Collected Essays (32 page)

It was the fashion among the Apostles to be Radical, a fashion less political than literary and metaphysical, connected in some recondite way with the reading of Charles and Arthur Tennyson’s poetry, with long talks in Highgate between Coleridge and John Sterling, when the old poet did most of the talking, starting, according to Hazlitt, from no premises and coming to no conclusions, crossing and recrossing the garden path, snuffling softly of Kant and infinitudes, embroiling poor Sterling for ever in the fog of theology. When politics were touched on by the Apostles it was in an amused and rather patronizing way. ‘’Twas a very pretty little revolution in Saxony,’ wrote Hallam in 1830, ‘and a respectable one at Brunswick’ (the dilettante tone has charm after the sweeping statements, the safe marble gestures, the self-importance of our own ‘thirties – ‘I stand with the People and Government of Spain’). Only in the rash Torrijos adventure did the Apostles come within measurable distance of civil war.

London in 1830 contained a small group of refugees who had been driven from Spain by the restored Bourbon, Ferdinand. Ferdinand after his long captivity in Bayonne had sworn to observe the Constitution. He broke his oath, dissolved the Cortes, and restored the Inquisition. After three years of civil war the French bayonets of the Duc d’Angoulême established him as absolute king. Foreign intervention again: it is difficult for the historian to feel moral indignation.

So in London the Spanish liberals gathered. ‘Daily in the cold spring air,’ wrote Carlyle, ‘under skies so unlike their own, you could see a group of fifty or a hundred stately tragic figures, in proud threadbare cloaks; perambulating, mostly with closed lips’ – a grotesque vision obtrudes of those other tragic figures who perambulated with open mouths – ‘the broad pavements of Euston Square and the regions about St Pancras new church.’ Their leader was Torrijos, a soldier and diplomat, the friend of Sterling’s parents, and soon therefore the friend of the literary and metaphysical Apostles. In Sterling’s rooms in Regent Street and radicals met Torrijos and talked. Sterling was twenty-four and Tennyson twenty-one.

The Apostles would probably have played no active part if it had not been for Sterling’s Irish cousin, Robert Boyd, a young man of a hasty and adventurous temper, who had thrown up his commission in the Army because of a fancied insult and now, with five thousand pounds in his pocket, planned to go privateering in the East. Torrijos needed capital and promised Boyd the command of a Spanish cavalry regiment on Ferdinand’s defeat. Even without the promise the idea of conquering a kingdom would have been enough for Boyd, whose ambition it was to live, like Conrad’s Captain Blunt, ‘by his sword’. A boat was bought in the Thames and secretly armed. Boyd and the Apostles were to sail it down the river at night to Deal and there take on board Torrijos and fifty picked Spaniards. The excitement, perhaps the sudden intrusion of reality when the arms came on board, proved too much for Sterling, ‘Things are going on very well, but are very, even frightfully near’, he wrote in February 1830, and soon his health gave way and furnished him with an excuse to stay behind, saved him for a Bayswater curacy, for the essays on Revelation and Sin, for death at Ventnor. But he did not avoid all danger; the Spanish Ambassador got wind of the preparations, the river police were informed, and one night they appeared over the side and seized the ship in the King’s name. Sterling dropped into a wherry, while a policeman brandished a pistol and threatened to shoot, escaped to Deal and warned Torrijos. The Spaniards crossed to France, and still accompanied by Boyd and a few of the Apostles, made their way in small parties to Gibraltar.

Tennyson and Hallam were not with them – a Cambridge term intervened. But for the long vacation they had a part to play, not altogether without danger. While Torrijos waited at Gibraltar, money and dispatches had to be carried to other insurgents in the north of Spain. So Tennyson and Hallam travelled across the Pyrenees by diligence, passing Cauteretz on the way, which Tennyson remembered thirty-two years later in a gentle poem to the memory of his friend, and reached the rebels’ camp.

‘A wild bustling time we had of it,’ Hallam declared later. ‘I played my part as conspirator in a small way and made friends with two or three gallant men who have since been trying their luck with Valdes.’ One of these was the commander, Ojeda, who spoke to Tennyson of his wish ‘
couper la gorge à tous les curés
but added with his hand on his heart, ‘
mais vous connaissez mon coeur.
’ The two came back from the ‘ferment of minds and stir of events’ in the steamer
Leeds
from Bordeaux, and a young girl, who was travelling with her father and sister, paid particular attention to Hallam, ‘a very interesting delicate looking young man’. He read her one of Scott’s novels, and Tennyson listened in the background, wearing a large conspirator’s cape and a tall hat. They did not confide their story to her.

Soon after they reached England a report came to Somersby Rectory that John Kemble – another of the Apostles – had been caught in the south and was to be tried for his life, and Tennyson in the early morning posted to Lincoln to try to find someone acquainted with the Consul at Cadiz, who might help to save his friend. But the rumour was false. It anticipated a more tragic story, for Torrijos and his band, commanded to leave Gibraltar in November 1831, sailed in two small vessels for Malaga, were chased by guardships and ran ashore. They barricaded themselves into a farmhouse, called curiously enough Ingles, and were surrounded. It was useless to resist and they surrendered, hoping for mercy. But they received none. They were shot on the esplanade at Malaga, after being shrived by a priest. Boyd received one favour: his body was delivered to the British Consul for burial.

He was the only Englishman to die, for the Apostles, tired of the long wait at Gibraltar, had already scattered through Spain with guidebooks, examining churches and Moorish remains. Sterling, who had his cousin’s death on his conscience, never quite recovered from the blow. ‘I hear the sound of that musketry,’ he wrote in a letter; ‘it is as if the bullets were tearing my own brain.’ Hallam took the adventure lightly: ‘After revolutionizing kingdoms, one is still less inclined than before to trouble one’s head about scholarships, degrees, and such gear.’ Tennyson’s silence was unbroken. He may have reflected that only a Cambridge term had stood between him and the firing party on Malaga esplanade.

1937

MR COOK’S CENTURY

A
LREADY
they seem to belong to history – those tourists of the 1830s; they have the dignity and the pathos of a period, as they gather, the older ones in extraordinary hats and veils, the younger a little awkward and coltish, on the Continental platform at Victoria. Their baggage is all labelled for the Swiss
pensions
, the Italian lakes: in their handbags they carry seasick remedies and some of them tiny bottles of brandy; their tickets are probably in the hands of the courier, who now kindly and dexterously, with an old-world manner, shepherds them towards the second-class (first on boat), towards adventure – the first view of Mont Blanc, the fancy-dress dance at Grindelwald, the falls of Schaffhausen (seen through stained glass for a few francs extra). How sad it is that war prevents the one-hundredth anniversary of the first Cook’s excursion being celebrated in a suitable atmosphere – with lots of eau-de-Cologne and steam and shiny picture-papers, and afterwards the smell of oil and sea-gulls and a sense of suppressed lady-like excitement, and the scramble along the corridor with the right coupons towards the first meal on the Basle express – everything paid for in advance, even the tips.

Of course there was so much more to Cook’s than that: that little daily gathering on the Continental platform was rather like the unimportant flower a big business executive may wear in his button-hole for the sake of some early association. Thomas Cook and Son, who, in 1938, could have arranged you an independent tour to Central Africa as easily as to Ostend, had become a world-power which dealt with Prime Ministers: they transported Gordon up the Nile, and afterwards the relief expedition – 18,000 troops, 130,000 tons of stores, and 65,000 tons of coal; they reformed the pilgrim traffic to Mecca, deported ‘undesirables’ from South Africa during the Boer War, bought the railway up Vesuvius, and knocked a gap in the walls of Jerusalem to let the Kaiser in; before the end of the nineteenth century, under the son, they had far outstripped the dream of the first Thomas Cook, the young wood-turner and teetotaller and Bible-reader of Market Harborough, who on 5 July 1841, chartered a special train to carry his local temperance association from Leicester to Loughborough, where a meeting was to be held in Mr Paget’s park. (The distance was twelve miles, and the return fare 1s.: it could hardly be less today.) The words of Mr John Fox Bell, secretary to the Midland Counties Railway, have the right historic ring: ‘I know nothing of you or your society, but you shall have the train’, and Mr Thomas Cook was quite aware that he was making history. ‘The whole thing came to me’, he said, ‘by intuition and my spirit recoiled at the idea of imitation.’ (This refers to the shameful attempt of the Mechanics Institute of Birmingham, who had run an excursion on 29 June to Cheltenham and Gloucester, to question the originality of his inspiration.) The cheers that greeted the thirsty teetotallers as they scrambled from their open scorching trucks, the music of the Loughborough band, the congratulatory speeches in Mr Paget’s park bore Mr Cook on a great wave of local pride, inspecting hotels as he went, interviewing railroad secretaries, noting points of interest – the fourteenth-century cathedral, the abbey ruin, the majestical waterfall, on out of England into Wales – ‘From the heights of Snowdon my thoughts took flight to Ben Lomond, and I determined to try to get to Scotland.’ And get to Scotland he did with 350 men and women – we don’t know whether they were teetotallers, and at Glasgow the guns were fired in their honour.

But Europe was another matter: Europe, to the Bible-reader and teetotaller, must have presented a knotty ethical problem, and it was not until 1860, after a personal look-round, that Mr Cook brought his excursions to the Continent. It is easy to mock nowadays at the carefully conducted tour, but there have been times and places when a guide was of great comfort. ‘In 1865, through many difficulties, I got my first party to Rome and Naples, and for several years our way was through brigand-infested districts, where military escorts protected us.’

By the end of the century – under the rule of the second Cook – the firm had become the Cook’s we know today. I have before me a copy of a paper called
Cook’s Excursionist
, for 18 March 1899; already there were few places in the world to which an excursion had not been arranged – from the Tea and Coffee Rooms of Bora Bimki to the Deansgate Temperance Hotel in Manchester. The link with Mr Paget’s park is still there, not only in the careful choice of hotel but in the advertisements – for Dr E. D. Moore’s Cocoa and Milk, and the Compactum Tea Baskets. I like to feel that this – the spring of 1899 – marks the serene height of Mr Cook’s tours, for brigands have ceased to trouble, and there is no suspicion that they may one day come again. Keating’s Powder has taken the place of the military escort; Mrs Welsley Wigg is keeping ‘an excellent table’ in Euston Square, and a young lady, ‘who last year found them perfectly efficacious’, is cautiously recommending Roach’s Sea-Sickness Draughts – perhaps this year won’t be so lucky? At John Piggott’s in Cheapside you can buy all the clothes you need for a conducted tour: the long black Chesterfield coat, the Norfolk suit, suitable for Switzerland, and the cap with a little button on top, the Prince Albert, the Leinster overcoat with velvet lapels, and with them, of course, the Gladstone bag strapped and double-strapped, secure against the dubious chambermaid and the foreign porter. What would they have thought – those serene men with black moustaches, and deer-stalkers for the crossing, if they could have seen in a vision the great familiar station-yard, dead and deserted as it was a few months back, without a cab, a porter or a policeman, just a notice, ‘Unexploded Bomb’, casually explaining what would have seemed to them the end of everything: no trains for France, no trains for Switzerland, none for Italy, and even the clock stopped? It is, when you come to think of it, a rather sad centenary year.

1941

THE EXPLORERS

T
HE
imagination has its own geography which alters with the centuries. Each continent in turn looms up on the horizon like a great rock carved with unintelligible hieroglyphics and symbols catching at the unconscious: in Shakespeare’s youth it was India, Arabia, the East, and a little later, in the days of Raleigh, Central America and Eldorado: in the eighteenth century, Australia and the South Seas: the nineteenth century, Africa – in particular, West Africa and the Niger. Men have always tried to rationalize their irrational acts, but the explanations given in prospectuses like those of the South Sea Bubble and the African Association are as unconvincing as last night’s supper as the cause of our fantastic dreams.

Little in history is more fantastic than the beginning of West African exploration. There had been occasional travellers, but the exploration of this unknown territory six times the size of Europe, the biggest white space on the contemporary map, began at a meeting of the very select Saturday Club at the St Alban’s Tavern on 9 June 1788. We know the company who were present, Lord Galloway, Lord Rawdon, General Conway, Sir Adam Fergusson, Sir Joseph Banks, Sir William Fordyce, Mr Pultney, Mr Beaufoy, and Mr Stuart, and even the names of those who were absent – the Bishop of Llandaff, Lord Carysfort, and Sir John Sinclair. The nine members (at what stage of dinner is not recorded) decided to form themselves into an Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior Parts of Africa and each agreed to subscribe five guineas a year for five years. Before the Association had been in existence for eight weeks two explorers had been chosen and their routes assigned, but the subscription had already proved inadequate.