CHAPTER III.
"And crowds commencing mere vexation,
Retirement sent its invitation."--SHENSTONE.
THE tench, no doubt, considers the pond in which he lives as the Great
World. There is no place, however stagnant, which is not the great
world to the creatures that move about, in it. People who have lived
all their lives in a village still talk of the world as if they had ever
seen it! An old woman in a hovel does not put her nose out of her door
on a Sunday without thinking she is going amongst the pomps and vanities
of the great world. /Ergo/, the great world is to all of us the little
circle in which we live. But as fine people set the fashion, so the
circle of fine people is called the Great World /par excellence/. Now
this great world is not a bad thing when we thoroughly understand it;
and the London great world is at least as good as any other. But then
we scarcely do understand that or anything else in our /beaux
jours/,--which, if they are sometimes the most exquisite, are also often
the most melancholy and the most wasted portion of our life. Maltravers
had not yet found out either /the set/ that pleased him or the species
of amusement that really amused. Therefore he drifted on and about the
vast whirlpool, making plenty of friends--going to balls and
dinners--and bored with both as men are who have no object in society.
Now the way society is enjoyed is to have a pursuit, a /metier/ of some
kind, and then to go into the world, either to make the individual
object a social pleasure, or to obtain a reprieve from some toilsome
avocation. Thus, if you are a politician--politics at once make an
object in your closet, and a social tie between others and yourself when
you are in the world. The same may be said of literature, though in a
less degree; and though, as fewer persons care about literature than
politics, your companions must be more select. If you are very young,
you are fond of dancing; if you are very profligate, perhaps you are
fond of flirtations with your friend's wife. These last are objects in
their way: but they don't last long, and, even with the most frivolous,
are not occupations that satisfy the whole mind and heart, in which
there is generally an aspiration after something useful. It is not
vanity alone that makes a man of the /mode/ invent a new bit or give his
name to a new kind of carriage; it is the influence of that mystic
yearning after utility, which is one of the master-ties between the
individual and the species.
Maltravers was not happy--that is a lot common enough; but he was not
amused--and that is a sentence more insupportable. He lost a great part
of his sympathy with Cleveland, for, when a man is not amused, he feels
an involuntary contempt for those who are. He fancies they are pleased
with trifles which his superior wisdom is compelled to disdain.
Cleveland was of that age when we generally grow social--for by being
rubbed long and often against the great loadstone of society, we obtain,
in a thousand little minute points, an attraction in common with our
fellows. Their petty sorrows and small joys--their objects of interest
or employment, at some time or other have been ours. We gather up a
vast collection of moral and mental farthings of exchange: and we
scarcely find any intellect too poor, but what we can deal with it in
some way. But in youth, we are egotists and sentimentalists, and
Maltravers belonged to the fraternity who employ
"The heart in passion and the head in rhymes."
At length--just when London begins to grow most pleasant--when
flirtations become tender, and water-parties numerous--when birds sing
in the groves of Richmond, and whitebait refresh the statesman by the
shores of Greenwich,--Maltravers abruptly fled from the gay metropolis,
and arrived, one lovely evening in July, at his own ivy-grown porch of
Burleigh.
What a soft, fresh, delicious evening it was! He had quitted his
carriage at the lodge, and followed it across the small but picturesque
park alone and on foot. He had not seen the place since childhood--he
had quite forgotten its aspect. He now wondered how he could have lived
anywhere else. The trees did not stand in stately avenues, nor did the
antlers of the deer wave above the sombre fern; it was not the domain of
a grand seigneur, but of an old, long-descended English squire.
Antiquity spoke in the moss-grown palings in the shadowy groves, in the
sharp gable-ends and heavy mullions of the house, as it now came in
view, at the base of a hill covered with wood--and partially veiled by
the shrubs of the neglected pleasure-ground, separated from the park by
the invisible ha-ha. There, gleamed in the twilight the watery face of
the oblong fish-pool, with its old-fashioned willows at each
corner--there, grey and quaint, was the monastic dial--and there was the
long terrace walk, with discoloured and broken vases, now filled with
the orange or the aloe, which, in honour of his master's arrival, the
gardener had extracted from the dilapidated green-house. The very
evidence of neglect around, the very weeds and grass on the
half-obliterated road, touched Maltravers with a sort of pitying and
remorseful affection for his calm and sequestered residence. And it was
not with his usual proud step and erect crest that he passed from the
porch to the solitary library, through a line of his servants:--the two
or three old retainers belonging to the place were utterly unfamiliar to
him, and they had no smile for their stranger lord.
