THE JAUNTY-SUBLIME IN FLEET STREET.
LIVERY ONE must have noticed the marked delight taken by 11 our age in asserting pertinaciously its humble realities in the very face and presence as it were of the grander and sublimer phenomena of Nature or History. From Lord Macaulay, who delighted to show his easy command of the petty items of London detail, (say) concerning Lord Holland's drawing-room, or Wills' coffee-house, or the Johnson Club, in close connection with a magnificent array of grand historic memories,—to Tennyson, who loves to connect the half slip-shod musings of a modern diner at the Cock, with the truest pathos of a trembling heart,—or to Carlyle, who, after his own fashion, invokes the midnight stars and the eternities to look down on the two or three millions of horizontal Londoners snoring prostrate in their nightcaps, with their heads " full of the foolishest dreams,"—we may notice a regular stream of tendency in our modern literature to delight in pointed contrasts between common things and ideal associations. And of course the tendency is sure to be caricatured. There are seine gifted individuals who clearly regard themselves as " benefactors to their race" (as Mr. Pecksuiff would say), purely because they have learned the knack of visibly keeping their hands in their pockets, their cigar in their mouths, and sang-froid in their brains, while they wander off into the sublimer regions of either space or time, and fetch back a long trail of splendid memories or dazzling scientific truths wherewith to illuminate the track of a jaunty walk through the dirt and puddles of a modern street. There is a great writer in the Daily Telegraph who never misses an opportunity to benefit his race by the accom- plished skill with which he grafts the modern-jaunty on the antique-sublime. He it was doubtless who drew a picture of the Augean Stable, wherein, though the floor might be sprinkled with diamond dust and the manger be of beaten gold, " there was assuredly not wanting a loose-box for a Pale Horse whose rider's name was Death." The great touch there, the touch which told of the nineteenth century's collectedness of mind and sang- froid amidst the grandest imagery, was " the loose-box." " Don't mistake me," the writer seemed to say, "for a man carried away by the gorgeous Oriental imagery which I condescend to employ. You could not be more in error. I am, first of all, a man of my age. I understand the modern stable as well as the ancient fable, and teach the world to connect more real ideas than they usually do with Lempriere's dictionary and the Apocalyptic visions of the ancient Hebrews. I manage this by connecting our vivid modern knowledge with the gorgeous imagery of the old times. The youth of to-day will read about the labours of Hercules in the Augean Stable with a new freshness and vivacity, when they are reminded of the loose-boxes in their fathers' stables in connec- tion with it. The coachman who reads the Daily Telegraph, as all respectable coachmen may do, when he next goes to church and hears the passage in the Apocalypse about the pale horse with the rider whose name was Death, will find a new meaning in it, as he remembers my telling phrase about the loose-box with which that horse was accommo- dated. In the meantime, more educated readers will learn from this modern touch of mine that it is not necessary for men of business and practical knowledge to despise imaginative literature. A man whose mind lives, as mine does, in the glorious atmosphere of sublimest legends and hieroglyphic prophecy, may yet be quite up to the world of to-day. It is a fixed system with me to connect the near present with the sublime far-away. While it gives ornament to my style, it also gauges the knowingness of the writer ; while it attracts the lovers of common-place, it attracts also the lovers of the ideal ; and it tends to make the lovers of the ideal more alive to the exigencies of common-place, and to awaken the devotees of common-place to the glorious study of the ideal." That is the kind of defence which we seem to read between the lines, for the gloriously original style of this great writer. He makes it his secret boast to teach the world how a plain man who is not ashamed of Fleet Street omnibuses . or the Daily Telegraph, who probably smokes as he writes, and knows the state of the Money Market as well as he knows the latest criticisms of Renan, the last resolution of the Jockey Club as well as be knows the last change in the state of parties, can yet soar into the empyrean in search of the most glorious ideals of the past and the grandest auguries of the future.
This true benefactor of his race has just been putting forth one of his really greater efforts. In the Daily Telegraph of Mon- day there is a model of the Jaunty-Sublime so perfect that it got into one's head as a barrel-organ tune sometimes does, and made one turn everything that happened into the same moral rhythm,— first a great flight into the empyrean, then a sarcastic, pitiful laugh, as of a big tender heart which cannot yet forget the petty world as it is, then another great flight, then a jaunty-hysterical sob that the world will not consent to be as grand as the writer's memories and dreams, and so on. The subject was a ball given at Simla to the Governor-General by the Maharajah of Jeypore, in which the Maharajah danced the lancers with Lady Mayo. This was a capital occasion, an almost heaven-sent occasion, for the great master of the Jaunty-Sublime. Dancing is of itself, as is obvious, a jaunty subject, and the Hindoo lore and mythology have precisely the sort of elements of sub- limity which this great writer can manipulate with the most graceful and winning ease. The article commences with a brilliant picture of the scene, and then preludes thus for its true subject, "But the Maharajah was the marvel,—the Prince of Jeypore in white kid gloves, poussetting, setting, balancing, chaining, doing in solemn state the labyrinthine figures of La Poule, and heroically going through all the strange anguish of Le Cavalier SeuL Jey- pore in pumps at the top of a quadrille, leading an English lady through the figures of a British dance, while all the amazed gods of Indra's heaven, and all the kings of the Lunar and Solar dynasties looked down from the welkin with divine astonishment." That is very good, for a beginning—" welkin" especially—but there is much better to come. Welkin' is poetical, and the lunar and solar dynasties stretch the historic imagination. But these are the trembling strings of the minstrel's prelude. Then comes a very poetical description of an Indian nautch. Of the dancer he writes :—" It will be better perhaps not to understand the Hindi or Persian song which she sings, which she chants now in tender minors of pain or hope, now in thrilling accents of passion or fainting sobs of despair." " Such," he goes on, after a much more elaborate development of the poetry of the nautch, " such is the dance of India—such has been for ages the dancing at Jeypore, w here the Shastris [Shastris is good] will wag [wag is very good] their turbans with amazement and dismay to learn of the new fashion which the Prince has borrowed from the Saheb." But then comes the first great burst :—" Jeypore to dance a nautch himself with a female of the gora-log ! [mark gora-log], why, in India there is no more intense and authentic representation of Brahmanism, with all its customs and exclusiveness, than this potentate ! He is a Rajpoot of the Rajpoots, a prince whose lineage bomes down in an unbroken and immemorial line from Vikramaditya and the Rishis.' Baber the Great and Akbar the Magnificent married their Moslem sons in old times with proud rejoicings to the Hindoo princesses of this mighty house. Old ballads call the Lords of Jeypore,—Lords, that is, of the City of Victory,—' stars in the sky of Indian glory.' " An " un- broken immemorial line from Vikramaditya," is one of -the sub- limest collocations of words in the language, and the only defect indeed of the whole passage, is that it has just a little forgotten the jaunty in the sublime—the actual nineteenth-century Telegraph writer in the " long glories " of Hindoo tradition. But this error is at once perceived and immediately repaired. " They" [the Lords of Jeypore], proceeds the writer, " have always been ' the greatest swells' conceivable among orthodox Hindi magnates." Even " the stars in the sky of Indian glory," one perceives, are con- demned to be tried by the metaphors and weighed in the balances of young London, and they only come out "great swells " after all. The Telegraph writer is not afraid of them. He can classify them as easily in the pococurante language of this cockney metro- polis as in the imposing periods of Oriental flattery. And it suits his purpose the better so to classify them, as the object and moral, as it were, of the whole article is to exhibit, with a pitiful smile or a genial sigh, all this long train of illuminated memories ending in pumps and La Poule. " When Lord Hastings offered the friendship and protection of the British Government to the palaces of central India, the superb and haughty Sovereign of Jeypore accepted the offer last of all, and with all the reluctance of one who contracted an obvious and lamentable me:salliance. Now, he dances the lancers at Simla, and—abomination of desolation for
all good Shastris guests are played in to supper upon ribs, rounds, and sirloins of the sacred animal, to the strain of that Heaven-defying and heifer-destroying tune, Oh the roast beef of Old England !" Here, at last, the Jaunty-Sublime reaches its climax. " Heaven-defying and heifer-destroying " is a stroke in a thousand ;—the Titanesque-ironic style will never go beyond that. You see the lip wreathed in sarcasm, the eye flashing a humanely-sad ridicule at the long array of historical traditions thus melting away beneath one of the slightest of social temptations, as the words are penned. One more burst in the same strain, and we have done. The writer feels that he can hardly treat this dance at Simla as anything short of an epitaph over a departing or departed faith. He almost weeps, and yet he smiles through his manly tears, to think that the descendant of a thousand princes is actually dancing out the gods of his fathers :—" The ancient Grecian mythology, with its glorious synod of gods and goddesses, faded from history only so soon as the solemn voice was heard upon the waters of the Egean proclaiming Great Pan is dead!' Shiva, Parvati, and Narayen—majestic deities of a sublime and more antique creed— were worthy of a doom at least as solemn ; but it really seems as if %hose awful Indian divinities were destined to disappear at the cry of ' Hands across, down the middle, and set to your partner !' " Shall we ever again find a disciple of modern realism who can at once face so boldly the ancient idealism and sympathize with it so genially? Fleet Street can fortify a great soul against all the mournfulness caused by the setting of the brightest " stars in the sky of India's glory." The young prophet of a paper with "the largest circulation in the world" can dare to wrap his spirit in all the proud glories of Jeypore, even while he foredates their doom. "Dance on ! dance on !" he seems to say to Jey- pore, with a bitter smile. "Dance out the old—dance in the new ; it is but human life. If the flower of modern civilization be a penny paper, why should not an immemorial line' of Brahmins end in one who breaks his caste by walking into a beef supper to the tune of ' Oh, the roast beef of Old England ?' It is always thus ; is not jauntiness caused by the knowledge of the sublime emptiness of human glory, at least when received into a steadfast soul, that has self-possession enough to turn that glory, empty though it be, to one last use, by gilding with it the most popular leaders in the Daily Telegraph?"
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