in the list: and the young men returned the document to the waiter, and went home wondering how it was that Mr. Sleaford’s name had no place among the names of his brotherhood.
* * * * *
I have very little to tell concerning the remaining days which the conditions of George Gilbert’s excursion ticket left him free to enjoy in London. He went to the theatres with his friend, and sat in stifling upper boxes, in which there was a considerable sprinkling of the “order” element, during these sunshiny summer evenings. Sigismund also took him to divers al fresco entertainments, where there were fireworks, and “polking,” and bottled stout; and in the daytime George was fain to wander about the streets by himself, staring at the shop-windows, and hustled and frowned at for walking on the wrong side of the pavement; or else to loll on the window-seat in Sigismund’s apartment, looking down into the court below, or watching his friend’s scratching pen scud across the paper. Sacred as the rites of hospitality may be, they must yet give way before the exigencies of the penny press; and Sigismund was rather a dull companion for a young man from the country who was bent upon a week’s enjoyment of London life.
For very lack of employment, George grew to take an interest in his friend’s labour, and asked him questions about the story that poured so rapidly from his hurrying pen.
“What’s it all about, Sigismund?” he demanded. “Is it funny?”
“Funny!” cried Mr. Smith, with a look of horror; “I should think not, indeed. Who ever heard of penny numbers being funny? What the penny public want is plot, and plenty of it; surprises, and plenty of ’em; mystery, as thick as a November fog. Don’t you know the sort of thing? ‘The clock of St. Paul’s had just sounded eleven hours;’—it’s generally a translation, you know, and St. Paul’s stands for Notre Dame;—‘a man came to appear upon the quay which extends itself all the length between the bridges of Waterloo and London.’ There isn’t any quay, you know; but you’re obliged to have it so, on account of the plot. ‘This man—who had a true head of vulture, the nose pointed, sharp, terrible; all that there is of the most ferocious; the eyes cavernous, and full of a sombre fire—carried a bag upon his back. Presently he stops himself. He regards with all his eyes the quay, nearly desert; the water, black and shiny, which stretches itself at his feet. He listens, but there is nothing. He bends himself upon the border of the quay. He puts aside the bag from his shoulders, and something of dull, heavy, slides slowly downwards and falls into the water. At the instant that the heavy burthen sinks with a dull noise to the bottom of the river, there is a voice, loud and piercing, which seems to elevate itself out of the darkness: ‘Philip Launay, what dost thou do there with the corpse of thy victim?’—That’s the sort of thing for the penny public,” said Mr. Smith; “or else a good strong combination story.”
“What do you call a combination story?” Mr. Gilbert asked, innocently.
“Why, you see, when you’re doing four great stories a week for a public that must have a continuous flow of incident, you can’t be quite as original as a strict sense of honour might prompt you to be; and the next best thing you can do, if you haven’t got ideas of your own, is to steal other people’s ideas in an impartial manner. Don’t empty one man’s pocket, but take a little bit all round. The combination novel enables a young author to present his public with all the brightest flowers of fiction neatly arranged into every variety of garland. I’m doing a combination novel now—the ‘Heart of Midlothian’ and the ‘Wandering Jew.’ You’ve no idea how admirably the two stories blend. In the first place, I throw my period back into the Middle Ages—there’s nothing like the Middle Ages for getting over the difficulties of a story. Good gracious me! why, what is there that isn’t possible if you go back to the time of the Plantagenets? I make Jeannie Deans a dumb girl,—there’s twice the interest in her if you make her dumb,—and I give her a goat and a tambourine, because, you see, the artist likes that sort of thing for his illustrations. I think you’d admit that I’ve very much improved upon Sir Walter Scott—a delightful writer, I allow, but decidedly a failure in penny numbers—if you were to run your eye over the story, George; there’s only seventy-eight numbers out yet, but you’ll be able to judge of the plot. Of course I don’t make Aureola,—I call my Jeannie ‘Aureola;’ rather a fine name, isn’t it? and entirely my own invention,—of course I don’t make Aureola walk from Edinburgh to London. What would be the good of that? why, anybody could walk it if they only took long enough about it. I make her walk from London to ROME, to get a Papal Bull for the release of her sister from the Tower of London. That’s something like a walk, I flatter myself; over the Alps—which admits of Aureola’s getting buried in the snow, and dug out again by a Mount St. Bernard’s dog; and then walled up alive by the monks because they suspect her of being friendly to the Lollards; and dug out again by Cæsar Borgia, who happens to be travelling that way, and asks a night’s lodging, and heard Aureola’s tambourine behind the stone wall in his bedroom, and digs her out and falls in love with her; and she escapes from his persecution out of a window, and lets herself down the side of the mountain by means of her gauze scarf, and dances her way to Rome, and obtains an audience of the Pope, and gets mixed up with the Jesuits:—and that’s where I work into the ‘Wandering Jew,’” concluded Mr. Smith.
George Gilbert ventured to suggest that in the days when the Plantagenet ruled our happy isle, Ignatius Loyola had not yet founded his wonderful brotherhood; but Mr. Smith acknowledged this prosaic suggestion with a smile of supreme contempt.
“Oh, if you tie me down to facts,” he said, “I can’t write at all.”
“But you like writing?”
“For the penny public? Oh, yes; I like writing for them. There’s only one objection to the style—it’s apt to give an author a tendency towards bodies.”
Mr. Gilbert was compelled to confess that this last remark was incomprehensible to him.
“Why, you see, the penny public require excitement,” said Mr. Smith; “and in order to get the excitement up to a strong point, you’re obliged to have recourse to bodies. Say your hero murders his father, and buries him in the coal-cellar in No. 1. What’s the consequence? There’s an undercurrent of the body in the coal-cellar running through every chapter, like the subject in a fugue or a symphony. You drop it in the treble, you catch it up in the bass; and then it goes sliding up into the treble again, and then drops down with a melodious groan into the bass; and so on to the end of the story. And when you’ve once had recourse to the stimulant of bodies, you’re like a man who’s accustomed to strong liquors, and to whose vitiated palate simple drinks seem flat and wishy-washy. I think there ought to be a literary temperance pledge by which the votaries of the ghastly and melodramatic school might bind themselves to the renunciation of the bowl and dagger, the midnight rendezvous, the secret grave dug by lantern-light under a black grove of cypress, the white-robed figure gliding in the grey gloaming athwart a lonely churchyard, and all the alcoholic elements of fiction. But, you see, George, it isn’t so easy to turn teetotaller,” added Mr. Smith, doubtfully; “and I scarcely know that it is so very wise to make the experiment. Are not reformed drunkards the dullest and most miserable of mankind? Isn’t it better for a man to do his best in the style that is natural to him than to do badly in another man’s line of business? ‘Box and Cox’ is not a great work when criticised upon sternly æsthetic principles; but I would rather be the author of ‘Box and Cox,’ and hear my audience screaming with laughter from the rise of the curtain to the fall thereof, than write a dull five-act tragedy, in the unities of which Aristotle himself could find no flaw, but from whose performance panic-stricken spectators should slink away or ere the second act came to its dreary close. I think I should like to have been Guilbert de Pixérécourt, the father and prince of melodrama, the man whose dramas were acted thirty thousand times in France before he died (and how many times in England?); the man who reigned supreme over the playgoers of his time, and has not yet ceased to reign. Who ever quotes any passage from the works of Guilbert de Pixérécourt, or
