Laurence Hutton

“ DANTE
9“Why keep you your eyes closed, Signor Torquato?” said a watcher at the death-bed of Tasso—one of those silly persons who ask silly questions, even under the most serious circumstances—“Why keep you your eyes closed?” “That they may grow accustomed to remain closed,” was the feeble reply. They have been closed to all mortal vision for three hundred years now, but in the pale, cold plaster of the accompanying mask his face is still seen as it was seen by the vast and sorrowing multitudes who lined the streets of Rome to look upon his triumphant funeral procession. ”

“ It was Mr. “Josh Billings” who said that in the whole history of the world there is but one thing that money cannot buy, to wit: the wag of a dog’s tail. And it was Professor John C. Van Dyke who declared the other day, in reviewing the artistic career of Landseer, that he made his dogs too human. It was the Great Creator himself who made dogs too human—so human that sometimes they put humanity to shame.
The Boy has been the friend and confidant of Four Dogs who have helped to humanize him for a quarter of a century and more, and who have souls to be saved, he is sure. ”

“ Oxford is very rich in guide-books, from a sixpence up; and very, very rich in Literary Landmarks, from Roger Bacon, Wycliffe, and Erasmus, down to the men of our own day. But those guide-books, while they tell one a great deal that one wants to know, in too many cases fail to tell one what certain ones want particularly to know, to wit: where Sidney roomed at Christ Church, what Beaumont and Shenstone did at Pembroke, how John Evelyn conducted himself at Oriel, as well as why some of these men left their colleges without their degrees, and how all of them passed their lives in Oxford ”

“ He stepped from a humble cradle in an Italian provincial town on to the throne of France; he made his commonplace brothers and sisters and his ignorant henchmen kings and queens of all the European countries within his reach; he locked a pope in a closet, as if he had been a naughty boy; he re-drew the map of half the world; he re-wrote history; his name will live as long as books are read; no man out of so little ever accomplished so much—but yet he was no gentleman!
The Bonaparte mask, in bronze, as here shown is very rare. Only four are known to exist. ”

“ But nobody except The Boy knows of the agony which the rest of the family, unconsciously, and with no thought of hurting his feelings, caused him by the fun they poked at his nose, at his fiery locks, and at his unhandiness. He fancied that passers-by pitied him as he walked or played in the streets, and he sincerely pitied himself as a youth destined to grow up into an awkward, tactless, stupid man, at whom the world would laugh so long as his life lasted. ”

“ Comparisons in Venice are certainly as odorous as are some of its canals, while many of its streets are not only paved with emerald, but are frescoed now with glaring End-of-the-Nineteenth-Century advertisements of dentifrice and sewing-machines.
That which first strikes the observant{2} stranger in Venice, to-day, is the fact that the Venetians have absolutely and entirely lost their grip upon the beautiful. Nothing on earth can be finer than the art of its glory; nothing in the world can be viler than the so-called art of its decadence. ”

“ Beckwith considers Roy one of the best models he ever had. Roy does not have to be posed; he poses himself, willingly and patiently, [p 80]
so long as he can pose himself very close to his master; and he always places his front legs, which he knows to be his strong point, in the immediate foreground. He tries very hard to look pleasant, as if he saw a chipmunk at the foot of a tree, or as if he thought Mr. Beckwith was squeezing little worms of white paint out of little tubes just for his amusement. And if he really does see a chipmunk on a stump, he rushes off to bark at the chipmunk ”

“ The value of a plaster cast as a portrait of the dead or living face cannot for a moment be questioned. It must, of necessity, be absolutely true to nature. It cannot flatter; it cannot caricature. It shows the subject as he was, not only as others xivsaw him, in the actual flesh, but as he saw himself. And in the case of the death-mask particularly, it shows the subject often as he permitted no one but himself to see himself. He does not pose; he does not “try to look pleasant.” In his mask he is seen, as it were, with his mask off! ”

“ No man, Graduate, Undergraduate, or Visitor, who leaves Oxford, voluntarily or involuntarily, in these days, ever feels that he does not want to go back to it, in the spirit, if not in the flesh.
No one knows whether Henry Kingsley was precocious or dull at Oxford. Nobody seems to know anything about Henry Kingsley, at Oxford or anywhere else. ”

“ He was The Boy’s, and The Boy was his, so long as he lived, ten happy years for both of them.
Without Punch’s phenomenal intelligence, Mop had many of Punch’s ways, and all of Punch’s trust and affection; and, like Punch, he was never so superlatively happy as when he was roughly mauled and pulled about by his tail. When by chance he was shut out in the back-yard, he knocked, with his tail, on the door; he squirmed his way into the heart of Mary Cook in the first ten minutes, and in half an hour he was on terms of the most affectionate friendship with Punch’s cat. ”

“ LITERARY LANDMARKS OF VENICE It is almost impossible for any one who is at all familiar with the voluminous amount of literature relating to the history and to the art of Venice, to refrain from quoting, voluntarily or involuntarily, what he has read and absorbed concerning “the dangerous and sweet-charmed town,” which Ruskin calls a golden city paved with emerald, and which Goethe said is a city which can only be compared with itself. ”

“ And there are men still living who would like to have known Charles Lamb himself in the flesh. There is one man still living, in Princeton, New Jersey, who, when he has kissed his Father and his Mother—in the spirit— when he has patted his dogs, and has talked with his friends, is going to hang around the Golden Staircase until he can catch the eyes of Charles Lamb, and of Mary Lamb, the Sister of Charles! ”

“ It is not impossible that he is making-believe all the time. One great, good thing can be said for Roy: he is [p 87]
never really cross; he never snaps; he never snarls; he never bites his human friends, no matter how great the provocation may be. Roy is a canine enigma, the most eccentric of characters. His family cannot determine whether he is a gump or a genius. But they know he is nice; and they like him!
Long may Roy be spared to wag his earthly tail, and to bay deep-mouthed welcome to his own particular people as they draw near home. ”

“ Over the high arched forehead—surely the forehead of a poet—there hangs from the crown of the head a single curl of dark hair, a curl which you cannot look at without feeling a touch of pathos in your inmost heart, for it is the only thing about the worn and silent man reminding you of the brilliant youth of Vivian Grey. ”

“ A town in which the sound of wheels and hoofs is never known, in which the stillness of the narrow, ravine-like canals is seldom broken, unless by the fall of an oar or the cry of a gondolier, fatigues one by its unceasing calm. I do not remember to have been so much struck with any place on entering it. I do not recollect ever to have been so soon tired of a residence in a capital.”
The very absence of the noise of hoof and{55} wheel, the very silence of which he complains, are, to most tired-minded travellers, the greatest of the charms of the capital city of Venice. ”

“ John's College; and here, during the next year, he died. He lies in the Cemetery of the Holy Cross, commonly known, in Oxford, as Holywell Cemetery.
For many years, however, Pater's real home in Oxford was in his rooms at Brazenose. He is described as disliking the society of strangers; as hating all unnecessary noise and all extravagance of any kind; as loving to surround himself with beautiful things, caring nothing for their association or for their money-value, only for their beauty. ”

“ He would rather be shut up, in the Williamsons’ kitchen, with John and Sarah, and with a chance of seeing Flossie through the wire-screened door, than roam in perfect freedom over all his own domain.
He will bark at horses’ heels until he is brought home, some day, with broken ribs. Nothing but hard experience teaches Roy. There is no use of boxing his ears. That only hurts his feelings, and gives him an extra craving for sympathy. He licks the hand that licks him, until everyone of the five fingers is heartily ashamed of itself. ”

“ Whatever is old is magnificent, from the madonnas of Gian Bellini to the window of the Cicogna Palace on the Fondamenta Briati. Whatever is new is ugly, from the railway-station at one end of the Grand Canal to the gas-house at the other. And the iron bridges, and the steamboats, and the drop-curtain in the Malibran Theatre are the worst of all.
When the English-speaking and the English-reading visitors in Venice, for whom this volume is written, overcome the feeling that they are predestined to fall into one of the canals before they leave the city ”

“ This kitchen was a favorite playground of The Boy, and about that kitchen-table centre many of the happiest of his early reminiscences. Ann Hughes, the cook, was very good to The Boy. She told him stories, and taught him riddles, all about a certain “Miss Netticoat,” who wore a white petticoat, and who had a red nose, and about whom there still lingers a queer, contradictory legend to the effect that “the longer she stands the shorter she grows.” The Boy always felt that, on account of her nose, there was a peculiar bond of sympathy between little Miss Netticoat and himself. ”

“ Only Dr. Johnson! And we do so gallant about! You can imagine with what delight he showed me every part of his own College [Pembroke] . After dinner Johnson begged to conduct me to see the College; he would let no one show it me but himself. 'This was my room, this Shenstone's.' Then, after pointing out all the rooms of the poets who had been at this College, 'In short,' he said, 'we were a nest of singing birds!'"
It is an unfailing pleasure to "gallant" about Oxford, with any party, or absolutely alone; but with Johnson and Hannah More it must have been delightful indeed. ”

“ In the “Guild Hall” of “The City of Lushington,” an ancient and very unique social club, which has met for many years in a dark and dingy little back room connected with the Harp Tavern, in Russell Street, Covent Garden, London, are still preserved the chair of Edmund Kean, the hole in the wall made by the quart pot he threw once, in a fit of gross insubordination, at a former “Lord Mayor,” and what is religiously considered by all the citizens of Lushington to be a death-mask of Kean himself. This cast is covered with glass and with dust and its history is lost in the mists of time. ”

“ There is, probably, no part of the mansion left, as Petrarch knew and loved it, except, perhaps, the pavement of the court-yard. Even the old marble well is not as old as the days of the great poet. The interior of the establishment is not now seen of the public, except by permission of the military authorities, but it is one of the most interesting of the Landmarks of Venice, because of its association with the two immortal men who once adorned it. ”

“ Castle was to The Boy an awful horror, of whom he always dreamed when his dreams were particularly bad. As he looks back upon his boyhood, with its frequent toothache and its long hours in the dentists’ chairs, The Boy sometimes thinks that if he had his life to live over again, and could not go through it without teeth, he would prefer not to be born at all!
It has rather amused The Boy, in his middle age, to learn of the impressions he made upon Red Hook in his extreme youth. Bob, as has been shown, associates him with a little cart, and with a good deal of the concord of sweet sounds. ”

“ Corporal punishment was introduced within the walls of Brazenose before it became habitual in any of the other Institutions of Learning in Oxford, and the undergraduate complained that he was stripped of all his mediaeval liberty and reduced to the school-boy level. If his lessons were unprepared, if he whispered in chapel, or if he was guilty of "odious comparisons"—whatever that last may mean—he was liable to be soundly birched, not by the upper-class men, who would naturally resent comparisons of any kind as being particularly odious, but by the tutors and masters in charge. ”

“ A student of physiognomy, but not a student of the back numbers of the London Punch, who did not recognize the man in this cast, said of it that it was the head of a man more remarkable for vivacity and quickness of mind than for original and powerful thinking. George Combe, in the winter of 1838-39, exhibited in the United States a mask of Brougham, of course from life, for Brougham did not die 262until thirty years after that—and he was born in 1778—which is perhaps the mask here reproduced, as it is the face of a man in his prime, and his was a marvellous prime—not that of a nonogenarian. ”

“ The Spezzeria is not a street, but a district of the town, near the Rialto Quarter. It was devoted, in Byron’s day, to the dealers in spices. His Merchant of Venice, therefore, should have been a vender of drugs, sugars, coffees, spices, wax-candles and the like, in wholesale. But, alas for the romance of it all! tradition, in Venice, says that he was a plain, commonplace baker who lived, in good enough style, not in the Spezzeria, but in the Frezzeria, the Street of the Makers of Arrows. ”

“ And the man who would send his dog to the Dog Show, would send his wife to a Wife Show, and permit his baby to be exhibited, in public, for a blue ribbon or a certificate—at an admission-fee of fifty cents a head!
Mop’s successor answers to the name of Roy—when he answers to anything at all. He is young, very wilful, and a little hard of hearing, of which latter affliction he makes the most. He always understands when he is invited to go out. He is stone-deaf, invariably, when he is told to come back. But he is full of affection, and he has a keen sense of humor. ”

“ A contemporary of the respectable Bishop of Rochester, at Wadham, was the wicked Earl, who bore the title of Rochester. He went up in 1660, at the age of twelve; he was dubbed a Master of Arts when he was fourteen, and he eloped with a very rich wife at the age of eighteen, to die, when he was thirty-two, owing bad debts to everybody, even to posterity. He was, perhaps, too young in his Wadham days to have developed a great deal of evil, although no doubt he tried his best to be wicked even then. ”

“ When Madame Malibran died I was very young, but I remember distinctly hearing my mother told that de Beriot, the husband of her friend, had taken her mask, and that it had helped him to execute the crowned bust of the great singer which now decorates the private cabinet of her son. His bust, nevertheless, is not a good likeness, nor is it agreeable. But it 54is a touching proof of the love of the widower. Is it not wonderful that simply by the force of this love a musician should have been transformed into a sculptor? ”

“ There is not a horse in all Venice to-day; the youths wear ulsters when it is cold, and very little of anything when it is hot; and every grain of barley which falls to the ground is ravenously devoured by the doves, who alone of all the Venetians wear the purple now. ”

“ A long siege with a certain bicuspid had left The Boy, one early spring day, with a broken spirit and a swollen face. The father was going, that morning, to attend the funeral of his old friend, Dr. McPherson, and, before he left the house, he asked The Boy what should be brought back to him as a solace. Without hesitation, a brick of maple sugar was demanded—a very strange request, certainly, from a person in that peculiar condition of invalidism, and one which appealed strongly to the father’s own sense of the ridiculous. ”

“ He was Mathematical Lecturer from 1855 until 1881, and his rooms at Christ Church are still pointed out. They were the large suite, in the Tower, on the First Quadrangle, Staircase No. Seven, on the left as one enters the establishment.
He must have been, if all the stories still told about him are true, one of the most eccentric of Eccentrics. He did not care for young men, it seems, but he liked young women, who all liked him; and Oxford is now full of women, mature and immature, who adore the gentle memory of the creator of " Alice." ”

“ Hartley incline to the opinion that the mask of Clay in my collection is a cast from the actual face, and, notwithstanding the fact that the eyelids are open, that it is from life. Lewis Gaylord Clark, writing in 1852 in Harper’s Magazine of Clay’s funeral, said: “His countenance immediately after death looked like an antique cast. His features seemed to be perfectly classical, and the repose of all his muscles gave the lifeless body a quiet majesty seldom reached by living human beings.” ”