Nuts and Nutcrackers. Charles James Lever
theories about abstinence, and only wishing she had the whole of the Cavanagh family for boarders at a guinea a-week.
Late in the evening of the same day this estimable lady, whose inquiries into the properties of gastric juice, if not as scientific, were to the full as enthusiastic as those of Bostock or Tiedeman himself, was returning from an early tea, through an unfrequented suburb of Manchester, when suddenly her eye fell upon Bernard Cavanagh, seated in a little shop—a dish of sausages and a plate of ham before him, while a frothing cup of porter ornamented his right hand. It was true, he wore a patch above his eye, a large beard, and various other disguises, but they served him not: she knew him at once. The result is soon told: the police were informed; Mr. Cavanagh was captured; the lady gave her testimony in a crowded court, and he who lately was rolling on the wheel of fortune, was now condemned to foot it on a very different wheel, and all for no other cause than that he could not live without food.
The magistrate, who was eloquent on the occasion, called him an impostor; designating by this odious epithet, a highly-wrought and well-conceived work of imagination. Unhappy Defoe, your Robinson Crusoe might have cost you a voyage across the seas; your man Friday might have been a black Monday to you had you lived in our days. 964 is a severer critic than The Quarterly, and his judgment more irrevocable.
We have never heard of any one who, discovering the fictitious character of a novel he had believed as a fact, waited on the publisher with a modest request that his money might be returned to him, being obtained under false pretences; much less of his applying to his worship for a warrant against G. P. R. James, Esq., or Harrison Ainsworth, for certain imaginary woes and unreal sorrows depicted in their writings: yet the conduct of the lady towards Mr. Cavanagh was exactly of this nature. How did his appetite do her any possible disservice? what sins against her soul were contained in his sausages? and yet she must appeal to the justice as an injured woman: Cavanagh had imposed upon her—she was wronged because he was hungry. All his narrative, beautifully constructed and artfully put together, went for nothing; his look, his manner, his entertaining anecdotes, his fascinating conversation, his time—from ten in the morning till eight in the evening—went all for nothing: this really is too bad. Do we ask of every author to be the hero he describes? Is Bulwer, Pelham, and Paul Clifford, Eugene Aram, and the Lady of Lyons? Is James, Mary of Burgundy, Darnley, the Gipsy, and Corse de Leon? Is Dickens, Sam Weller, Quilp, and Barnaby Rudge?—to what absurdities will this lead us! and yet Bernard Cavanagh was no more guilty than any of these gentlemen. He was, if I may so express it, a pictorial—an ideal representation of a man that fasted: he narrated all the sensations want of food suggests; its dreamy debility, its languid stupor, its painful suffering, its stage of struggle and suspense, ending in a victory, where the mind, the conqueror over the baser nature, asserts its proud and glorious supremacy in the triumph of volition; and for this beautiful creation of his brain he is sent to the treadmill, as though, instead of a poet, he had been a pickpocket.
If Bulwer be a baronet; if Dickens’ bed-room be papered with bank-debentures; then do I proclaim it loudly before the world, Bernard Cavanagh is an injured man: you are either absurd in one case, or unjust in the other; take your choice. Ship off Sir Edward to the colonies; send James to Swan River; let Lady Blessington card wool, or Mrs. Norton pound oyster-shells; or else we call upon you, give Mr. Cavanagh freedom of the guild; call him the author of “The Hungry One;” let him be courted and fêted—you may ask him to dinner with an easy conscience, and invite him to tea without remorse. Let a Whig-radical borough solicit him to represent it; place him at the right hand of Lord John; let his picture be exhibited in the print-shops, and let the cut of his coat and the tie of his cravat be so much in vogue, that bang-ups à la Barney shall be the only things seen in Bond-street: one course or the other you must take. If the mountain will not go to Mahomet, Mahomet must go to the mountain: or in other words, if Bulwer descend not to Barney, Barney must mount up to Bulwer. It is absurd, it is worse than absurd, to pretend that he who so thoroughly sympathises with his hero, as to embody him in his own thoughts and acts, his look, his dress, and his demeanour, that he, I say, who so penetrated with the impersonation of a part, finds the pen too weak, and the press too slow, to picture forth his vivid creations, should be less an object of praise, of honour, and distinction, than the indolent denizen of some drawing-room, who, in slippered ease, dictates his shadowy and imperfect conceptions—visions of what he never felt, dreamy representations of unreality.
“The poet,” as the word implies, is the maker or the creator; and however little of the higher attributes of what the world esteems as poetry the character would seem to possess, he who invents a personage, the conformity of whose traits to the rule of life is acknowledged for its truth, he, I say, is a poet. Thus, there is poetry in Sancho Panza, Falstaff, Dugald Dalgetty, and a hundred other similar impersonations; and why not in Bernard Cavanagh?
Look for a moment at the effects of your system. The Caraccis, we are told, spent their boyish years drawing rude figures with chalk on the doors and even the walls of the palaces of Rome: here the first germs of their early talent displayed themselves; and in those bold conceptions of youthful genius were seen the first dawnings of a power that gave glory to the age they lived in. Had Sir Peter Laurie been their cotemporary, had 964 been loose in those days, they would have been treated with a trip to the mill, and their taste for design cultivated by the low diet of a penitentiary. You know not what budding genius you have nipped with this abominable system: you think not of the early indications of mind and intellect you may be consigning to prison: or is it after all, that the matter-of-fact spirit of the age has sapped the very vitals of our law-code, and that in your utilitarian zeal you have doomed to death all that bears the stamp of imagination? if this be indeed your object, have a good heart, encourage 964, and you’ll not leave a novelist in the land.
Good reader, I ask your pardon for all this honest indignation; I know it is in vain: I cannot reform our jurisprudence; and our laws, like the Belgian revolution, must be regarded “comme un fait accompli;” in other words, what can’t be cured must be endured. Let us leave then our friend the Pole to perform his penance; let us say adieu to Barney, who is at this moment occupying a suite of apartments in the Penitentiary, and let us turn to the reverse of the medal, I mean to those who would wile us away by false promises and flattering speeches to entertain such views of life as are not only impossible but inconsistent, thus rendering our path here devoid of interest and of pleasure, while compared with the extravagant creations of their own erring fancies. Yes, princes may be trusted, but put not your faith in periodicals. Let no pictorial representations of Alpine scenery, under the auspices of Colburn or Bentley, seduce you from the comforts of your hearth and home: let no enthusiastic accounts of military greatness, no peninsular pleasures, no charms of campaigning life, induce you to change your garb of country gentleman for the livery of the Horse-Guards—“making the green one red.”
Be not mystified by Maxwell, nor lured by Lorrequer; let no panegyrics of pipe-clay and the brevet seduce you from the peaceful path in life; let not Marryat mar your happiness by the glories of those who dwell in the deep waters; let not Wilson persuade you that the “Lights and Shadows of Scottish Life” have any reference to that romantic people, who betake themselves to their native mountains with a little oatmeal for food and a little sulphur for friction; do not believe one syllable about the girls of the west; trust not in the representations of their blue eyes, nor of their trim ankles peering beneath a jupe of scarlet—we can vouch it is true, for the red petticoat, but the rest is apocryphal. Fly, we warn you, from Summers in Germany, Evenings in Brittany, Weeks on the Rhine; away with tours, guide-books, and all the John Murrayisms of travels. A plague upon Egypt! travellers have a proverbial liberty of conscience, and the farther they go, the more does it seem to stretch; not that near home matters are much better, for our “Wild Sports” in Achill are as romantic as those in Africa, and the Complete Angler is a complete humbug.
There is no faith—no principle in any of these men. The grave writer, the stern moralist, the uncompromising advocate of the inflexible rule of right, is a dandy with essenced locks, loose trousers, and looser morals, who breakfasts at four in the afternoon, and spends his evenings among the side scenes of the opera; the merry writer