Читать книгу The Age of Scandal - T. H. White - Страница 9

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H orace Walpole, says Cunningham, had ‘seen in the flesh two heroines of De Grammont and the Restoration, La Belle Jennings, and Arabella Churchill, and lived long enough to offer his coronet to two ladies (Mary and Agnes Berry) who lived far into the reign of Queen Victoria’.

So extensive a panorama, stretching from the diamond-hilted sword and ruffle to a group of top-hats standing round a railway train, cannot easily be treated as a whole, unless it is realized that the gap between swords and trains was really a narrow one. In an age whose men had carried muffs and whose women had worn head-dresses so high that they had to sit on low stools in their coaches, swords only began to go out of fashion in 1780, when umbrellas came in. (Umbrellas, indeed, were carried by officers during the battles of the Peninsular war, though Wellington was inclined to disapprove. ‘The Guards may in uniform, when on duty at St. James’s, carry them if they please; but in the field it is not only ridiculous but unmilitary.’) Gentlemen wore wigs or powder till about 1800—Lord Bathurst, the Colonial Secretary, cut off his pigtail in 1828 and sent it round to his colleagues in an official box—while Creevey was inspecting a puffing billy, in a top-hat, in 1829. There was a collision between cultures at the turn of the century, a rapid acceleration, so that at Horace Walpole’s death the old world of the Stuarts and of the Tudors suddenly, rather than gradually, gave way to the new world of the Industrial Revolution. In less than a generation, the male population shed their finery and cosmetics for the eclipse plumage of modern times. The change happened under the guidance of Beau Brummell, though Fox, according to Wraxall, had ‘first thrown a sort of discredit on dress’—and this great alteration, which Walpole had seen to begin, took place within the Age of Scandal. The date was about 1793.

His is consequently a difficult time to imagine; for half its writers were dressed in velvet and brocade—Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Lord Hervey and Walpole himself—while the other half, born well within Walpole’s lifetime—Creevey, Greville or Croker—were in morning coats and pantaloons. Its lengthy ascendancy stretched from the last efforts of the Stuarts to regain the throne, through the Spanish and Austrian wars, the campaigns of India and Canada, the Seven Years war, the loss of America, the French Revolution and the struggle with Napoleon, to the days of the Reform Bill.

Perhaps three quotations about transport may serve to stitch the period together.

In 1773, Dr. Johnson, whose idea of bliss was ‘driving briskly in a post-chaise’, gave Boswell a piece of information about the possible speeds of earlier days.

The English [said he] are the only people who ride hard a-hunting. A Frenchman goes out upon a managed horse, and capers in the field, and no more thinks of leaping a hedge than of mounting a breach. Lord Powerscourt laid a wager, in France, that he would ride a great many miles in a certain short time. The French academicians set to work, and calculated that, from the resistance of the air, it was impossible. His lordship, however, performed it.

As late as 1784, de la Rochefoucauld was explaining, with reference to English race-horses, that ‘when you are close to them you can hardly follow them with the eye—they travel more swiftly than a flash of lightning. The jockeys are obliged to keep their heads low in order to breathe. Their passage through the air is so swift that otherwise they would be choked’.

In 1829, Creevey had a lark of a very high order.

Today we have had a lark of a very high order. Lady Wilton sent over yesterday from Knowsley to say that the Loco Motive machine was to be upon the railway at such a place at 12 o’clock for the Knowsley party to ride in if they liked, and inviting this house to be of the party. So of course we were at our post in three carriages and some horsemen at the hour appointed. I had the satisfaction, for I can’t call it pleasure, of taking a trip of five miles in it, which we did in just a quarter of an hour—that is, twenty miles an hour. As accuracy upon this subject was my great object, I held my watch in my hand at starting, and all the time; and as it has a second hand, I knew I could not be deceived; and so it turned out that there was not the difference of a second between the coachee or conductor and myself. But observe, during these five miles, the machine was occasionally made to put itself out or go it; and then we went at the rate of 23 miles an hour, and just with the same ease as to motion or absence of friction as the other reduced pace. But the quickest motion is to me frightful: it is really flying, and it is impossible to divest yourself of the notion of instant death to all upon the least accident happening. It gave me a headache which has not left me yet. Sefton is convinced that some damnable thing must come of it.

Whether something damnable came of it or not, whether human happiness has advanced since those days or retrograded, it is true to say that the central king of Walpole’s five, George III, had been ruling over an England which was at one of the peaks of her greatness.

It is only [wrote G. M. Trevelyan] in the years that followed (1740-80) that we find a generation of men wholly characteristic of the Eighteenth Century ethos, a society with a mental outlook of its own, self-poised, self-judged, and self-approved, freed from the disturbing passions of the past, and not yet troubled with anxieties about a very different future which was soon to be brought upon the scene by the Industrial and French Revolutions. The gods mercifully gave mankind this little moment of peace between the religious fanaticisms of the past and the fanaticisms of class and race that were speedily to arise and dominate time to come. In England it was an age of aristocracy and liberty; of the rule of law and the absence of reform; of individual initiative and institutional decay; of Latitudinarianism above and Wesleyanism below; of the growth of humanitarian and philanthropic feeling and endeavour; of creative vigour in all the trades and arts that serve and adorn the life of man.

It was an England, however, in which some of the refinements were still at a primitive level. In Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s time, gentlemen had not been expected to shave daily. Washing had been performed in a hand-basin. Chamber-pots had been kept in the dining-room sideboard, for the use of those who sat after the ladies had retired. Instead of the water-closet, which was re-introduced at the end of the century, there was the chaise percée: sometimes in a separate room, as was the case when George II died upon the stool; sometimes only behind a curtain, as it was when Lord Hervey had a contretemps in 1742.

The late Lord Privy Seal has had a most ridiculous accident at Bath: he used to play in a little inner room; but one night some ladies had got it, and he was reduced to the public room; but being extremely absent and deep in politics, he walked through the little room to a convenience behind the curtain, from whence (still absent) he produced himself in a situation extremely diverting to the women; imagine his delicacy, and the passion he was in at their laughing!