Lever
The Dodd Family Abroad, Vol. II
LETTER I. KENNY JAMES DODD TO THOMAS PURCELL, ESQ., OF THE GRANGE, BRUFF
My dear Tom, – I got the papers all safe. I am sure the account is perfectly correct. I only wish the balance was bigger. I waited here to receive these things, and now I discover that I can't sign the warrant of attorney except before a consul, and there is none in this place, so that I must keep it over till I can find one of those pleasant functionaries, – a class that between ourselves I detest heartily. They are a presumptuous, under-bred, consequential race, – a cross between a small skipper and smaller Secretary of Legation, with a mixture of official pedantry and maritime off-handedness that is perfectly disgusting. Why our reforming economists don't root them all out I cannot conceive. Nobody wants, nobody benefits by them; and save that you are now and then called on for a "consular fee," you might never hear of their existence.
I don't rightly understand what you say about the loan from that Land Improvement Society. Do you mean that the money lent must be laid out on the land as a necessary condition? Is it possible that this is what I am to infer? If so, I never heard anything half so preposterous! Sure, if I raise five hundred pounds from a Jew, he has no right to stipulate that I must spend the cash on copper coal-scuttles or potted meats! I want it for my own convenience; enough for him that I comply with his demands for interest and repayment. Anything else would be downright tyranny and oppression, Tom, – as a mere momentary consideration of the matter will show you. At all events, let us get the money, for I 'd like to contest the point with these fellows; and if ever there was a man heart and soul determined to break down any antiquated barrier of cruelty or domination, it is your friend Kenny Dodd! As to that printed paper, with its twenty-seven queries, it is positive balderdash from beginning to end. What right have they to conclude that I approve of subsoil draining? When did I tell them that I believed in Smith of Deanstown? Where is it on record that I gave in my adhesion to model cottages, Berkshire pigs, green crops, and guano manure? In what document do these appear? Maybe I have my own notions on these matters, – maybe I keep them for my own guidance too!
You say that the gentry is all changing throughout the whole land, and I believe you well, Tom Purcell. Changed indeed must they be if they subscribe to such preposterous humbug as this! At all events, I repeat we want the money, so fill up the blanks as you think best, and remit me the amount at your earliest, for I have barely enough to get to the end of the present month. I don't dislike this place at all. It is quiet, peaceful, – humdrum, if you will; but we've had more than our share of racket and row lately, and the reclusion is very grateful. One day is exactly like another with us. Lord George – for he is back again – and James go a-fishing as soon as breakfast is over, and only return for supper. Mary Anne reads, writes, sews, and sings. Mrs. D. fills up the time discharging Betty, settling with her, searching her trunks for missing articles, and being reconciled to her again, which, with occasional crying fits and her usual devotions, don't leave her a single moment unoccupied! As for me, I'm trying to learn German, whenever I'm not asleep. I've got a master, – he is a Swiss, and maybe his accent is not of the purest; but he is an amusing old vagabond, – an umbrella-maker, but in his youth a travelling-servant. His time is not very valuable to him, so that he sits with me sometimes for half a day; but still I make little progress. My notion is, Tom, that there's no use in either making love or trying a new language after you're five or six and twenty. It's all up-hill work after that, believe me. Neither your declensions nor declarations come natural to you, and it's a bungling performance at the best. The first condition of either is to have your head perfectly free, – as little in it as need be. So long as your thoughts are jostled by debts, duns, mortgages, and marriageable daughters, you 'll have no room for vows or irregular verbs! It's lucky, however, that one can dispense both with the love and the learning, and indeed of the two, – with the last best, for of all the useless, unprofitable kinds of labor ever pursued out of a jail, acquiring a foreign language is the most. The few words required for daily necessaries, such as schnaps and cigars, are easily learnt; all beyond that is downright rubbish.
For what can a man express his thoughts in so well as his mother tongue? with whom does he want to talk but his countrymen? Of course you come out with the old cant about "intelligent natives," "information derived at the fountain head," "knowledge obtained by social intimacy with people of the country." To which I briefly reply, "It's all gammon and stuff from beginning to end;" and what between your blunders in grammar and your informant's ignorance of fact, all such information is n't worth a "trauneen." Now, once for all, Tom, let me observe to you that ask what you will of a foreigner, be it an inquiry into the financial condition of his country, its military resources, prison discipline, law, or religion, he 'll never acknowledge his inability to answer, but give you a full and ready reply, with facts, figures, dates, and data, all in most admirable order. At first you are overjoyed with such ready resources of knowledge. You flatter yourself that even with the most moderate opportunities you cannot fail to learn much; by degrees, however, you discover errors in your statistics, and at last, you come to find out that your accomplished friend, too polite to deny you a reasonable gratification, had gone to the pains of inventing a code, a church, and a coinage for your sole use and benefit, but without the slightest intention of misleading, for it never once entered his head that you could possibly believe him! I know it will sound badly. I am well aware of the shock it will give to many a nervous system; but for all that I will not blink the declaration – which I desire to record as formally and as flatly as I am capable of expressing it – which is, that of one hundred statements an Englishman accepts and relies upon abroad, as matter of fact, ninety-nine are untrue; full fifty being lies by premeditation, thirty by ignorance, ten by accident or inattention, and the remainder, if there be a balance, for I 'm bad at figures, from any other cause you like.
It is no more disgrace for a foreigner not to tell the truth than to own that he does not sing, nor dance the mazurka; not so much, indeed, because these are marks of a polite education. And yet it is to hold conversation with these people we pore over dictionaries, and Ollendorfs, and Hamiltonian gospels. As for the enlargement and expansion of the intelligence that comes of acquiring languages, there never was a greater fallacy. Look abroad upon your acquaintances: who are the glib linguists, who are the faultless in French genders, and the immaculate in German declensions? the flippant boarding-school miss, or the brainless, unpaid attaché, that cannot, compose a note in his own language. Who are the bungling conversera that make drawing-rooms blush and dinner-tables titter? Your first-rate debater in the Commons, your leader at the bar, your double first, or your great electro-magnetic fellow that knows the secret laws of water-spouts and whirlpools, and can make thunder and lightning just to amuse himself. Take my word for it, your linguist is as poor a creature as a dancing-master, and just as great a formalist.
If you ask me, then, why I devote myself to such unrewarding labor, I answer, "It is true I know it to be so, but my apology is, that I make no progress." No, Tom, I never advance a step. I can neither conjugate nor decline, and the auxiliary verbs will never aid me in anything. So far as my lingual incapacity goes, I might be one of the great geniuses of the age; and very probably I am, too, without knowing it!
I have little to tell you of the place itself. It is a quaint old town on the side of the lake; the most remarkable object being the minster, or cathedral. They show you the spot in the aisle where old Huss stood to receive his sentence of death. Even after a lapse of centuries, there was something affecting to stand where a man once stood to bear that he was to be burned alive. Of course I have little sympathy with a heretic, but still I venerate the martyr, the more since I am strongly disposed to think that it is one of those characters which are not the peculiar product of an age of railroads and submarine telegraphs. The expansion of the intelligence, Tom, seems to be in the inverse ratio of the expansion of the conscience, and the stubborn old spirit of right that was once the mode, would nowadays be construed into a dogged, stupid bull-headedness, unworthy of the enlightenment of our glorious era. Take my word for it, there's a great many eloquent and indignant letter-writers in the newspapers would shrink from old Huss's test for their opinions, and a fossil elk is not a greater curiosity than would be a man ready to stake life on his belief. When a fellow tells you of "dying on the floor of the House," he simply means that he'll talk till there's a "count out;" and as for "registering vows in heaven," and "wasting out existence in the gloom