Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 444

Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 444
Various

Various

Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 444 / Volume 18, New Series, July 3, 1852

THE ART SEASON

Returning with the circling year, and advancing pari passu with the multitude of metropolitan musical attractions, comes the more silent reign of the picture exhibitions—those great art-gatherings from thousands of studios, to undergo the ultimate test of public judgment in the dozen well-filled galleries, which the dilettante, or lounging Londoner, considers it his recurring annual duty strictly to inspect, and regularly to gossip in. As places where everybody meets everybody, and where lazy hours can be conveniently lounged away, the exhibitions in some sort supply in the afternoon what the Opera and parties do in the evenings. Nearly all through the summer-day, they are crowded with a softly-rustling, humming, buzzing crowd, coming and going perhaps, taking little heed of the nominal attraction, but sauntering from room to room, or ensconcing themselves in colonies or clusters of chairs, and lounging vacantly in cool lobbies. At energetic sight-seers, who are labouring away, catalogue and pencil in hand, they stare languidly. They really thought everybody had seen the pictures; they know they have: they have stared at them until they became a bore. But this sort of people, who only come once, why, of course, they suppose this sort of people must be allowed to push about as they please. But it is a confounded nuisance; it is really.

The great army of art amateurs, connoisseurs, and the body who are regarded in the artistic world with far greater reverence—the noted picture buyers and dealers, have come and seen, and gone away again; after having lavishly expended their approbation or disapprobation, and possibly in a less liberal degree, their cash. After the first week or so, the galleries begin to clear of gentlemen of the class in question; even artists have got tired of coming to see their own pictures, particularly if they be not well hung; and so the exhibition is generally handed over during the greater part of its duration to the languid far niente elegant crowd we have seen thronging its corridors. The grand day for the moneyed amateurs, who come to increase their collections, is, however, that of the private view. This generally occurs on a Saturday, and the public is admitted on the following Monday. Within an hour of the opening on the former day, the rooms are crowded with a multitude of notabilities. You see that you are in a special class of society, or rather, in two special classes—literary and artistic on the one hand; wealthy and socially elevated on the other. The fact is evident in the general mutual acquaintanceship which prevails, principally within each respective circle, but by no means exclusively so. First, you are sure to observe a cluster of those peers and members of parliament who busy themselves most in social, literary, and artistic questions. Bishops, too, are regular private-view men; capital judges, moreover, and liberal buyers; and we seldom miss catching a glimpse of some dozen faces, whose proprietors are men standing at the very top of our historic, philosophic, and critical literature, and who move smilingly about, amid the keen but concealed inspection of the crowd, who pass their names in whispers from group to group.

But the class of regular picture-buyers is quite sui generis. You may pitch upon your man in a moment. Ten to one, he is old, and has all the shrivelled, high-dried appearance of the most far-gone and confirmed bachelorism. Everything about him looks old and old-fashioned. His hair is thin and gray, and he shuffles along on a couple of poor old shanks, which will never look any stouter unless it be under the influence of a fit of the gout. He wears a white neckcloth, arranged with the celebrated wisp-tie—shoes a great deal too big for him—and to his keen, twinkling eyes he applies a pair of heavy horn or silver-set glasses. These old gentlemen appear to know each other as if by magic. They cluster in groups like corks in a basin of water, and then go hobbling eagerly along, peering closely into the more promising works, jerking their heads from side to side, so as to get the painting in as many lights as possible; and full of talk—good critical talk—about the productions in course of inspection. True, there may be something in their observations speaking too much of the technical, and too little of the more ideal faculty. They are greater upon flesh-tints and pearly grays, middle distances and chiaroscuro, than upon conception, expression, or elevation or magnificence of sentiment. Nevertheless, they know thoroughly what appertains to a good picture. They give a work its place in a moment, and assign it to its author by internal evidence, with an unfailing accuracy, which speaks of long training and constant familiarity with all the main studios of London. Perhaps you observe one of our friends apparently fascinated before a particular canvas: he dances about, so as to get it in every angle of light. Then he shuffles off, and brings two other skilful old foggies, holding each by an arm; and the three go through the former ceremony as to the lights, and then lay their heads together; and then our original personage glides softly up to the table where the secretary's clerk sits with pen and ink before him, and whispers. The clerk smiles affably—turns up a register: there are two or three confidential words interchanged; and then he rises and sticks into the frame of the lucky picture a morsel of card, labelled 'Sold;' and leaves the purchaser gloating over his acquisition.

And where do these pictures go? Frequently to some quiet, solemn old house in the West End, or to some grange or manor far down in the country. The picture-gallery is the nursery of that house—its pride and its boast. Year after year has the silent family of canvas been increasing and multiplying. Their proprietor is, as it were, their father. He has most likely no living ties, and all his thoughts and all his ambitions are clustered round that silent gallery, where the light comes streaming down from high and half-closed windows. The collection gradually acquires a name. Descriptions of it are found in guide-books and works upon art. Strangers come to see it with tickets, and a solemn housekeeper shews them up the silent stairs, and through the lonesome mansion to its sanctum sanctorum. At length, perhaps, the old man takes his last look at his pictures, and then shuts his eyes for ever. It may be, that within six weeks the laboriously collected paintings are in a Pall-Mall auction-room, with all the world bidding and buzzing round the pulpit; or it may also chance that a paragraph goes the round of the papers, intimating that his celebrated and unrivalled collection of modern works of art has been bequeathed by the late Mr So-and-so to the nation—always on the condition, that it provides some fitting place for their preservation. The government receives bequests of this kind oftener than it complies with the stipulation.

In the beginning of March, the first of the galleries opens its portals to the world. This is the British Institution, established at the west end of Pall-Mall, and now in existence for the better part of a half century. The idea of the establishment was to form a sort of nursing institution for the Royal Academy. Here artists of standing and reputation were to exhibit their sketches and less important works; and here more juvenile aspirants were to try their wings before being subjected to the more severe ordeal of Trafalgar Square. The idea was good, and flourished apace; so much so, that you not unfrequently find in the British Institution no small proportion of works of a calibre hardly below the average of the Great Exhibition; while the A. R. A.'s, and even the aristocratic R. A.'s[1 - Associates Royal Academy, and Royal Academicians.] themselves, do not by any means disdain to grace the humble walls of the three rooms in Pall-Mall. This year, the only picture of Sir Edwin Landseer's exhibited—a wild Highland corry, with a startled herd of red deer—is to be found in the British Institution. But the merit of the works is wonderfully unequal. They are of all classes and all sizes, in water-colour and in oils. Clever sketches by clever unknowns, rest beside sprawling frescos by youths whose ambition is vaster than their genius; and finished and accomplished works of art are set off by the foils of unnumbered pieces of unformed and not very promising mediocrity. Among them are the productions of many of the more humble painters of genre subjects—the class who delight in portraying homely cottage interiors, or troops of playing children, or bits of minutely-finished still life—or careful academical studies of groups with all the conventions duly observed: this class of pictures musters strong, and connoisseurs, without so much remarking their imperfections, carefully note their promise.

A month after the opening of the British Institution, three galleries become patent on the same morning: the Old Water Colour, in Pall-Mall East, the New Water Colour, in Pall-Mall West, and a still more recently founded society, called, somewhat pompously, the National Institution of Fine Arts. These are mainly composed of dissenters from the other associations—gentlemen who conceive that they have been ill-treated by Hanging Committees, and a large class of juvenile but promising artists, who resort to the less crowded institutions in the hope of there meeting with better places for their works than in the older and more established bodies. The two water-colour galleries are both highly favoured exhibitions, and present works of an importance quite equal to those of the Academy itself. Water-colour painting is indeed a national branch of art in England. Neither French, Germans, nor Italians, can presume for a moment to cope with us in the matter of aquarelles. They have no notion of the power of the medium, of the strong and rich effects it is capable of producing, and the transparency of the tints which a great water-colour artist can lay on. Nearly twenty years ago, there was but one water-colour society; but increasing numbers, and the usual artistic feuds, produced a partly natural, partly hostile, separation. The ladies and gentlemen who withdrew were mainly figure painters; those who stayed were mainly landscape artists; and thus it happens, that while in the new society you are principally attracted by historic and genre groups and, scenes, in the old you are fascinated by landscape and city pictures of the very highest order of art. The painters, too, you observe, are very industrious. The fact is, they can work more quickly in water than in oil. Copley Fielding will perhaps exhibit a score of landscapes, blazing with summer sunshine; David Cox, half as many—stern and rugged in tone and style; George Tripp will have painted his fresh river and meadow scenes by the dozen; and the two brothers Callum will each have poured in old Gothic streets and squares, and ships in calm and storm, which catch your eye scores of times upon the walls. As in the other society, many of the finest 'bits' contributed by the water-colourists are not much above miniature size. The screens on which these gems are hung attract fully as much as the walls with their more ambitious freight; and Jenkin's rustic lasses, and Topham's Irish groups, and Alfred Fripp's dark-eyed Italian monks and Campagna peasants, are as much gazed at as Richardson's sunny landscapes or Bentley's breezy seas.

Five minutes' walk takes us to the new society. No lack of landscape here; but it is inferior to that in the rival institution, and its attractions are eclipsed by ambitious pictures of historic or fictitious interest; the scene almost always laid in the picturesque streets or rooms of a mediæval city, and the groups marvels of display in the matter of the painting of armour, arms, and the gorgeous velvets, minivers, and brocades of feudal grande tenue. See Mr Edward Corbould. He is sure to be as picturesque and chivalrous as possible. There is the very ring of the rough old times in his caracoling processions of ladies and knights, or his fierce scenes of hand-to-hand fight, with battered armour, and flashing weapons, and wounded men drooping from their steeds. Or he paints softer scenes—passages of silken dalliance and love; ladies' bowers and courtly revels in alcoved gardens. Mr Haghe is equally mediæval, but more sternly and gloomily so. He delights in sombre, old Flemish rooms, with dim lights streaming through narrow Gothic windows, upon huge chimney-pieces and panellings, incrusted with antique figures, carved in the black heart of oak—knights, and squires, and priests of old. Then he peoples these shadowy chambers with crowds of stern burghers, or grave ecclesiastics, or soldiers 'armed complete in mail;' and so forms striking pieces of gloomy picturesqueness. Figure-paintings of a lighter calibre also abound. There is Mr John Absolon, who is in great request for painting figures in panoramic pictures; Mr Lee, whose graceful rural maidens are not to be surpassed: Mr Warren, whose heart is ever in the East; and Mr Mole, who loves the shielings of the Highland hills. Landscape, though on the whole subordinate to genre pictures, is very respectably represented; and the lady-artists usually make a good show on the screens, particularly in the way of graceful single figures, and the prettinesses of flower and fruit painting.

We can merely mention the Society of British Artists and the National Institution of Fine Art. Both are mainly composed of the natural overgrowth of artists who prefer a speedy and favourable opportunity for the display of their works in minor galleries, to waiting for years and years ere they can work themselves up to good positions on the walls of the Academy. Many of these gentlemen, however, exhibit both in the smaller and the greater collection; but here and there an artist will be found obstinately confining his contributions to one pet establishment—possibly entertaining a notion that he has been deeply wronged by the Hanging Committee of another.

Both of the exhibitions under notice are very various in merit; but each generally contains some able works, and the specialties of one or two painters distinguished by notable peculiarities. Thus the president of the British Artists, Mr Hurlstone, has for several seasons confined himself to Spanish subjects; Mr West paints Norwegian landscape; Mr Pyne sends to this gallery only his very splendid lake-pictures; and Mr Woolmer's curious sketches, which seem compounded of the styles of Turner and Watteau, blaze almost exclusively upon the walls. The best men of the National Institution contribute also to the Royal Academy—as, for example, Mr Glass, with his capital groups of hunters or troopers, so full of life and movement; and Mr Parker, with his smugglers and coast-boatmen. In this exhibition—and, indeed, in all the London exhibitions—a family, or rather a race or clan of artists, connected at once by blood and style, and rejoicing in the name of Williams, abound and flourish exceedingly. These Williamses are dreadful puzzlers to the students of the catalogue; they positively swarm upon every page, and the bewildered reader is speedily lost in a perfect chaos of undistinguishable initials. Sometimes, indeed, the Williamses come forth under other appellations—they appear as Percies and Gilberts; but the distinguishing mark is strong, and a moment's inspection convinces the amateur that the landscape before him, attributed to Mr So-and-so, is the work of 'another of these everlasting Williamses.'

But the first Saturday of May arrives, and with it many a rumour, true and false, of the state of matters within the Royal Academy—of the academicians who exhibit, and of what are to be 'the' pictures. From early morning, St Martin's bells have been ringing, and a festival flag flies from the steeple; no great pomp, to be sure, but it marks the occasion. About noon, the Queen's party arrives, and Her Majesty is conducted about the rooms by the leading members of the Academy. Between one and two, she departs; and immediately after, the crowd of ticket-holders for the private view cluster before the closed gratings. Punctually as the last stroke of the hour strikes, the portals are flung open, and a cataract of eager amateurs rush up the staircases, and make their way straight to the inner room, or room of honour, all in quest of the picture, to which the pas has been given, by its being hung upon the line in the centre of the eastern wall of the apartment. The salons fill as by magic; in half an hour, you can hardly move through a crowd of dignitaries of all kinds—hereditary, social, literary, scientific, and artistic. Perhaps, indeed, there is no muster in London which collects a greater number of personages famous in every point of view. The ladies of the aristocracy swarm as at a drawing-room. The atmosphere is all one rustle of laces and silks; and it is anything but easy to make one's way among the bevies of clustered beauties who flock round their chaperone, all one flutter of ribbons, feathers, and flowers. And to the Academy, at all events, come all manner of political notabilities: you find a secretary of state by your elbow, and catch the muttered criticism of a prime-minister. Ordinary peers and members of parliament are thicker than blackberries. Bishops prevail as usual; and apropos of ecclesiastical costumes, peculiar looped-up beavers and single-breasted greatcoats, the odds are, that you will be attracted by the portly figure and not very refined face of the Romish dignitary whose pretensions, a couple of years ago, set the country in a blaze. The muster of literary men is large and brilliant. Mr Hallam is most likely there as Professor of Ancient History to the Academy; and Mr Macaulay as Professor of Ancient Literature. Sir George Staunton puts in an appearance as Secretary for Foreign Correspondence; and blooming Sir Robert Harry Inglis, with the largest of roses at his button-hole, looks the most genial and good-humoured of 'antiquaries.' The Academicians—lucky Forty!—muster early. Happy fellows! they have no qualms of doubt, or sick-agonies of expectation as they mount the broad flight of steps. They have been giving hints to the Hanging Committee, or they have been on the Hanging Committee themselves. Well they know that their works have been at least provided for—all on the line, or near it; all in the best lights; and all titivated and polished up and varnished on the walls, and adapted, as it were, to the situation. You may know an R. A. on the private view-day by the broad, expanding jollity of his visage, if he be a man of that stamp, or by a certain quiet, self-satisfied smile of self-complacence, if he be a man of another.

But he looks and bears himself as a host. He cicerones delighted parties of lady-friends with his face all one smile of courtesy, or he does the honours with dignity and a lofty sense of—we do not speak disrespectfully—of being on his own dunghill, in respect to the more important exigeant connoisseurs, whom he thinks it right to patronise. He always praises his brethren's works, and discovers in them hidden virtues. For the Associates, he has minor smiles and milder words. The ordinary mob of exhibiters he looks down upon with a calm and complacent gaze, as though from the summit of a Mont Blanc of superiority. At any bold defier of the conventions and traditions of the Academy drawing-school, he shakes his head. The pre-Raphaelite heresy was a sore affliction to him. He looked upon Millais and Hunt as a Low-church bishop would regard Newman and Pusey. He prophesied that they would come to no good. He called them 'silly boys;' and he looks uneasily at the crowds who throng before this year's picture of the Huguenot Couple—not recovering his self-complacency until his eye catches his own favourite work, when he feels himself gradually mollified, and smiles anew upon the world.

Not so the nameless artist, whose work of many toiling days, and many sleepless nights, has been sent in unprotected to take its chance. He knows nothing of its fate until he can get a catalogue. It may be on the line in the east room; it may be above the octagon-room door; it may not be hung at all. Only the great artistic guns are invited to the private view, the rest must wait till Monday. Possibly a stray catalogue puts him so far out of his pain on Sunday. If not, he passes a feverish and unhappy time till the afternoon of Monday; and then, first among the crowd, rushes franticly up stairs. We had an opportunity the other day of seeing the result of a case of the kind. The picture—a work of great fancy and high feeling, but deficient in manipulative skill—the artist, a poet in the true sense of the word, had spent months in dreaming and in joying over. He found it in the dingiest corner of the octagon-room. His lip quivered and his chest heaved. He pulled his hat further down on his face, and walked quickly and quietly out.

We would gladly, indeed, see the octagon-room abolished. A picture is degraded, and an artist is insulted, by a painting being hung in this darksome and 'condemned cell.' The canvas gets a 'jail-bird' stamp, and its character is gone. In France, at the Palais-Royal, the young artists have a far better chance. After a stated time, the pictures, which, as the best have primarily had the best places, change stations with their inferiors; so that everybody in turn enjoys the advantages of the brightest lights and the most favourable points of view.

No need, of course, of attempting even the most summary sketch of the styles and ordinary subjects of the great painters who bear aloft the banner of the British school of art—of Landseer's glimpses of the Highlands; or Stanfield's skyey, breezy landscapes; of the quiet pieces of English rural scenery—meadows, and woodland glades, and river bits, fresh and rich, and green and natural—of our Lees, our Creswicks, our Coopers, our Witheringtons, our Redgraves, our Ausdills; of the classic elegance and elevated sentiment of groups by our Dyces and our Eastlakes; of the abundance of clever genre subjects—scenes from history or romance—poured in by our Wards, our Friths, our Pooles, our Elmores, our Eggs; or of—last, not least—the strange but clever vagaries of that new school, the pre-Raphaelites, who are startling both Academy and public by the quaintness of their art-theories, and the vehement intensity of their style of execution. All the summer long, the world is free to go and gaze upon them. All the summer long, the salons are crowded from morning till night—in the earlier hours, by artists and conscientious amateurs, the humbler sort of folks, who have daily work to do; in the later, by our old friends, the staring, insouciant, lounging, fashionable mob, whose carriages and Broughams go creeping lazily round and round Trafalgar Square. And at parties and balls, and all such reunions, the exhibition forms a main topic of discourse. Bashful gentlemen know it for a blessing. Often and often does it serve as a most creditable lever to break the ice with. The newspapers long resound with critical columns apropos of Trafalgar Square. You see 'sixth notice' attached to a formidable mass of print, and read on, or pass on, as you please. But you distinctly observe, at any rate, the social and conversational, as well as the artistic importance of the Royal Academy; and you confess, that a London season would be shorn of its brightest feature if you shut the gates of the National Gallery.

    A. B. R.

BILL WILLIAMS:

A STORY OF CALIFORNIA

It was in the first flush of the Californian fever, when moderate people talked of making one's fortune in a fortnight, and the more sanguine believed that golden pokers would soon become rather common, that the Betsy Jones from London to New Zealand, with myself on board as a passenger, dropped anchor in the bay of San Francisco, and master and man turned out for the diggings. It is my impression that not a soul remained on board but the surgeon, who was sick, and the negro cook, who wouldn't leave him; and the first man I met on the deck of the Go-Ahead steamer, which took as up to Sacramento, was our enterprising captain, clad in a canvas jacket and trousers, with the gold-washing apparatus, two shirts, and a tin kettle, slung at his back. The crew followed his example, and all the passengers. The latter were some thirty men, from every corner of Britain, and of various birth and breeding. There were industrious farm-servants and spendthrift sons of gentlemen among them. Some had sailed with money, to purchase land in the southern colony, some were provided only with their hopes and sinews; but California was an irresistible temptation to them all, and by general desire, they had come to try their luck at the washing. We had mere boys and men of grizzling hair in our company. Two were married, but they wisely left their wives in San Francisco, where, having brought with them some spare blankets and crockery, the ladies improvised a boarding-house, and I believe realised more than their wandering lords. Nevertheless, we, one and all, went up the broad river with loftier expectations than the prudent among us cared to make public.

There was one who made no secret of his hopes. The man's name was Bill Williams. I had had a loose acquaintance with Bill from school-time, for we had been brought up in the same good town of Manchester, where his father was a respectable tradesman, and his three brothers were still in business. Many a town and many a trade had Bill tried to little purpose. Never doing what his relatives could call well, he had gone through a series of failures, which tired out both kinsmen and creditors, and at length shipped for New Zealand, leaving a wife and seven children to the care of the said three brothers, till he should see how the climate agreed with him, and find a home for them. Bill did not belong to the extended fraternity of scapegraces. He was neither wild nor worthless, in the ordinary sense of those terms, but there was a faith in him, the origin of which baffled his most penetrating friends, that he was to get money somehow without working for it by any of the common methods. Unlike many a professor of better principles, Bill had carried that faith into practice. Under its influence, he had engaged in every scheme for making fortunes with incredible rapidity which coffee-house acquaintances or advertising sheets brought to his knowledge. There was not a banking bubble by which he had not lost, nor a mining company of vast promise and brief existence in which he had not held shares. Uncompromisingly averse to the jog-trot work of ordinary mortals. Bill was neither indolent nor timid in his own peculiar fashion of seeking riches. He would have gone up in a balloon to any height, or down in a diving-bell to depths yet unsounded, had the promise been large enough; and there was something so suitable to his inclinations in the Californian reports, that he was the prime mover of our visit to San Francisco, and the entire desertion of the ship. Strange to say, every man on board believed in Bill; from the captain to the cabin-boy, they had all listened to his tales. Where he had learned such a number, fortune knows, concerning found treasures, and wealth suddenly obtained by unexpected and rather impracticable ways. That was the whole circle of Bill's literature, and going over it appeared his chief joy; but the gem of the collection was a prophecy which a gipsy woman, whom his mother met once in a country excursion, had uttered concerning himself—that he should find riches he never wrought for, and leave a great fortune behind him. In the faith of that prediction Bill had lived; and it was a curious illustration of the sympathetic force inherent in a firm belief, that both passengers and seamen, even those who affected to laugh at the rest of what they called his wonderful yarns, entertained a secret conviction in favour of that tale, and felt secure of gold-gathering in Bill's company.

I am not certain that my own mind was entirely clear of a similar impression, but the two among us who contemned loudest and believed most devoutly, were the captain and his mate. They were brothers, and of Jewish parentage; the rest of the family still hang about an old-clothes and dyeing establishment in the neighbourhood of Houndsditch. I made that discovery by an accidental glance at a torn and mislaid letter before we left the Thames, and thought proper to reserve it for private meditation. The relationship of the two was kept a profound secret, for reasons best known to themselves; but to the eye at least it was revealed by their striking resemblance, both being small, spare, dingy-complexioned men, with keen, cunning eyes, and faces that looked as hard and sharp as steel. Ever since they first heard of the prophecy, they had half ridiculed, half flattered, and kept remarkably familiar with Bill. That familiarity rather increased as we went up the Sacramento. A goodly number we made on the deck of the Go-Ahead, our only place of accommodation; and at length we reached the new town, the golden city, which takes its name from the river, christened in old times of Spanish voyaging by some discoverer for his Catholic majesty, and which was to be the metropolis of the diggings. When I first saw it, it consisted of some hundred huts and tents, a large frame-house, in which an advertising board informed us there was an ordinary, a gaming-table, and all manner of spirits; and a timber wharf, somewhat temporarily put together, at which we landed. Yet the city was rising, as cities rise only in the western hemisphere: broad streets and squares were marked out; building was going forward on all sides; while bullock-wagons, canoes, and steamers, brought materials by land and water. The enterprise and vagrancy of all nations were there, as we had seen them at San Francisco; and those not engaged in building the town, were going off in caravans to the gold-gathering.

We fraternised with a company of Americans, who said they knew 'a bluff that flogged creation for the real metal,' and sold us two spare tents and a wagon, at a price marvellous to ask or pay. Our journey was not far. It led along the course of the Sacramento, and towards evening we came in sight of the diggings. A strange sight it was for one accustomed to London streets and shops. The Sacramento runs through a great inclined plane, sloping from the hill-country to the sea. Here and there, it is covered with low coppice or underwood; but the greater part is bare and sandy, or sprinkled over with thin, dry waving grass. As far as the eye could reach upon the plain, and up the river-banks, the smoke of fires was rising from hut, tent, and upturned wagon, which served for temporary dwellings. Groups of men were hard at work in small trenches, and numbers more stood with pan and cradle, washing out the gold in the shallow creeks of the river. 'Our location,' as the Americans called it, was an earthy promontory jutting far out into the water. Close by its landward base we pitched our tents, turned up our wagon—the bullocks that brought it belonged to the Americans, who promised to sell us a share when they were killed—and commenced operations. Digging out tenacious clay, and washing its sandy particles for minute grains of gold, sleeping under canvas at night, and living on half-cooked and not very choice provisions, have little in them of interest worth relating. The first thing that struck me, was the silence that prevailed among the workers. In a district so populous, scarcely a sound was heard from tent, trench, or river. Caravan after caravan, as it arrived, pitched its tents, and fell to work in the same quiet fashion. A cynical character might have attributed this to the absence of all feminine faces, for in my time there was not a woman at the diggings. Incredible as it may seem to the fair ones themselves, they were not missed; but nobody missed anything except gold. Relations parted; old comrades left each other with scarcely a leave—taking in search of better gatherings; our American friends began to get tired of the bluff that flogged creation; for although we were getting gold, it was but little, and the more impatient spirits of our company departed with them to find another.

I wondered that Bill did not join their company. He was long ago weary of gold-washing; the work was too regular, and the returns far too slow for him. He used to declare that shopkeeping was better; and it is probable that most of us had similar convictions regarding the vocations we had left in Britain; but except occasionally cooking for the rest, smoking the tobacco he had providently brought with him, and suggesting wild projects of digging down the bluff, and dredging the river for lamps of gold, which, he said, all the grains we found came off, Bill at last did nothing at all. With hard labour and harder fare, we had collected some of us more and some less of the precious dust; but nobody's fortune was yet made, and the rainy season set in.

The heavy rains confined us for days to the shelter of tent and wagon; but the days were nothing to the nights, which on the banks of the Sacramento are almost equinoctial throughout the year; and we had neither coal nor candle. All the fuel that could be found was rather too little for culinary purposes. Concerning the rest of our comforts, there is no use in being particular; but at intervals between the drowning showers, we were willing enough to come out and work, though the muddy soil and the swollen river made our labour still harder, and our profits less. The best service was done us by an honest Paisley weaver, who had left his helpmate and two children at San Francisco, in hopes of taking back, quite full, a strong chest, of some two hundredweight capacity, which he had brought with infinite pains to the diggings. He enlivened our wet leisure by repeating whole volumes of Burns and Scott. Bill also returned to his wonderful stories, though the captain and mate sneered at them more than ever; indeed, they were by far the most discontented of the company, and an unaccountable sort of distrust seemed growing between them and Bill. At length, fever and ague began to thin the ranks of the gold-seekers; we saw the working-parties around us diminish day by day, and graves dug in the shadows of the low coppice. Our company kept lip amazingly, perhaps because, according to the captain's counsel, we held but little communication with other workers; but the want of the buffalo-meat, which the Indian traders were accustomed to bring, was much felt among us; and one day less rainy than usual, Bill Williams, as the idlest, was sent up the river's bank, on their wonted track, to look out for their coming. The rest were busy, and did not miss him; but I thought he stayed long. The sky became unusually dark; great clouds floated over us from the west, and then broke with a sudden thunder-crash, which was renewed every five minutes with such rain and lightning as I had never seen. We ran to our tents, and, when fairly sheltered, Bill also arrived, wet to the skin, out of breath, and looking terribly frightened. He said, hastily, that he had seen nothing, and no word of the Indians; but the poor fellow began to shiver as he spoke, and before evening the fever was strong upon him.

To keep the rest safe, he was quartered alone in a small hut which the Americans had left us. It was a poor shelter, being built of turf, and roofed with boughs and grass, but as good as any we had. There was no surgeon among us, and handing him food or drink was deemed a perilous business; but all his comrades had a sort of a liking for Bill, and, besides, he was regarded as the palladium of the party. The fever was not violent, though Bill raved at times, and all his wanderings were after gold. I have heard him talk for half-hours together in a loud whisper, as if communicating a secret to some very dull car, concerning a pool among rocks, with glistening sands, and something shining far down in a crevice. He was restless, too, and kept looking out on the track of the Indians after they had come and gone. One evening I observed him particularly so. The night fell with heavy rain; we all took early to shelter, and slept so soundly, that Bill was forgotten among us; but in the morning we found him lying wrapped in his blanket, as thoroughly wet as if he had been dipped in the river, while the hut remained quite dry. Where he had been, or under what illusion of the fever, we could not learn, for he never spoke a rational word after. The wet and exposure increased his malady tenfold. He became fiercely delirious, and struck at whoever approached him, swearing he would let nobody kill him for his gold. The captain warned us all, that this was the most dangerous time for infection; but I saw that he and his brother had got wind of something, for their eyes were never off the hut.

Towards the second evening, Bill grew worse, his ravings became faint and low, and he lay gathered up on a corner of his mattress. I had placed a pitcher of water as near him as possible, escaping by chance a blow which the poor soul struck at me in his feverish fury; but I could not help thinking of him when we had all gone to rest. The night was so still, that I could hear the rush of the river and the cries of the night-hawks on its opposite bank; but being unable to sleep, I crept out of the tent, and looked to Bill's hut. A smothered sound of scuffling came from that direction, and stepping nearer, I saw by the rising moon, which just then shone with extraordinary brightness, two men struggling, as it seemed for life, in the narrow space between Bill's bed and the door.

'If you don't give me the full half, I'll tell them all,' said the voice of the captain's brother; but almost as he spoke, his antagonist threw him heavily back. I knew it was upon poor Williams, for a low moan reached my ear, and I sprang forward just in time to intercept the victor, who stumbled over me as he rushed out, and a heavy bag rolled from him. The next moment the other was at my side, and I stood face to face with the captain and his brother in the broad moonlight. The bag for which they had sneaked, and sinned, and scuffled, had burst by the fall, and its contents—stones, gravel, and sand, with some small sparkles of gold-dust amongst them—were scattered at my feet. Both stood stupefied, and I stepped into the hut; but Bill was dead, and growing cold, with his stiff hands stretched out, as if clutching at something, and a wild expression of pain and anger in the ghastly face, which lay turned up to the moon. Her light filled the hut, and lay upon plain, and tent, and river. It was a glorious night, such as sometimes shines in the gold-country. I woke up my comrades, and told them what I had seen, but they all said: 'Poor Bill! How could they help it? and it was a good thing that the captain and his chum had been disappointed;' upon which every man composed himself again to sleep.

Next morning, the captain and mate were gone with all their traps, having joined, as we afterwards heard, a company returning to San Francisco. We laid Bill beside the gold-seekers who rested in the coppice, and our company broke up, and scattered away: some settled at San Francisco; some went to the United States; and I, having collected through so many hardships almost a pound of dust, returned to the employment I had left in London with such high contempt. From an old comrade, however, still located at the diggings, I heard by letter that a party of Americans had made a great discovery of gold among some rocks in a creek of the Sacramento, and that they had found, sticking fast in a crevice close by, a small spade marked with the name of Bill Williams, which the poor fellow had cut on the handle, as I well remembered, in one of his many idle hours. This explained to me Bill's long absence when he went to look for the Indians, his after-anxiety, and where he had been in the delirium of the fever, filling up that canvas bag which so fatally deceived the captain and his brother. The last I heard of these worthies was, that they had gone to the diggings in Australia; and I never see gold in any shape without a recollection of their disappointment, and my own experiences in California.

HYGIENIC CHANGE OF AIR

The age of hygiene is rapidly approaching, when the exhibition of drugs will be the exception instead of the rule in medical treatment. For this reason, the effect of climate on disease is rising into a subject of first-rate importance, and, no longer a prejudice or a tradition, submits to the investigations of science. The chief recent writers on what we already presume to call climatology, are Sir James Clark in England, Schouw in Sweden, and Carrière in France; and now there comes Dr Burgess, armed with the united authority of these physicians, and with his own experience, to indoctrinate the public as well as the profession. His book is of moderate size and price, and we recommend it to all invalids, whether they are able to travel abroad, or are confined by circumstances to their own country; but in the meantime, as the subject is both new and interesting to general readers, we propose giving them an inkling of what it contains.[2 - Climate of Italy in Relation to Pulmonary Consumption: with Remarks on the Influence of Foreign Climates upon Invalids. By T. H. Burgess, M. D., &c. London: Longman, Brown, Green, & Longmans. 1852.]

We do not mean that the subject of climate is new in itself: it is only new in its treatment. We have all, from our earliest youth, heard of the effects of climate; we have all been brought up to believe in certain foreign places; and we have all observed that when—consumption, for instance—approaches its last stage (rarely before), it is shipped off, as a matter of course, for Italy or the south of France. And, alas! we have all heard from the wan lips of the stricken one excluded by poverty from the privilege of foreign travel: 'If I could but get to a warm climate, I should live!' Such notions, right or wrong, depended exclusively upon habit or prejudice. Experience had no effect upon them, any more than it had upon the orthodox course of medicines which entitled the death of a patient to be considered professionally legitimate. Sometimes, indeed, the venue was changed, and one place became more fashionable than another to die in. Here the group of English tombs grew gray and ancient, and there a new city of the silent sprang up with the suddenness of an American emporium. But still the cry was: 'A warm climate! Give us Italy, or we perish!'

But we need not say the cry was: it continues to this moment. Such impressions are long of being dispelled; it takes a great many years for the voice of doubt even to reach completely the public ear; and we think it a privilege to be able to take such advantage of our wide circulation as will give repining invalids to understand, that the advantages of a foreign climate are closely limited by one portion of the profession, and considered by another portion as highly problematical, if not entirely visionary. This applies, however, mainly to consumption; for the advantages of the climatic change are seldom denied in dyspepsy, rheumatism, scrofula, and the tribe of nervous diseases. Even in these, however, the locality chosen is rarely a proper one. There are countries which, if they could only obtain the stamp of fashion, would be invaluable to the invalid. 'The climate of Norway, for example,' says Dr Burgess, 'is admirably suited, during several months of the year, between the middle of May and the middle of September, for certain forms of dyspepsy, lesions of the nervous system affecting the mind, or that form of general innervation which results from an overwrought brain, and diseases of repletion. But Norway is little frequented, because it is not fashionable, although it would be difficult to point out a more appropriate occasional residence for the numerous class of invalids just mentioned, than Christiania, with its picturesque environs, sublime scenery, and clear and rarefied atmosphere.'

The non-professional predilection in favour of a warm climate for consumption, may be referred, we suspect, to the analogy that exists between the earlier stages of that disease and those of a common cold. In fact, in most cases in this country, consumption is for a long time styled a cold; then it becomes a bad cold; then a worse; till it is impossible to withhold from it the more formidable name. A cold, however, it should be considered, occurs as frequently in summer as in winter; and in neither is it owing to the temperature, whether high or low, but to the atmospheric changes. The warmer the weather is, the greater will be the morbific effect of a cold draught of air. That a warm climate in itself is neither prevention nor cure in consumption, may be inferred from the prevalence of the complaint in all latitudes. In India and in Africa it is as rife as in any part of Europe. By the Army Reports from Malta, we find that upwards of 30 per cent. of the whole number of deaths throughout the year is caused by phthisis. In Madeira, according to Dr Heineken, Dr Gourlay, and Dr Mason, no disease is more common among the natives than pulmonary consumption. At Nice, it is stated by Dr Meryon, more natives die annually of consumption than in any town in England of the same amount of population. In Genoa, one of the most prevalent and fatal of the indigenous diseases is pulmonary consumption. In Florence, pneumonia is marked by a suffocating character, and rapid progress towards its last stage. In Naples, 1 death from consumption occurs in a mortality of 2-1/3 while in the hospitals of Paris, where phthisis is notoriously prevalent, the proportion is only 1 in 3¼. In short, in all the celebrated sanatoria to which we fly for relief, we find the disease as firmly established as at home.

If we examine the analogies presented by the history of the inferior animals, we find no argument in favour of a foreign climate. The fishes, birds, and wild beasts of one region, die in another. 'Man, although endowed in a remarkable degree, and more so than any other animal, with the faculty of enduring such unnatural transitions, nevertheless becomes sensible of their injurious results. For familiar illustrations of this influence, we have only to look to the broken-down constitutions of our Indian officers, or to the emaciated frame of the shivering Hindoo who sweeps the crossings of the streets of London. The child of the European, although born in India, must be sent home in early life to the climate of his ancestors, or to one closely resembling it, in order to escape incurable disease, if not premature death. Again, the offspring of Asiatics born in this country pine and dwindle into one or other of the twin cachexiæ—scrofula and consumption; and, if the individual survives, lives in a state of passive existence, stunted in growth, and incapable of enduring fatigue. If such extreme changes of climate prove obnoxious to the health of individuals having naturally a sound constitution, how are we to expect persons in a state of organic disease to be thereby benefited? In fact, view the subject in whatever light we may, we must eventually arrive at the natural and rational conclusion—that nature has adapted the constitution of man to the climate of his ancestors. The accident of birth does not constitute the title to any given climate. The natural climate of man is that in which not only he himself was born, but likewise his blood-relations for several generations. This is his natural climate, as well in health as when his constitution is broken down by positive disease, or unhinged by long-continued neglect of the common rules of hygiene.' It is Dr Burgess's theory, therefore, that when change is necessary, a modification of the patient's own climate—that is to say, change of air in the same climate—is more in accordance with the laws of nature, and more likely to effect good, than a violent transition to warmer countries.

With regard to the curability of this disease, there is now, we believe, no doubt of the fact, although, unfortunately the process has not yet come completely into the hands of the physician. That a cure has frequently taken place, somehow or other, even in advanced stages of pulmonary consumption, has been demonstrated by post-mortem examinations; but nature herself seems, in these cases, to have been her own doctor, for no mode of treatment of general applicability has been discovered. Some think that the progress of tubercles may be arrested in the first stage—others, that nothing can be effected till the second. Some resort to the water-cure—others, to the still more marvellous Spanish baths of Panticosa; and others, again, swear by cod-liver oil. As to the last remedy, our author quotes the statements of Dr Williams, 'that the pure fresh oil from the liver of the cod is more beneficial in the treatment of pulmonary consumption than any agent, medicinal, dietetic, or regimenal, that has yet been employed. Out of 234 cases carefully recorded, the oil disagreed, and was discontinued, in only 9 instances. In 19, although taken, it appeared to do no good; whilst in the larger proportion of 206 out of 234, its use was followed by marked and unequivocal improvement—this improvement varying in degree in different cases, from a temporary retardation of the progress of the disease, and a mitigation of distressing symptoms, up to a more or less complete restoration to apparent health. The most numerous examples of decided and lasting improvement, amounting to nearly 100, have occurred in patients in the second stage of the disease, in which the tuberculous deposits begin to undergo the process of softening. The most striking instance of the beneficial operation of cod-liver oil in phthisis, is to be found in cases in the third stage—even those far advanced, where consumption has not only excavated the lungs, but is rapidly wasting the whole body with copious purulent expectoration, hectic, night-sweats, colliquative diarrhœa, and other elements of that destructive process by which, in a few weeks, the finest and fairest of the human family may be sunk to the grave. The power of staying the demon of destruction sometimes displayed by the cod-liver oil is marvellous.' Dr Burgess, however, although witnessing the same results even in far-gone cases, limits their duration to a year or eighteen months, after which the medicine lost its effect. Although the oil, therefore, is serviceable through the process of nutrition, he considers it no specific, and concludes on the subject thus: 'All that our present knowledge enables us to state positively on the subject is this: cod-liver oil is the most effectual stay to the progress of consumption, in a great majority of cases, that we possess; this salutary action is not always lasting, and there are cases in which its administration cannot be borne, and others in which it produces no good effects whatever. In those cases in which the stomach rejects the pure oil, if it be given in combination with phosphoric acid, it will generally be borne easily, and the acid will assist the tonic action of the oil.'

The non-professional notion respecting the curative powers of climate is, that by breathing a mild and soothing atmosphere, the phthisical patient withdraws irritation, and leaves nature at liberty to effect her own cure. But this, it seems, is entirely erroneous, inasmuch as it is through the skin, not the lungs, that a warm climate acts beneficially. When an atmospheric change takes place so as to produce a chill, 'whereby the cutaneous transpiration is instantly checked, the skin then becomes dry and hard, so that the respiratory organs suffer from the excessive action they now undergo, for the matter of transpiration must be eliminated through the lungs if the action of the skin be interrupted.' This is illustrated by the instantaneous relief usually afforded by free perspiration in cases where difficult breathing and oppression of the chest have been occasioned by artificial heat. What really soothes, therefore, is equability of climate, not high temperature. Some authors even think that a cold climate is more suitable for consumption than a warm one, and point to Upper Canada, with its pure, dry, tonic atmosphere, affording hardly any trace of the complaint at all.

Here we might stop, as the nature of our work precludes our following Dr Burgess in his exposition of the action of climate on the lungs and skin; but it may be useful, and at any rate amusing, to trace his iconoclastic progress through the popular shrines of Hygiea on the continent.

Malta is a famous resort for phthisical patients, although during the winter and spring the weather is cold and variable, and in autumn the sirocco is frequent. When a sirocco has blown for some days, it lulls suddenly, and is succeeded by an equally strong breeze from the north-west, contrasting violently with the former in temperature and everything else. The extremes of heat and cold are as great here and in other places in the Mediterranean as in London. In Malta, our author saw five or six cases of bronchitis, which in a single month terminated in incurable phthisis; and in two cases, six weeks only elapsed between the first signs of the tuberculous deposit and the death of the patients.

Madeira, a still more popular sanatorium for this disease, is a complete delusion. Instead of the climate being essentially dry, it is saturated with humidity during a great part of the year; and the peculiar sirocco of the place is of a hot, dry, irritating nature. An intelligent medical author, who had resorted to Madeira for change of air, remarks, that 'very frequent and remarkable variations in a given series of years, incontestably prove that Madeira is no more to be relied on than any other place for certainty of fine weather, and that it has equally its annual variations of temperature.... From what has been stated by writers, a person might be led to believe that disease was scarcely known there; but I am afraid, that were the subject thoroughly investigated, as it ought to be, few places would be found where the system is more liable to general disorder; while, at the same time, I suspect that the average duration of life would turn out to be inferior to that of our own country.'

Our author knows no place more unfavourable to patients suffering from organic diseases of the lungs, than the far-famed sanatoria—Aix and Montpellier. The atmosphere is pure, but ever and anon keen and piercing, and the bise and marin—one cold and cutting, and the other damp—irritate the lungs, and excite coughing. Add to this, that Provence is proverbially the land of dust, and, what is worse, the land of the mistral—a wind from the north-west, which carries stones, men, and carriages before it. 'For several days in spring the climate may no doubt be delicious, although, however, always too warm about mid-day, when suddenly the mistral, of evil celebrity, begins to blow. It is difficult to give an adequate idea of the change, or of the injurious effects of the climate under the influence of this scourge. The same sun shines in the same bright blue sky, but the temperature is glacial. The sun is there only to glare and dazzle, and seems to have no more power in producing warmth, than a rushlight against the boisterous winds, which chill the very marrow in one's bones. During the prevalence of this wind, it is impossible to stir out of doors without getting the mouth and nostrils filled with dust. All nature seems shrivelled and dried up under its baneful influence.'

Nice, likewise, is scourged by the mistral, which there, however, divides its empire with winds from the north and north-east. 'But one of the greatest vices characterising the climate of Nice, if not the greatest, is the remarkable variation of temperature noticed between day and night—in the sun and in the shade. The land or continental winds prevail during the night; the southerly or maritime during the day. The former are cold and dry; the latter, soft and humid. As soon, therefore, as the former subside, and the sun rises in the horizon, the humidity commences to shew itself in the atmosphere; whilst, on the contrary, when the diurnal winds cease, and the sun sets, the above hygrometric condition of the air disappears.' M. Carrière cannot conceive why our countrymen prefer Nice to a milder climate, and considers that the annual mortality in the English colony ought to discourage other hectic invalids from going thither.

Central Lombardy is, in general, characterised by marshy swamps poisoning the whole atmosphere with their miasmatic exhalations. The meteoric influences are decidedly cold and variable; and the 'extremes of temperature increase in proportion as we approach the valleys at the foot of the Central Alps, especially those most distant from the Adriatic coast.' This climate, our author tells us, cannot afford more benefit to the consumptive than that of the fens of Lincolnshire, or of the marshes of Holland. Brescia, Pavia, Mantua, and other Lombard towns, also share in this character; and at Verona, Mr B. Honan writes, that of all humbugs, the humbug of an Italian climate is the most intolerable.

At Genoa, although the air is pure and transparent in fine weather, it is liable to sudden gusts of wind and violent transitions dangerous to the invalid.

'In no part of England could a climate be found more unfavourable for consumptive invalids than that of Florence, a town built in a deep ravine, almost surrounded by the Apennines, and intersected by a squalid river.... Extreme cold in winter, great heat in summer, the prevalence of the northerly winds, the chilling effects of which are not always neutralised by the antagonistic winds, rapid and violent transitions, profoundly affecting the system, even in healthy persons; and combined with these violent atmospheric and thermal variations are also, in similar proportions, hygrometric and electric ever-changing influences.' Leghorn, the seaport of Tuscany, is built in a sunk locality, in the midst of a marshy country. Beggars, galley-slaves, assassins, smugglers, these are the picturesque portions of the inhabitants; and the promenade is an arid beach, anything but soothing to the respiratory organs. The English cemetery is a touching spectacle, with its numerous monuments of brilliant marble; among which stands conspicuous the tomb of Smollett.

Of Pisa, the grand central depôt of Italy for foreign consumptive patients, Dr Burgess says: 'The excess of humidity and warm temperature of the Pisan climate depress the vital force, induce an overwhelming lassitude, and are, in my opinion, most unfavourable elements in a climate so generally recommended for pulmonary consumption. Whatever effect the humid mildness of the air may have in diminishing excitability, and in allaying pulmonary irritation in patients of a nervous temperament, it is decidedly injurious in those of a feeble and lymphatic habit.... The delusion of an Italian climate, as regards the cure or prophylaxis of tubercular consumption, is in no part of that country, so delightful to persons in sound health, more clearly portrayed than at far-famed Pisa. The stagnant life, the death-like silence, the dreary solitude of this dull town, whatever utility these elements may have in allaying the restless irritability of nervous and excitable patients, always produce serious evils upon those consumptive invalids of a melancholy turn of mind, or whose spirit is broken by hope deferred. Brooding over their melancholy condition, in a foreign land, away from the comforts of home, without the solace and cheering influence of friends and relations, they soon break down and perish.' M. Carrière and Sir James Clark consider the climate of Rome adapted only for consumptive patients in the first stage of the complaint; but Dr Burgess, after a train of reasoning founded on scientific facts, comes to a conclusion consonant with his own theory, that it is not adapted for consumption in any stage or form whatever.

It is needless to follow our author to Naples, for this place is admitted by all writers to be injurious in cases of pulmonary consumption; but we may conclude this fragmentary survey by stating that, according to Dr Burgess, the least injurious portions of Italy are the Lake of Como and the city of Venice, the air in neither of them being warm, but in both equable. Here we end as we began: 'It is a mistake to suppose that a warm, humid, relaxing atmosphere can benefit pulmonary disease. Cold, dry, and still air, appears a more rational indication, especially for invalids born in temperate regions.' It will be seen that our author differs occasionally from both his great predecessors, Sir James Clark and M. Carrière; but even in so doing, he has at least the merit of fairly opening out a most important subject.

Let it be understood, that we have merely mentioned the nature of the contents of this volume, without attempting to follow Dr Burgess either in his reasonings or in the facts on which these are founded. We have now only to recommend the work as one that will be found highly interesting and suggestive, both by the medical and non-medical reader.[3 - We print the above as we received it from a respectable contributor, but without giving any opinion ourselves upon a subject of which we are not qualified to judge.—Ed. C. J.]