Читать книгу The Age of Scandal - T. H. White - Страница 13

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Dr. Johnson was even more emphatic than this. ‘The French are a gross, ill-bred, untaught people; a lady there will spit on the floor, and rub it with her foot. What I gained by being in France was, learning to be better satisfied with my own country.’

Insanitary conditions on the continent were still rampant during the Napoleonic wars, and they seem to have preyed upon the minds of the English nobility even more. Sir Thomas Styles, who had fought with fists against Shelley at Eton, got a commission in the 1st Foot Guards; but he complained after leaving Lisbon that the ‘fleas and vermin on the march had nearly driven him mad’. Finally they did do so. ‘Our doctor, Mr. Bacot, a very kind fellow, anticipating brain fever, placed Styles in his camp bed, covered his head with wet towels, and desired his batman to watch over his master, and not to leave him for an instant. However, the servant fell asleep, and during the night poor Styles got out of bed, unlocked his trunk where his razors were kept, and with one of them deliberately cut his throat from ear to ear.’ (Gronow.)

If England was cleaner than France, she was more comfortable—less stiff, that is to say—than middle Europe. There was a social ease which was frequently regretted by foreign ambassadors such as Sir Robert Murray Keith, in Vienna, where the hunting forests of Prince Lichtenstein had clean gravel walks and more than three hundred gamekeepers.

I have for this fortnight past [he wrote during a hot summer in 1776] been running about the country houses in the neighbourhood of this capital, without the most distant chance of enjoying one hour of that convivial gaiety which reigns at Mistley, Fawley, Wimbledon, Coombank, &c. Yet our noble personages are as civil and attentive as possible at their country seats; but still it is otium cum dignitate with a vengeance! and that same dignitas is to me a terrible damper of all social enjoyments. I have had my Andrew (a boy on the Grand Tour) for five days along with me at a princely castle, where he was powdered and perfumed at ten o’clock in the morning; then fetched a broiling walk in a gilded garden, dined in state, and after playing three grave rubbers at whist, we sallied forth for the evening’s excursion in half a dozen coaches and six!

The most common foreign word used by the English letter-writers of the Age of Scandal was probably ‘agrémen’. This was a measure of the English interests. They liked to have their agrémens, both physical and mental. They, if not their neighbours across the Channel, were interested in the comfortable pleasures of civilization, without its pomp. ‘I did not mean to make my house so Gothick’, wrote Walpole, as to exclude conveniences and modern refinements in luxury.’ And it was he, as an epicurean amateur of the humanities, who set the tone for the era.

The ‘humanities’: perhaps this was the key word for the seventeen-eighties. It was astonishing how much the upper classes knew. Fox was an authority on Cassandra of Lycophron, known to scholars as ‘the Obscure’: Walpole could read a blazon or print a fine edition or write about the history of Richard III: the classics had been flogged into everybody, so that the Latin poets were quoted as familiarly as educated people now quote Shakespeare: Greek was spouted in the House of Commons, though with no great success: it was in the royal library that Dr. Johnson met the bibliophile King: the main legacy of the coarse Sir Robert Walpole was a fabulous collection of pictures: all society went nightly to hear Handel or the Opera: the business of the country had actually been transacted between George I and his first Minister in dog latin: an Irish Earl had possessed the temerity to argue with Bentley: Selwyn, who was an ignoramus, wrote his unimpressive letters instinctively in a mixture of English, French and Italian: in Paris, at Madame du Deffand’s and at other salons, the visiting English talked almost as easily in the foreign tongue: and the scandalous Wilkes, who had belonged to a Hell-fire Club and who had set all Britain by the ears in Parliament, retired gracefully to edit Theophrastus.

Even in applied science, as opposed to the humanities, there was an attitude of learned dilettantism which is perhaps not unrefreshing when compared with the ‘ologies’ of our own day. Newton had shed his light upon physics: chemistry was concerned with phlogiston, and most of the other branches of learning were a matter for museums like junk-shops, for gentlemanly if dusty antiquaries and for letters to the Royal Society. The typical biologist was not Linnaeus, not Ray, not Pennant, not even the aristocratic Buffon: it was George Edwards—who dedicated his first volume to the President and Fellows of the Royal College of Physicians, and a subsequent volume, as an afterthought, in enormous letters ‘to god’—followed, in tiny print, with the words ‘from his resign’d, humble servant, Geo. Edwards’.

Everything in Edwards’s ‘natural history’ was interesting rather than precise. From all directions the letters poured in to the learned publications—letters about wild boys found in Germany, about people whose skins had petrified like the Giant’s Causeway, about ladies who gave birth to rabbits, about Siamese twins and thunderbolts and shifting bogs and Irish crowns and fat men and people with pigs’ faces and why negroes were black. The full facts about bird migration were unknown even to the immortal Gilbert White—fortunately unknown, since it gave Dr. Johnson the opportunity for one of his more prodigious belly-floppers. ‘Swallows’, he explained tremendously, ‘certainly sleep all the winter. A number of them conglobulate together, by flying round and round, and then all in a heap throw themselves under water, and lie in the bed of a river.’

But perhaps it was in medicine that their fancy and genteel experiment soared to the highest. Lady Frances Erskine, being struck with aphasia, tried learning a foreign language, thinking she might remember the new words, but the stratagem did not answer. Turnip water, with a poultice of mashed turnip, was used for chilblains. Another poultice used by Joseph Mydelton consisted of ‘a top crust of a threepenny loaf toasted, then spread with soft soap put between a flannel made hot and applied to the part affected’. Lord Fermanagh, when ill for fifteen days in 1716, drank ‘horse-dung posset daily’. The Chevalier Manfredi, ‘an excellent doctor’, recommended chickens fed on frogs to Lady Caroline Lamb. Bacon, the Royal Academician, ‘eat freely of Ice Cream saying He knew of a Lady cured of a complaint in Her stomach by it’. ‘I drank snail tea for breakfast’, wrote Torrington on June 2nd, 1792, ‘for my chest is very sore.’ When wetted by rain this nobleman used to rub himself with brandy or gin, which liquors he also used to sprinkle on his bedclothes if he suspected them of being damp. At Biggleswade, in 1793, he also ‘drank 3 pints [of port] every day, besides ½ pint of brandy’—and this without impairing his energies as a tourist in the least. ‘This morning’, wrote John Baker in his diary on October 2nd, 1755, ‘a negro child of Capn. Dromgoole’s found drowned in a tub of water, with its head down and heels up, how long they knew not; but brought to life by lighting a pipe of tobacco and sticking the small end in its fundament, and blowing it at the bowl.’

There was a good deal of insanity about, nobody knew why, and some of the cures for this malady were no less Draconic. ‘Fuseli mentioned [to Farington] that a Medical man who attended Bedlam had said that the greatest number of those confined were Women in love, and the next class in respect of number was Hackney and Stage Coachmen, caused it was supposed by the constant shaking exercise to which they are subject which affects the pineal gland.’ Musk was given to the mad King George as a medicine for insanity, but the poor fellow ‘begged that it might be discontinued’. ‘Dr. Jenner’, wrote the artist Farington in 1796, ‘has found that in insane patients He has moderated their violence by keeping them sick with tartar emetic ... Camphor water is an excellent medicine for nervous complaints.’ The waters of many spas, moreover, performed surprising cures. Those of Buxton particularly seem to have been successful. A Mrs. Jessop, with a fortune of £16,000, ‘was last year here’, wrote Egmont in 1744, ‘to be cured of a frenzy, wherein she succeeded. That good success brought her here again this year. She is now very orderly behaved and has got a lover’.

Among proprietary medicines, ‘Velno’s Vegetable Syrup’ brought £5000 a year to its proprietor, and was compounded of Goose-grass. The very greatest of all such brands was Dr. James’s Powder—‘a well-known specific unhesitatingly recommended by Horace Walpole, which seems to have polished off Oliver Goldsmith in 1774. Its active principle was antimony’. Next to this cure came laudanum and calomel. ‘I’ll tell your honour,’ confided a country doctor to Sir Walter Scott, ‘my twa simples are just laudamy and calamy!’ ‘But, John, do you never happen to kill any of your patients?’ ‘Kill? Ou ay, may be sae. Whiles they die and whiles no;—but it’s the will o’ Providence. Ony how, your honour, it wad be lang before it makes up for Flodden!’

Other medicines, according to C. E. Vulliamy, included Bacon’s Cordial Essence of Russia Rhubarb, Dr. Steer’s famous Opodeldoc, Cordial Cephalic Snuff, Petastile Root, Balsam of Tolu and ‘an aphrodisiac known as the Balsamic Corroborant or Restorer of Nature which had received flattering encomiums from a certain Royal and several Noble Personages’.

Whatever else may be urged against them, the patients of the Age of Scandal were ready to try anything once.

Massage was called ‘Champooing’ and the Hon. E. Hamilton begged Lady Charleville not to be shy about going to a masseur called Mahomet. He was black, sixty years old and, besides, her ladyship might wear a mask.

The new force, electricity, was attempted to be used medicinally, for instance by the diarist Barker; and John Yeoman, a country bumpkin, made trial of it in 1774:

then we was all Lactrified a Think is Imposable to describe. Its composed of a Mixture of cumbustables that if you Touch it the Fire flys out of it, besides You have Shuch Shudden Shock with it. We all hold hand in hand about 7 of us when I toucht it, and the Moment I was struck so hard in the Stomack that I could not stand, the Rest felt it as well as me, If there was 500 It would be all the same.

There was a belief that the breath of young women might be helpful in prolonging life. According to Mr. Wadd, one physician actually took lodgings in a girls’ boarding-school for this purpose. ‘I am myself,’ wrote Philip Thicknesse in 1779, ‘turned of sixty, and in general, though I have lived in various climates, and suffered severely both in body and mind, yet having always partaken of the breath of young women, wherever they lay in my way, I feel none of the infirmities, which so often strike the eyes and ears in this great city of sickness [Bath], by men many years younger than myself.’

Other cures were as peculiar, but less successful.

Lord Stafford had long had a weakness in his sight which seemed approaching fast to blindness, and among the other more common prescriptions was told by his physician that he must strictly abstain from all conjugal intercourse with his wife. This requirement he had adhered to for more than a twelvemonth when, notwithstanding, her Ladyship proved with child.