Schleswig Map

MARCH 5, 1864.]

HARPER'S WEEKLY.

149

MAP OF THE SCENE OF HOSTILITIES IN SCHLESWIG, SHOWING THE DEFENSIVE WORKS OF THE DANES.—[SEE PRECEDING PAGE.]

[Entered according to Act of Congress, in the Year 1864, by Harper & Brothers, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court for the Southern District of New York.]

QUITE ALONE.

By GEORGE AUGUSTUS SALA.

Printed from the Manuscript and early Proof—sheets purchased by the Proprietors of "Harper's Weekly.

BOOK I.—CHILDHOOD.
CHAPTER I.

SEULE AU MONDE.

THIS is Hyde Park at the most brilliant moment in the afternoon, at the most brilliant period in the season. What a city of magnificence, of luxury, of pleasure, of pomp, and of pride this London seems to be! Can there be any poor or miserable people—any dingy grubs among these gaudy butterflies? What are the famed Elysian fields of Paris to Hyde Park at this high tide of splendor? what the cavalcade of the Bois de Boulogne, or the promenade of Longchamps, to the long stream of equipages noiselessly rolling along the bank of the Serpentine? Every body in London who is worth naming is being carried along on wheels, or bestrides

pig-skin girthed o'er hundred-guinea horse-flesh, or struts in varnished boots, or trips in soft, sandaled prunella, or white satin with high heels. There is Royal Blood in a mail phaeton. Royal blood smokes a large cigar, and handles its ribbons scientifically. There is a Duke in the dumps, and behind him is the Right Reverend Father in a silk apron and a shovel hat, who made that fierce verbal assault upon his Grace in the House of Lords last night. There is the crack advocate of the day, the successful defender of the young lady who was accused of poisoning her mamma with nux vomica in her negus; and there is the young lady herself encompassed with a nimbus of crinoline, lolling back in a miniature brougham with a gentleman old enough to be her grand-father, in a high stock, and a wig dyed deep indigo. Is that Anonyma driving the twin ponies in a low phaeton, in a paletot and navy buttons made by Poole, a pork-pie hat with a pheasant's plume, a parasol attached to her whip, and a groom with folded arms behind her! Bah! there are so many Anonymas nowadays. If it isn't the Nameless one herself, it is Synonyma. Do you see that stout gentleman with the coal-black beard and the tarnished fez cap? That is the Syrian embassador. The liver-colored man in the dingy white turban, the draggle-tailed blue burnouse, the cotton stockings, and the alpaca umbrella, is the Maronite envoy. The nobleman who is driving that four-in-hand, and is got up to such a perfection of imitation of the manners and costume of a stage-coachman, has a rental of a hundred and thirty thousand a year. He passes his time mostly among hostlers, engine-drivers, and firemen. He swears, smokes a cutty pipe, and of his two intimate friends, one is a rough rider and the other a rat-catcher. Mr. Benazi, the great Hebrew Financier, you must know: yonder cadaverous, dolorous-looking figure in shabby clothes, huddled up in a corner of the snuff-colored chariot, drawn by the spare-ribbed horses that look as though they had never enough to eat. He is Baron Benazi, in the Grand Duchy of Sachs-Pfeifigen, where he lent the Grand Duke money to get the crown jewels out of pawn. That loan was the making of Ben. There is nothing remarkable about him save his nose, which stands out, a hooked promontory, like the prow of a Roman galley, from among the shadows cast by the squabs of the snuff-colored chariot. That nose is a power in the state. That nose represents millions. When Baron Benazi's nose shows signs of flexibility

monarchs may breathe again, for loans can be negotiated. But when the Benazian proboscis looks stern and rigid, and its owner rubs it with irritable finger, it is a sadly ominous sign of something being rotten in the state of Sachs-Pfeifigen, and of other empires and monarchies which I will not stay to name.

What else? Every thing. Whom else? Every body. Dandies and swells, smooth-cheeked and heavy-mustached, twiddling their heavy guard chains, caressing their fawn-colored favoris, clanking their spurred heels, screwing their eye-glasses into the creases of their optic muscles, hawhawing vacuous commonplaces to one another, or leaning over the rails to stare at all, to gravely wag the head to some, to nod superciliously to others, and to grin familiarly to a select few. Poor little snobs and government clerks aping the Grand Manner, and succeeding only in looking silly: not in looking swells. Any number of quiet, sensible folks surveying the humors of the scene with much amusement, and without envy. Disreputable women, who are known to be such, by scores. Disreputable women, not yet found out, by hundreds. Foreigners who, after a five-years' residence in London, may have discovered that Leicester Square, the Haymarket, and the lower part of Regent Street, are not the only promenades in London, and so come swaggering and jabbering here, in their braid and their pomatum and their dirt, poisoning the

air with the fumes of bad tobacco. An outer fringe of nurse-maids revolving new projects of crinoline, to be constructed chiefly of cane, in emulation of the prodigies in whalebone and watch-spring, here sweeping the gravel—then some soldiers listlessly sucking the knobs of their canes, and looking very much as if they considered themselves as flies in amber, neither rich nor rare, and wondering how the deuce they got there. As useless as chimneys in summer, seemingly, are these poor, strong men done up in scarlet blanketing, with three half-pence a day spending-money, and nobody to kill, and severely punished by illogical magistrates if they take to jumping upon policemen, or breaking civilian's heads with the buckles of their belts, through their weariness. Aggravated assaults, says the magistrate, as he signs their mittimus, are not to be tolerated. Why what is it but a soldier's bounden duty to keep on committing a series of aggravated assaults upon people who never did him any harm? Did Jacques Bonhomme, the French conscript, whom Solomon Lobb, the grenadier, bayoneted at Waterloo, ever do him wrong? Did Ivan Ivanovitch, the Russian, whom he hewed down at Inkermann, ever spoil his goods? Why should soldiers be fined or sent to the treadmill for exhibiting in peace that unprovoked brutality and ferocity for which they are hired, and clothed, and fed?

Any thing else in Hyde Park at this high tide

of the season? Much: only a score of pages would be required to describe the scene. All is here—the prologue, the drama, the epilogue; for here is Life. Life from the highest to the very lowest rung of the ladder: not only in earliest youth and extreme old age, in comely virtue and ruddled vice, in wisdom and folly, complacency and discontent; but—look yonder, far beyond the outer fringe in utter want and misery. There, under the trees, the ragged woman opens her bundle, and distributes among her callous brood the foul scraps she has begged at area gates or picked from gutters. There, on the sunny sward the shoeless tramp sprawls on his brawny back, and flaunts his flesh, grinning in impudent muscularity from the windows of his tatters in the very face of well-dressed Respectability passing shuddering by; and the whole "huge, foolish whirligig where kings and beggars, angels and demons, and stars and street-sweepings chaotically whirl," the Spirit of Earth surveys and plies his eternal task. Where is my copy of Faustus? There: I can not read the German. Here is Monsieur Henri Blaze's French interpretation of the mystic utterances of the Esprit da la Terre, "Dans les flots de la vie, dans l'orage de l'action, je monte et descends, flotte ici et la: naissance, tombeau mer eternelle, tissu changeant, vie ardente: c'est ainsi je travaille sur le bruyant metier du temps, et tisse le manteau vivant de la Divinite." Sufficiently weak, limp, and wishy-washy is this French Faustus of Monsieur Henri Blaze, I

 wot. It savors of absinthe, and an estaminet where they charge nothing for stationery. Turn I now to another and immeasurably greater translator:

In Being's flood, in Action's storm I walk and work, above beneath Work and weave in endless motion: Birth and Death, An infinite ocean; A seizing and giving The fire of living

'Tis thus at the roaring Loom of Time I ply And weave for God the garment thou seest him by.

"Of twenty millions," asks the author of Sartor Resartus, "that have read and spouted this thunder-speech of the Erdgeist, are there yet twenty of us that have learned the meaning thereof?" But, Sage, is not the Spirit of Earth the Spirit of Nature? Is not Life the warp and Humanity the woof over which, spread on the "Roaring Loom of Time," the shuttle of production is always plying? And what is Nature: a field, a flower, a shell, a sea-weed, a bird's feather, but the woven garment that we see GOD by?

When Humanity begins to fade out of Hyde Park, and goes home to dinner, or to brood by the single nook, dinnerless, or betakes itself to other holes and corners where it may languish, panting, until bread or death come; when only a few idlers are to be met with in the Ring, or Rotten Row, or on the Knightsbridge Road, you sometimes see a solitary horsewoman. She is QUITE ALONE. No groom follows: no passing dandy ventures to bow, much lest to accost, or condescends to grin as she passes. A spare slight little woman enough, not in her first youth—not in her second yet; but, just entre chien et loup, between the lights of beauty at blind man's holiday-time, she might be Venus. She wears a very plain cloth habit, and a man's hat. I mean the chimney-pot. She has a veil often drawn down. Great masses of brown hair are neatly natted under her hat. She rides easily, quietly, undemonstratively. If her habit blows aside you may see a neat boot and faultless ankle, wreathed in white drapery, but no sign of the cloth and chamois leather riding-trowser affectation. She carries a light switch with an ivory handle, which she never uses. That tall, lustrous black mare never came out of a livery-stable you may be sure. She pats and pets, and makes mach of her, and very placidly she paces beneath her light weight. The groom keeps his distance; she is always alone: quite alone.

"Who the doose is that woman on the

GEORGE AUGUSTUS SALA, AUTHOR OF "QUITE ALONE."—[SEE PAGE 151.]