion that poems
would pay as an export but to show that if we excel in one of the Arts we
may in others of them. The poetry was not cited, nor was it necessary,
the object being to inflate the balloon of paradox with a light-flying
gas, and prove a poem-producing people to be of their nature born
artists; if they did but know it. The explosion of a particular trade
points to your taking up another. Energy is adapted to flourish equally
in every branch of labour.

It is the genius of the will, commanding all the crossroads. A country
breeding hugely must prove its energy likewise in the departments of the
mind, or it will ultimately be unable to feed its young--nay, to feast
its aldermen! Let us be up and alive.--Such was the exhortation of a
profound depression. Outside these dismal assemblies, in the streets, an
ancient song of raven recurrence croaked of 'Old England a-going down the
hill'; for there is a link of electricity between the street-boy and the
leading article in days when the Poles exchange salutations.

Mr. Ezra's legacy of his millions to son and daughter broke like a golden
evening on the borders of the raincloud. Things could not be so bad when
a plain untitled English gentleman bequeathed in the simplest manner
possible such giant heaps, a very Pelion upon Ossa, of wealth to his
children. The minds of the readers of journals were now directed to think
of the hoarded treasures of this favoured country. They might
approximately be counted, but even if counted they would be past
conception, like the sidereal system. The contemplation of a million
stupefies: consider the figures of millions and millions! Articles were
written on Lombard Street, the world's gold-mine, our granary of energy,
surpassing all actual and fabulous gold-mines ever spoken of: Aladdin's
magician would find his purse contracting and squeaking in the
comparison. Then, too, the store of jewels held by certain private
families called for remark and an allusion to Sindbad the sailor, whose
eyes were to dilate wider than they did in the valley of diamonds. Why,
we could, if we pleased, lie by and pass two or three decades as jolly
cricketers and scullers, and resume the race for wealth with the rest of
mankind, hardly sensible of the holiday in our pockets though we were the
last people to do it, we were the sole people that had the option. Our
Fortunatus' cap was put to better purposes, but to have the cap, and not
to be emasculated by the possession, might excuse a little reasonable
pride in ourselves.

Thus did Optimism and Pessimism have their turn, like the two great
parties in the State, and the subsiding see-saw restored a proper
balance, much to the nation's comfort. Unhappily, it was remembered,
there are spectators of its method of getting to an equipoise out of the
agitation of extremes. The peep at our treasures to regain composure had,
we fear, given the foreigner glimpses, and whetted the appetite of our
masses. No sooner are we at peace than these are heard uttering low
howls, and those are seen enviously glaring. The spectre, Panic, that
ever dogs the optimistic feast, warns us of a sack under our beds, and
robbers about to try a barely-bolted door. . . Then do we, who have so
sweetly sung our senses to sleep, start up, in their grip, rush to the
doctor and the blacksmith, rig alarums, proclaim ourselves intestinally
torn, defenceless, a prey to foes within and without. It is discovered to
be no worse than an alderman's dream, but the pessimist frenzy of the
night has tossed a quieting sop to the Radical, and summoned the
volunteers to a review. Laudatory articles upon the soldierly 'march
past' of our volunteers permit of a spell of soft repose, deeper than
prudent, at the end of it, India and Ireland consenting.

So much for a passing outline of John Bull--the shadow on the wall of
John Mattock. The unostentatious millionaire's legacy to his two children
affected Mr. Bull thrillingly, pretty nearly as it has here been dotted
in lining. That is historical. Could he believe in the existence of a son
of his, a master of millions, who had never sighed (and he had only to
sigh) to die a peer, or a baronet, or simple Knight? The downright
hard-nailed coffin fact was there; the wealthiest man in the country had
flown away to Shadowland a common Mr.! You see the straight deduction
from the circumstances:--we are, say what you will, a Republican people!
Newspaper articles on the watch sympathetically for Mr. Bull's latest
view of himself, preached on the theme of our peculiar Republicanism.
Soon after he was observed fondling the Crown Insignia. His bards flung
out their breezy columns, reverentially monarchial. The Republican was
informed that they were despised as a blatant minority. A maudlin fit of
worship of our nobility had hold of him next, and English aristocracy
received the paean. Lectures were addressed to democrats; our House of
Lords was pledged solemnly in reams of print. We were told that 'blood'
may always be betted on to win the race; blood that is blue will beat the
red hollow. Who could pretend to despise the honour of admission to the
ranks of the proudest peerage the world has known! Is not a great
territorial aristocracy the strongest guarantee of national stability?
The loudness of the interrogation, like the thunder of Jove, precluded
thought of an answer.

Mr. Bull, though he is not of lucid memory, kept an eye on the owner of
those millions. His bards were awake to his anxiety, and celebrated John
Mattock's doings with a trump and flourish somewhat displeasing to a
quietly-disposed commoner. John's entry into Parliament as a Liberal was
taken for a sign of steersman who knew where the tide ran. But your
Liberals are sometimes Radicals in their youth, and his choice of parties
might not be so much sagacity as an instance of unripe lightheadedness. A
young conservative millionaire is less disturbing. The very wealthy young
peer is never wanton in his politics, which seems to admonish us that the
heir of vast wealth should have it imposed on him to accept a peerage,
and be locked up as it were. A coronet steadies the brain. You may let
out your heels at the social laws, you are almost expected to do it, but
you are to shake that young pate of yours restively under such a splendid
encumbrance. Private reports of John, however, gave him credit for sound
opinions: he was moderate, merely progressive. When it was added that the
man had the habit of taking counsel with his sister, he was at once
considered as fast and safe, not because of any public knowledge of the
character of Jane Mattock. We pay this homage to the settled common sense
of women. Distinctly does she discountenance leaps in the dark, wild
driving, and the freaks of Radicalism.

John, as it happened, had not so grave a respect for the sex as for the
individual Jane. He thought women capable of acts of foolishness; his
bright-faced sister he could thoroughly trust for prudent conduct. He
gave her a good portion of his heart in confidence, and all of it in
affection. There were matters which he excluded from confidence, even
from intimate communication with himself. These he could not reveal; nor
could she perfectly open her heart to him, for the same reason. They both
had an established ideal of their personal qualities, not far above the
positive, since they were neither of them pretentious, yet it was a
trifle higher and fairer than the working pattern; and albeit they were
sincere enough, quite sincere in their mutual intercourse, they had, by
what each knew at times of the thumping organ within them, cause for
doubting that they were as transparent as the other supposed; and they
were separately aware of an inward smile at one another's partial
deception; which did not thwart their honest power of working up to the
respected ideal. The stroke of the deeper self-knowledge rarely shook
them; they were able to live with full sensations in the animated picture
they were to the eyes best loved by them. This in fact was their life.
Anything beside it was a dream, and we do not speak of our dreams--not of
every dream. Especially do we reserve our speech concerning the dream in
which we had a revelation of the proud frame deprived of a guiding will,
flung rudderless on the waves. Ah that abject! The dismantled ship has
the grandeur of the tempest about it, but the soul swayed by passion is
ignominiously bare-poled, detected, hooted by its old assumption. If
instinct plays fantastical tricks when we are sleeping, let it be ever
behind a curtain. We can be held guilty only if we court exposure. The
ideal of English gentleman and gentlewoman is closely Roman in the
self-repression it exacts, and that it should be but occasionally
difficult to them shows an affinity with the type. Do you perchance, O
continental observers of the race, call it hypocritical? It is their
nature disciplined to the regimental step of civilisation. Socially these
island men and women of a certain middle rank are veterans of an army,
and some of the latest enrolled are the stoutest defenders of the flag.

Brother and sister preserved their little secrets of character apart.
They could not be expected to unfold what they declined personally to
examine. But they were not so successful with the lady governing the
household, their widowed maternal aunt, Mrs. Lackstraw, a woman of
decisive penetration, and an insubordinate recruit of the army aforesaid.
To her they were without a mask; John was passion's slave, Jane the most
romantic of Eve's daughters. She pointed to incidents of their youth; her
vision was acutely retrospective. The wealth of her nephew and niece
caused such a view of them to be, as she remarked, anxious past
endurance. She had grounds for fearing that John, who might step to an
alliance with any one of the proudest houses in the Kingdom, would marry
a beggar-maid. As for Jane, she was the natural prey of a threadbare
poet. Mrs. Lackstraw heard of Mr. Patrick O'Donnell, and demanded the
right to inspect him. She doubted such perfect disinterestedness in any
young man as that he should slave at account-keeping to that Laundry
without a prospect of rich remuneration, and the tale of his going down
to the city for a couple of hours each day to learn the art of keeping
books was of very dubious import in a cousin of Captain Con O'Donnell.
'Let me see your prodigy,' she said, with the emphasis on each word.
Patrick was presented at her table. She had steeled herself against an
Irish tongue. He spoke little, appeared simple, professed no enthusiasm
for the Laundry. And he paid no compliments to Jane: of the two he was
more interested by the elder lady, whose farm and dairy in Surrey he
heard her tell of with a shining glance, observing that he liked thick
cream: there was a touch of home in it. The innocent sensuality in the
candid avowal of his tastes inspired confidence. Mrs. Lackstraw fished
for some account of his home. He was open to flow on the subject; he
dashed a few sketches of mother and sisters, dowerless girls, fresh as
trout in the stream, and of his own poor estate, and the peasantry, with
whom he was on friendly terms. He was an absentee for his education.
Sweet water, pure milk, potatoes and bread, were the things he coveted in
plenty for his people and himself, he said, calling forth an echo from
Mrs. Lackstraw, and an invitation to come down to her farm in the Spring.
'That is, Mr. O'Donnell, if you are still in London.'

'Oh, I'm bound apprentice for a year,' said he.

He was asked whether he did not find it tiresome work.

'A trifle so,' he confessed.

Then why did he pursue it, the question was put.

He was not alive for his own pleasure, and would like to feel he was
doing a bit of good, was the answer.

Could one, Mrs. Lackstraw asked herself, have faith in this young
Irishman? He possessed an estate. His brogue rather added to his air of
truthfulness. His easy manners and the occasional streak of correct
French in his dialogue cast a shadow on it. Yet he might be an ingenuous
creature precisely because of the suspicion roused by his quaint
unworldliness that he might be a terrible actor. Why not?--his heart was
evidently much more interested in her pursuits than in her niece's. The
juvenility of him was catching, if it was indeed the man, and not one of
the actor's properties. Mrs. Lackstraw thought it prudent to hint at the
latter idea to Jane while she decided in her generosity to embrace the
former. Oh! if all Irishmen shared his taste for sweet water, pure milk
and wholesome bread, what a true Union we should have! She had always
insisted on those three things as most to be desired on earth for the
masses, and she reminded Jane of it as a curious fact. Jane acquiesced,
having always considered it a curious fact that her aunt should combine
the relish of a country life with the intensest social ambition--a
passion so sensitive as to make the name her husband had inflicted on her
a pain and a burden. The name of Mattock gave her horrors. She spoke of
it openly to prove that Jane must marry a title and John become a peer.
Never was there such a name to smell of the soil. She declared her
incapacity to die happy until the two had buried Mattock. Her own one
fatal step condemned her, owing to the opinion she held upon the
sacredness of marriage, as Lackstraw on her tombstone, and to Lackstraw
above the earthly martyr would go bearing the designation which marked
her to be claimed by him. But for John and Jane the index of Providence
pointed a brighter passage through life. They had only to conquer the
weakness native to them--the dreadful tendency downward. They had, in the
spiritual sense, frail hearts. The girl had been secretive about the
early activity of hers, though her aunt knew of two or three adventures
wanting in nothing save boldness to have put an end to her independence
and her prospects:--hence this Laundry business! a clear sign of some
internal disappointment. The boy, however, had betrayed himself in his
mother's days, when it required all her influence and his father's
authority, with proof positive of the woman's unworthiness, to rescue him
from immediate disaster.

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