ROSE, BLANCHE, AND VIOLET.

BY

G. H. LEWES, ESQ.

AUTHOR OF "RANTHORPE," "BIOGRAPHICAL HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY," ETC. ETC.

Il n'y a point de vertu proprement dite, sans victoire sur nous-mêmes, et tout ce qui ne nous coûte rien, ne vaut rien.

DE MAISTRE.

IN THREE VOLUMES.

VOL. III.

LONDON: SMITH, ELDER AND CO., 65, CORNHILL. —— 1848.

London: Printed by STEWART and MURRAY, Old Bailey.

CONTENTS.

——

BOOK VI.

CHAPTER

I.—The Idler's Day II.—Another Literary Soirée III.—The Tiger Tastes Blood IV.—The Young Father V.—Renunciation VI.—Man purified by Experience VII.—Poor Vyner VIII.—Rehearsal of the Opera IX.—Cecil Succumbs X.—A Gentleman's Life XI.—Deeper, and Deeper Still XII.—Hester's Love

BOOK VII.

CHAPTER

I.—George Maxwell II.—Rose again sees Julius III.—Woman's Love IV.—A Beam of Sunshine in the House V.—Violet to Marmaduke VI.—Brighter Scenes VII.—Another Love Scene VIII.—Violet writes again IX.—Frank in reduced Circumstances X.—Effects of Dining Well XI.—The Honeymoon

BOOK VIII.

CHAPTER

I.—Amiable People II.—Love not killed by Unkindness III.—Captain Heath Returns IV.—Humbled Pride V.—"Black Wins" VI.—Cecil's Weakness VII.—All Hope Destroyed VIII.—The Forgery IX.—Ruin X.—The Sinner that Repenteth XI.—The Wife awaiting her Husband XII.—The Gambler's End XIII.—Explanation XIV.—The Alternative XV.—Those Left to Weep XVI.—The Voice of Passion

Epilogue

ROSE, BLANCHE, AND VIOLET.

CHAPTER I. THE IDLER'S DAY.

"Nature hath given us legs to go to our objects, not wings to fly to them."—EASTWARD HOE.

The spring of 1841 was very mild, and this enabled Cecil and Blanche to endure the wretched, comfortless state of Mrs. Tring's boarding-house, better than if the weather had been more rigorous. The cheapness, which was now becoming more and more important to them, was therefore a sufficient compensation for the want of comfort. They had renewed their engagement, hoping that either the comic opera, or the historical picture, would so improve their circumstances as to admit of their removal in the summer.

They had long awakened from their holiday dream to find that, however pleasant the change in their position, it was only pleasant as a change; the novelty once worn off, the scene appeared in all its ugliness; or rather, let me say, appeared so to Cecil. He was of a luxurious habit, and felt privation keenly. Blanche felt it less, and her love for him made home happy. She had never been so happy. Cecil was all she could desire.

As may be imagined, Cecil once relaxing in the energy with which he had begun to work, never recovered his former happiness. The charms of society were charms he could not withstand; the more so because he was fitted for it, shone in it. Having dined occasionally at the club was sufficient to give him an incurable disgust to the meagre fare Mrs. Tring spread before him, and he consequently began to absent himself more and more.

Added to this, his painting proceeded slowly. "Inspiration," wait for it as he would, seemed unwilling to descend upon him. Then there were so many days lost: sometimes the weather was foggy, and that prevented him; sometimes it was fine, and tempted him to exercise; sometimes he had visits to pay; sometimes men "looked in" upon him at his rooms. One way or another, the week slipped from him without leaving behind it any record of labour.

Besides—and this perhaps was one great cause of his idleness, giving strength to the other influences—he grew less satisfied with his picture the nearer it approached its termination. Cecil was a man whose designs were always finer than his productions, his sketches gave a promise which his execution never realized. In this little trait we may see the whole man. It might serve as a description of his character. With a certain freshness, delicacy, and even grandeur in his conceptions, he wanted strength, energy, and mastery, to endow them with vitality. Who can wonder that he raved about "genius," and scorned the "mechanical labour" of mere technical execution?

When he contemplated his productions, he grew impatient at their inadequacy to represent his conceptions, and he threw the blame on everything but on his own indolence and caprice. That broad line which separates intention from execution—which makes the thought a thing—which distinguishes the artist from other men, by creating in art what other men only create in visions—that broad line Cecil wilfully overlooked. He saw that he had failed, and did not choose to see wherein lay his failure. He despised the "drudgery" which was indispensable to success. Disgusted with his failure, he lost all courage, and scarcely ever handled a pencil.

"When will your picture be finished, Mr. Chamberlayne?" asked Mrs. Merryweather, one morning at breakfast.

"Indeed, I cannot say," he replied; "works of that magnitude require long consideration. I could have produced it long ago, had I been disposed; but I'm in no hurry."

"Do you know Mr. Bostock's paintings?"

Cecil replied that he did not.

"Oh, he's a beautiful painter, that he is! Does peaches and mackerel so that you wouldn't know them from real. His pictures give one an appetite—that they do. I remember once—it was very curious—Mrs. Henley, a relation of mine who lives at Southampton—her husband was in the customs—good situation, as I have heard—and a strange creature he was, with the queerest nose you ever saw, and eyes just like a lobster's, one was always alarmed lest they should tumble into his waistcoat pocket! Well, he married my relation, Mrs. Henley, one of the best creatures! She often comes up to town, and I should so like you to be acquainted with her, you'll be quite pleased with her! So, as I was saying, she came up to town once, to manage a little business, and enjoy herself at the same time. Well, one day she called upon us. Merryweather—my poor Merryweather was then alive: who wouldn't have thought him good for another thirty years at least! He proposed to take us both to the Exhibition; so we went. It was a very hot day, I remember; intensely

hot. Poor Merryweather was in a bath all the time. And as he stood in the octagon room, his hat in his hand, wiping the perspiration from his face—which was a sight of itself to see!—complaining of heat, I suddenly spied one of Mr. Bostock's pretty pictures—oh, it was a love! you can't fancy what a bunch of grapes straddled across a few peaches surrounded with egg plums! 'Lor,' says poor Merryweather, 'do look at that; isn't it refreshing.' And we all declared it was; and so it was."

Cecil, as usual, made a precipitate retreat at the conclusion of this biographical anecdote, and Blanche soon followed him.

"By George!" he said, puffing a huge column of smoke from his mouth, "that woman is insupportable. I really must quit this hole; at least if that toad squats in it."

"She amuses me," said Blanche.

"Lucky for you."

Blanche took up her work, and sat beside her husband, who, stretched upon the sofa, a cigar in his mouth, was at what he chose to consider his morning meditations. He certainly did think; but thought of the club, of society, of opera singers, and of his past life, far more than he thought of his work. From time to time he spoke to Blanche, and the subjects upon which he spoke were sufficiently trivial to have told any one more clear-sighted than she was, how little art occupied his reveries.

His cigar finished, he put on a pair of white kid gloves, and occupied himself for half an hour cleaning them with india-rubber, whistling, humming, and chatting all the while with enviable insouciance.

That important business concluded, he rose, kissed his wife, yawned, stretched his limbs, looked out of the window, and then took up his bottes vernies, which he began to rub up, and brighten with a piece of wool dipped in oil, whistling, humming, and chatting as before.

"What time is it, I wonder?" he said, drawing out his watch, "nearly twelve! whew! how the morning flies. I must be off. Where's my coat, Pet?"

She gave him his coat, and in another half hour he had completed his toilet, and was ready to start.

"God bless you, my Pet!" he said, embracing her.

"Shall you be home to dinner to-day, dearest?"

"No, I am to dine with Lufton; and this evening we go to Miss Mason's."

"Enjoy yourself! God bless you, dearest!"

Another kiss, and our man of genius departed for his studio. Arrived there, he began to consider whether it were not too late to do anything that day. It was near one o'clock; at two, Frank was to call upon him. They were going to a morning conceit.

"It is decidedly useless beginning anything to-day. I'll just try over some of those songs till Frank calls."

He sat down to the piano. Having sung for a quarter of an hour, he opened a French novel, and was deep in that when his fidus Achates appeared.

"Frank," said Cecil, as they strolled out together; "I am going to ask you a question which generally disturbs friendship, but which won't alter ours, because you'll answer it candidly."

"Cis, I know what that exordium means. Whenever a man begins in that solemn circumlocutory manner he can have but one object—money."

Cecil laughed, as he replied,—

"You have hit it, by George!"

"Of course, I have. Do you think I have borrowed so much money without learning every symptom?"

"Well, then, Frank, without disguise, I want to borrow a few pounds; old Vyner has not relented, and his wife has not been lately with any little contribution: but she can't be long, it has been due some weeks."

"What has been due, old fellow?"

"Why, what she intends to give us."

Thus securely did Cecil rely upon that source of aid.

"Meanwhile," he added, "I am deucedly hard up, and if you have a few pounds——"

"Make it shillings, Cis, and it will be quite as impossible. Egad! it is rather a queer sensation for one who has been so long a borrower, to be looked upon in the light of a possible lender!"

"Say no more, Frank; you would do it if you could, I am sure."

"Damn my whiskers! if you are sure of it, I'm not. I doubt whether I could lend. I don't know the trick of it; I should feel as strange and disreputable as if I were to pay a bill. Perhaps my friendship for you might overcome that—— I don't know—perhaps it might. But it is all speculation, so let us trouble ourselves no more with it. As a matter of practice, judge how feasible it is when I reveal to you the present state of my capital: four shillings and some halfpence in current coin, and eighteen pence invested."

"Invested, Frank! in what, pray?"

"In a bill-stamp: I take care to be provided with that."

Cecil shouted with laughter, exclaiming,—"That's so like you."

It was, indeed, a trait which painted the man. The value of the bill-stamp consisted, of course, in the chance of meeting with some obliging young gentleman who would consent, "merely as a matter of form," to put his name to the bill, which Frank would forget to take up. But this value was now the more precarious, as that mere matter of form had been so very frequently gone through, that he found it excessively difficult to get it repeated. As he used to say,—

"We degenerate—damn my whiskers! we degenerate fearfully: the principles of true politeness are becoming effaced."

CHAPTER II. ANOTHER LITERARY SOIRÉE.

The soirée at Hester Mason's, to which they went that evening, was very much the same as the one formerly described; there were fewer guests, and among them more women: a sure sign that she was getting on in the world, and that the reputation of her parties was beginning to cover any suspicious circumstances in her own position.

But the women were still of a questionable class: questionable, I mean, not as regards propriety, but ton. There were no ladies who gave parties, who were recognised as belonging to "society;" and, above all, there were no girls there: the virgins were old, ugly, or wise.

In a word, the women were almost exclusively literary women; described by Cecil as poor faded creatures, who toiled in the British Museum, over antiquated rubbish which they extracted and incorporated with worse rubbish of their own—women who wrote about the regeneration of their sex—who drivelled in religious tales—compiled inaccurate histories—wrote moral stories for the young, or unreadable verses for the old—translated from French and German (with the assistance of a dictionary, a dashing contempt for English idiom),—learned women, strong-minded women, religious women, historical women, and poetical women; there were types of each class, and by no means attractive types.

One remark Cecil made, which every one will confirm. "How curious it is," said he, "to notice the intimate connexion between genius and hair. You see it very often in men, but universally in women, that the distinguishing mark of literary or artistic pretension is not in the costume, but in the mode of arranging the hair. Women dress their hair in a variety of ways: each has a reference to what is becoming; but when women set up for genius or learning, all known fashions are despised, and some outrageous singularity alone contents them. Just look round this room. There is Hester herself: she is young and handsome; but instead of taking advantage of her black curls, she trains them up like a modern Frenchman. If you only saw her head, you would call it a boy's. Then, again, next to her sits Mrs. James Murch—she reads Greek, and writes verses; you see it by the hair parted on one side, instead of in the centre, and by the single curl plastered on her brow, emulous of a butcher boy. There is Miss Stoking—she writes history and talks about the 'Chronicles'—I see that in the row

of flat curls on her forehead, and in the adjustment of her back hair. Miss Fuller must be a philosophical woman, by the way in which all the hair is dragged off her forehead. That bony thing next to her must be a poetess, by the audacity of her crop. In fact, depend upon it, as there is a science of phrenology, there is a science of hair."

These women did not, as may be guessed, give any additional charm to Hester's parties, unless, indeed, in the shape of some fun. Nevertheless, their presence was inexpressibly delightful to her, for it was a sanction; and with all her sneers at the "conventions" of society, Hester was most anxious to preserve them.

Cecil, who liked Hester very much, and was interested even in her opinions which he did not share, was pitiless in his satire upon her female friends; which I will not repeat here, lest the reader should imagine that I share the general dislike to clever women—a conclusion against which I protest, and stoutly. True, I am not so blind an admirer of cleverness as to think it atones for the absence of womanly grace, gentleness, lovingness, and liveliness; but, on the other hand, some of the most charming women—and womanly women too—I have ever known, have been distinguished in literature and art. Will that avowal save me?

Hester forgave Cecil for his opinion, the more so as she shared it; and although she combated his views on social matters as warmly as ever, was falling over head and ears in love with him.

"You will come round to my way of thinking one day," she said; "so elevated a mind as yours cannot long remain a slave to traditionary sophisms; the Spirit of the Age will claim you."

"Pray," said Cecil, smiling, "can you explain to me what this spirit of the age actually is? I hear a great deal about it, and comprehend nothing that I hear. Is our age so very different from all those that have gone before it?"

"Assuredly: it is the age of progress."

"Progress? but that is the characteristic of all ages; society never stands still."

"True, but sometimes it retrogrades, and now it advances. My dear Mr. Chamberlayne, you will not deny that the peculiarity of our age is not only progress, but consciousness of progress."

"That is to say, I suppose, while our forefathers contented themselves with advancing, we prate about our advance. Now, of that kind of consciousness I am as decided an enemy as Carlyle himself; and his eloquent denunciations of it as the disease of our time find full acceptance from me."

"Ah! my dear sir, Carlyle, with all his genius, does not understand the historic development of humanity."

"Perhaps not; nor do I: though I have tried. But it still seems to me an evil, not a benefit, that our modern reformers are so very conscious—"

"Stop! You will not deny that every man should have a Purpose?"

Cecil, who knew this was one of the magnificent aphorisms of the "earnest" school, paused for a reply. Seeing him hesitate, Mr. Jukes, a sickly red-haired republican, with a feeble falsetto voice, stammered forth—

"Is it p-p-p-possible, Mr. Ch-ch-chamberlayne, you can hesitate to p-p-pronounce that e-e-every man should have a p-p-p-purpose?"

There was something so marvellously ludicrous in the feebleness of the individual, contrasted with the apparent vigour of his doctrine, that Cecil could with difficulty restrain his laughter, and hastened to say—

"By no means—by no means. I presume every one has a purpose; but, then, the question is—what purpose?"

"If you admit," said Hester, "that a man must have a Purpose, it is surely unreasonable to wish him not to be distinctly conscious of it: then, only, can he best fulfil it; otherwise, he is a mere machine in the hands of fortune. I say, therefore, that the consciousness of our age is the consciousness of progress; each man of any real eminence has a Mission, and he knows it; that Mission is to get the broad principles of Humanity in its entire Developments fully recognised. That Mission," she continued, with rising warmth, "is to sweep from the face of the earth the worn-out sophisms which enslave it; to give Mind its high Prerogatives; to cut from the heart of society the cancer of Conventionalism which corrupts it; to place Man in majestic antagonism to Convention; to erect the Banner of Progress, and give the democratic Mind of Europe its unfettered sphere of action."

"A grand scheme," replied Cecil, smiling; "but how is all this to be accomplished?"

"By indomitable re-re-resolution; b-b-b-by f-f-f-ixity of p-p-purpose," suggested Jukes.

"By a recognition of the rights of women," sternly remarked the philosophical Mrs. Fuller.

"The Greeks," began Mrs. James Murch, "whose literature——"

Here she was interrupted by Miss Stoking, who thought that if readers were not so fond of "trash," and would only look into the "Chronicles," something considerable might result.

The epic poet—the celebrated author of "Mount Horeb, and other Poems"—thought the age was not religious enough: there was not enough divine aspiration in the souls of modern men to bring about any grand revolution.

Mr. Blundell (the kind of "Boz," as his friends told him) thought that there was a deficiency of wit, and referred to a "government tempered with epigrams" as his ideal.

Hester would admit of nothing but the "broad Principles of Humanity:" upon these she stood.

"My dear Miss Mason," said Mrs. Murch, "surely the Greeks, whose literature——"

"And women?" interposed Mrs. Fuller. "Are women not destined to play a great part in the reformation of society?"

"Oh, yes!" replied Hester; "the greatest part—I am quite of your opinion. Society must be reorganized, and in its new structure women must fill their proper place; they must be consulted—their rights must be recognised. You have no idea," she added, turning to Cecil, "what an enormous difference there would be if society were reconstructed with a view to the equal partition of power between man and woman."

"I beg your pardon," he said, laughing; "I have a very formidable idea of it. In fact, I think there is already too great a preponderance of female influence."

A chorus of indignant astonishment followed this from all the ladies, except from Mrs. Murch, who, pertinaciously sticking to her yet unexpressed idea, began—