As March 1st.-To-night, at home, the conversation turned upon English and French marriages. several Frenchmen of note who had married English wives were present (and one especially, whose mother also was English, and who can use either tongue with equal eloquence), the discussion was based on tolerably correct knowledge. Most of those present objected strongly to the English way of bringing up the daughters of wealthy houses in all the luxurious habits of their fathers' homes. Their riding-horses, their maids, their affluence of amusement, when, if the question of marriage arose-say to a young man of equal birth and education, but who had his way to make in the world-the father of the young lady could rarely pay any money down. It was even doubtful if he could make her an annual allowance; hardly ever one commensurate with the style in which she had been accustomed to live. In all probability a younger child's portion would be hers when her father died; when either the two lovers had given up all thoughts of uniting their fates, or when perhaps they no longer needed it, having had force of character enough to face poverty together, and had won their way upwards to competence. The tardy five or ten thousand pounds would have been invaluable once, that comes too late to many a one; so they said. They added that the luxurious habits of English girls, and the want of due provision for them on the part of their fathers, made both children and parents anxious and worldly in the matter of wedlock. The girls knew that as soon as their fathers died they must quit their splendid houses, and give up much of those habits and ways which had become necessary to them; and their parents knew this likewise; and hence the unwomanly search for rich husbands on the part of the mothers and daughters, which they maintained the existence of in England. Now, said our French friends, look at a household in our country; in every rank it is the custom to begin to put by a marriage portion for a girl as soon as she is born. A father would think he was neglecting a duty if he failed to do this just as much as if he starved the little creature. Our girls are brought up simply; luxury and extravagance with us belong to the married women. When his daughter is eighteen or twenty, a good father begins to look about him, and inquire the characters of the different young men of his acquaintance. He observes them, or his wife does so still more efficiently; and when they have settled that such a youth will suit their daughter, they name the portion they can give their child to the young man's father or to some common friend. In reply they are possibly informed that Monsieur Alphonse's education has cost so much; that he is now an avocat in a fair way to earn a considerable income, but at present unable to marry unless the young lady can contribute her share, not merely her pin-money, but a bonâ-fide share towards the joint expenses of housekeeping. Or he is a son of a man of property-property somewhat involved at present, but could it be released from embarrassment by the payment of an immediate sum of money, his father would settle a certain present income upon the young people, and so on. My friends said that there was no doubt whatever that if, after these preliminary matters of business were arranged, either the young man or the girl did not entirely like each other on more intimate acquaintance, the proposed marriage would fall through in the majority of French families, and no undue influence would be employed to compel either party into what they disliked. But in general the girl has never been allowed to be on intimate terms with any one till her parents' choice steps forward and is allowed by them to court her notice. And as for the young fellow, it has been easy for him to see enough of the young lady to know whether he can fancy her or not, before it comes to the point when it is necessary that he should take any individually active steps in the affair. CHILDREN OF THIS WORLD. W that the celebrity and the E all recognize more or less, success of a man during the period of his active life will not always meet with a similar estimate when he has withdrawn from it. It is not of that high and sacred thing, Fame in the large sense, and endurant through many generationsfame such as that Semper florentis Homeri, of which we are speaking; but of those lower species of it which throw a halo round almost everybody who has been in any sphere frequently before the world's eye during his existence. Such celebrity as this-adhuc vivo glory we might call it may be gained simply by honest work and fair abilities: it surrounds an efficient Secretary of State or a successful merchant. Or it may be gained, as men whisper in many cases, by means less direct -by versatility and knowledge of human weakness, in politics; by beauty and a good cellar, in society; by dexterity and deference to popular commonplace, in novel writing, or poetry, or art, or even comparative anatomy. And two points may be specially noted of such fame as this: that we, generally speaking, at once acquiesce in it whilst the man lives, and are conscious that it will not overlive him. The world, naturally favouring its children, plays a kind of good-natured game with them; it gives them their day in, as it were; does not profess, except of course officially, to think that their reputation or their influence will last; but, meanwhile, allows them to reap all the advantages. In the outspoken Middle Ages the position of such Children of this World was rudely symbolized by a certain arrangement which people contracted with a certain personage. We have done away with that personage and his unpleasant parchments; the 'feudal Devil,' as Goethe says, 'is no more;' yet it is a curious, even if an unpractical thing, to inquire what possessors of present fame might, of old, have been allegorized as high contracting powers of this kind, and to ask by what means they manage to be so much wiser in their generation than the Children of Light. It is obvious that no disrespect, far less censure, towards the Children of this World can be thus conveyed; for in so judging them we merely anticipate by a few years the estimate which, as we have said, their contemporaries have already tacitly formed, and gently whispered. Indeed, we frankly admire the success which has raised them to high places in the public view; even if occasionally that impertinent wonder with which Pope surveyed the flies in the amber will force itself on the mind, at a period, perhaps, of digestive derangement. But this success is their invitation to us to examine and to ask how it was gained, and how long it will continue. And in analyzing these phenomena, if we find means to answer the inquiry, we look, or seem to look, into the next page of history, and enjoy something of the pleasure which the children of Mr. Dickens or Mr. Thackeray may have enjoyed when they read on Christmas Day the January number of Vanity Fair or Pickwick, and knew, before we could, how the rogue was shown up, or how the devil came to fetch off the wicked nobleman. It is We need not, however, dwell upon that first and thoroughly honourable species of adhuc vivo reputation which we have noticed. simply the halo that a certain performance of duty, or the occupation of a certain position, throws round a, perhaps, unambitious man. Some one must fill the place, we often say; must be Duke, or head of the Bank, or Foreign Secretary in his turn; and the place is in itself so high that it imparts a glory to the wearer. Even if this be his main title to glory, yet the lofty personage in question will, pretty surely, have the chance of doing a few kind or liberal things; and such things, from such an eminence, have a grace and distinction of their own. The reputation arising from all this we take to be not only inevitable and innocent, but of considerable value in oiling the wheels of life. It is the fairly-earned honour of duty done on a pinnacle; the counterbalance to some of the uneasiness which besets a throne; at the lowest, the recognition that a man has tried to bear himself well in circumstances of a certain responsibility. It helps him to easychairs in life, and to peace on the death-bed. Finally, it is engraved on the monuments of a thousand peers and ministers, bishops and magistrates, writers and soldiers, where, though not quite aere perennius, it has a duration and an extent precisely commensurate with the marble tablet. We remember how the Times, that special and singular patron of Children of the World, spoke of the late Lord Lansdowne, in its obituary notice, as the most respected man of the day.' This was an admirable instance of the kind of exaggeration we mean; conscious, indeed, yet not too conscious. But there is a noble and conspicuous member of the Lower House, happily yet living, who may better serve to illustrate the above text. We quote him solely because, when an example is introduced, it should be a brilliant one, for in some important features Lord Palmerston's portrait will not come within the limits here sketched. A successful Premier of England in the nineteenth century will, quite abstractedly from the personality of the man, always hold a distinguished place in English annals, at least until they are written on the principles of Mr. Buckle; nor will the present Premier individually fail to be remembered with honour, so long as the phrase Civis Romanus is held to be accurately construed by British Traveller. Lord Palmerston, though owing much to nature and more to birth, is a bright example how to make the most, if not of both worlds, yet at least of that world with which we are best familiar. Determined never to be unintelligible by the meanest capacity in speech, and in policy rarely to ascend above the vision of the average Englishman, he may have sacrificed-perhaps we might even say, he has sacrificed-to 'his generation' the loftier impulses of his intellect, and, at times, the aspirations of his statesmanship. The epithets which friends apply to him are the unconscious echo of the impression which he is destined to leave-dexterous, active, versatile, vigorous, genial; pleasant epithets, doubtless, and such as any man might envy, but not exactly of the immortal order. Like the last fashionable bonnet (nor would he superciliously reject such a standard of comparison), Lord Palmerston is neat, brilliant, handy, indispensable, and constructed of the best materials that are con sistent with economy; but he will not be seen on the shelf of the British Museum, a thousand years hence, like the helmet of King Pyrrhus. But then the bonnet does not wish to be the helmet of King Pyrrhus! Perhaps we sometimes laud him a little too highly, with a knowledge that, though we wish to honour him much, we wish for his services more. Even in our own sketch there may be a rose-tint or two supernumerary. It is in certain measures that he has carried, in certain bursts of eloquence where the man was deeply stirred and knew that his audience or his countrymen had risen to his level, that the future Macaulay (if an equal admirer of great Whig houses) will find occasion to confer the laudes laudati viri. Meanwhile, the Poet of No. 37 High-street, St. Giles, has recently drawn a portrait which— in rough lines no doubt, but such lines as Englishmen love-admirably sums up what we have here ventured to suggest : Here's jolly good luck to Palmerston, If we hunted through the land; He's a rum cove, fol de riddle I do, Our Pre-mi-er so free; The World, like the Church, is a word of a singularly chameleonlike quality. The ideas of praise or of dispraise which it conveys may range almost from heaven to the antipodes. We have hitherto taken it in the higher position of its orbit; somewhere above the waist,' as Hamlet said, or 'the middle of its favours.' In this sense, to be Children of this World is something distinct from being simply and downrightly worldly. It means doing your duty with energy, pushing your way without philosophical scruples, and making fame and money on the road by all methods consistent (of course) with the highest principles of honour. Respectable is an epithet which, as we in England at present employ it, exactly fits this class during life; and whatever reputation they leave -though less in amount, as we said at the beginning, than contemporaries by a good-natured and useful fiction confer upon them—will be thoroughly respectable also. But in the great Commercial School of the World there is another class of its children who-watching the career of our friends above, observing how they succeed, and that excess or extra quantity, so to speak, of fame which the world allows them-enact a kind of imitation of their parts, with certain differences, on which we now propose to dwell. They too, succeed; and we honestly admire their success, although we may plead to be excused from greatly respecting it. The distinctive quality the differentia, as the logicians say-of these men seems to lie in this, that they reserve their interest, absolutely and wholly, for the range of individual life. Fame amongst those they will never dine with, or any after-world in which a good income is not quite distinctly perceptible to the eye of faith, has simply no hold whatever on their minds, or influence on their actions. Charles Lamb humorously deprecates the heaven of theologians, as a place in which he could not confidently look for finding a shelf for his dearly-beloved folios.' Knowledge, he feared, would there come to him by some awk ward process of intuition, in place of that familiar one of reading.' Carry this idea out in all its ramifications, and the man who acts upon it rationally and consistently through his threescore years and ten (some act upon it, with admirable steadiness, from the days of open tarts and apples), will make himself what we mean by a Child of this World, in the absolute worldly sense. To succeed for his own day is his object, his aim and end. A certain amount of respectability, but not too much; a considerable quantity of fame amongst the powerful of the world, for fame is influence; a shrewdness which does not disdain, as they say of the steam-hammer, to crack a nut, whilst we all know it could punch an armour-plate-nay, which, if it sees halfpence in the gutter, will sagaciously know them to be halfpence still; a Falstaff, in one word, though not always so humorous and entertaining-in such, or some such, elements the Child of this World will be 'wise in his generation.' Such a man, it is clear, must have some considerable ability. But the ability which brings success is of two main species. The first is the ability to do well the work which you profess; the second, the ability to get influential people or classes to think that you do it well. Of the first we have already spoken. The second is the attribute of the class we are considering. We often hear this distinction recognized. People say, if it be demonstrated to them, as clearly as such matters can be, that some politician or railway director knows nothing of statesmanship or business, that some fashionable artist cannot drawthat at least they have had the knowledge how to get themselves accepted by the world. The speaker generally makes this remark with a smile; it seems to dispose of the impertinent inquiry into the merits; it tacitly implies, the Children of this World are wiser in their day than the other children. After their day it is quietly felt that a different measure may be applied; but then this is no part of our hero's concern. Such fame as this is the earnest of all he aims at. It secures his success, and he may negotiate it for his immediate advantage with as philosophical a calmness as the swindler who draws bills which he knows cannot be presented till he is safe across the Atlantic. Posterity has done nothing for him, and may harshly call him knave or humbug at its leisure. Not to be found out, adhuc vivo, limits his horizon. If such is the quality of the reputation wanted, it will be mainly amongst two classes that it will be sought by the (male) Child of this World. He must conciliate a prominent literary organ or two, and he must succeed amongst the upper ranks (whether of wealth or of fashion) of the upper ten thousand. Whether it be in politics, in science, in art, or in literature that he wishes to be thought that which he is not, and to reap the advantages thereof, neither of these engines of fame can be safely neglected. A few powerful patrons have, it is true, occasionally done all the needful for those who aim at being thought men of genius. We sometimes see, for instance, buildings or public monuments put up by persons ignorant of the grammar of art, and, if we are innocent of the world, express our naïf wonder how men who have no popularity, and have been perhaps often exposed for incompetence, can succeed so widely. The very innocent even go so far as to use what we hope Archbishop Trench will warrant us in considering the Saxon word job. How often that word was employed in 1862, for example, in connexion with our friends at South Kensington! How ignorantly, however, as was felt by all persons of well-constituted minds and a certain consideration-how improperly! These, however, are comparatively rare cases. In general, more or less adhesion from the literature of the day cannot be dispensed with. It is superfluous to show why this is the case. How, for instance, should those born, by inferior luck, south of Tweed have discovered the poetical merits of the great Professor Aytoun, had not the Scottish papers, and those English to which Scotchmen contribute the outpourings of the ingenium perfervidum, proved to us, with such gallant resolution against overwhelming odds, that the author of the 'Lays' is the Scott of his generation? To belong to a small quasi-nationality, and cultivate its vanity, is no mean element of success for those who, let us say, wish to live all their lives on credit. In politics, the importance of public verdicts is even clearer. The sagacious adventurer would not neglect the good-will of Grub-street; much more will he not fail to conciliate although always by the most honourable and agreeable of means -the omnipotent managers of any Great Company. This, and a duke well used, have been the making of many a reputation. Let the sceptical study with due discretion certain columns in the Morning Post. Who's who in 1864? is a question with which the stationers' shops have rendered us familiar. Who dined with whom during 1863 will be found of no small use in answering it. A third method of gaining that fame which is success, is to take up some popular cry, and endeavour to obtain recognition as a representative man in certain large sections of the community. Of course there is a sense in which all men of mark, and all who wish to be widely useful, do so. The poet and the man of science must be, as has been often remarked, children of their age. Much more the Chief in business or politics. It is sometimes difficult to distinguish this from the imitation of it with which we are here concerned. But we take the test to be whether the man is consistent in his adoption of popular interests. If so, popular as he may himself be at first, he will be sure some day to find himself in collision with influential persons in society or in literature. Mr. Dickens is an example of this, in those later tales which he has devoted to social questions; the polite world has long tabooed him. Mr. Ruskin is another. We do not here enter on any inquiry into the justice of the taboo; we only note its existence. |