I am so anxious to get on with the story of Realmah that I do not like to interrupt it by the account of long conversations. I cannot help, however, giving a part of a conversation which occurred when we assembled together to hear a reading. Sir John Ellesmere had been propounding one of his favourite maxims; namely, that all vice is but dulness.

_Ellesmere._ Not idleness, you know; but dulness. How often the word dull could advantageously be substituted for wicked, or malicious, or cruel, or criminal! Many a puffy, fluffy sentence of historians might be most advantageously abridged if they would but use the right words. I will give an instance.

An historian of the Huns, a learned Hun, not known to many people, but much studied by me, writes as follows of Attila:--“The great King’s disposition, which, even in his earliest years, could not have been accounted as humane and forbearing as that of other Huns, was now exacerbated by the impertinent and unwarrantable resistance which had been opposed to his victorious and civilizing arms by the inhabitants of Verona, Mantua, and Brescia: he felt that the power he had gained by unsparing vigour might be lost by the exercise of a mercy that would have been considered weakness: religious controversy, in the course of which a fanatic Christian had dared to suggest that the great King was the scourge of God, had not sweetened his temper, or soothed his suspiciousness: moreover, the number of his prisoners embarrassed and delayed his progress; and accordingly Attila resolved to put them all to the sword.”

Now, I should merely say, Attila was dull that day; and, wanting something to amuse him, ordered a general slaughter of the prisoners.

_Sir Arthur._ What an historian is lost to the world in this great lawyer! But what is your remedy, Ellesmere, for dulness?

_Ellesmere._ Oh, inducing men to take an interest in what you would call little things; in cultivating all manner of small pursuits--that is, if they cannot be persuaded to take up great ones. A man who loves his garden, and works in it, is sure to be a less dull, and therefore a better man, than other men who have no such pursuit. This is a very commonplace remark; but it is true.

_Milverton._ I quite agree with you.

_Ellesmere._ I don’t believe that any of you see the full force of what I mean. Calumny, ill-nature, malice--all the minor vices, which, however, give so much pain to the world, are merely functions, to use a mathematical phrase, of dulness.

Now, suppose I were to die suddenly. I might easily do so of irritable over-yawning some day in the House of Commons, or at the Bar. In the ---- case, that fellow Wordall spoke consecutively for three days--his speech in all exceeding fourteen hours, when it might easily have been made in one and a half. I had to listen, because I had to reply to the fellow, and I declare to you I might have expired then and there, from suppressed irritability.

Well, I die. Now I do believe I am not an unpopular fellow, and that a good many men rather like me than not; but their first feeling would be of satisfaction at something having happened that interested them, that they could go home and tell their wives: “My dear, such a sad thing has happened; Sir John Ellesmere is dead--and suddenly. You’ve heard of him, of course? He was Leonard Milverton’s great friend. A much cleverer fellow, by the way, as people, who knew them both, have often told me! There was always some good saying of his floating about the world. He was the man who said that the greatest humbug of all humbugs is the pretending to despise humbugs.”

“Poor fellow, I am afraid he had a sad time of it with Milady! You have only to look at her face to see that she has a temper of her own. A _nez_ does not become _retroussé_ by internal _angelic_ influences.” (Don’t hit me, Lady Ellesmere. Milverton, you should protect your guests against battery and assault.)

Now this heartlessness about my death; this just but depreciatory view of poor Milverton; this painful truthfulness about poor Lady Ellesmere,--all of it is the result, not of ill-nature, but of dulness. Dulness it is that creates the momentary unkindness. The same thing with calumny; people calumniate because they are dull; in nine times out of ten they do not mean any harm!

_Sir Arthur._ Moralist as well as historian! We shall never come to the end of Ellesmere’s powers. But what pursuit have you got, Sir John, which always prevents you from being dull, and therefore malicious?

_Lady Ellesmere._ Why, don’t you know, Sir Arthur? Perhaps, though, you thought the other day, when my amiable husband talked about setting up balloons, he was joking. Would that it were so! There is a back room in our house in town, where knocking and hammering, and screwing and pasting, and warming and cooling, and gas-burning, are constantly going on. He and his clerk--for they are both bitten with the same mania--shut themselves up in that room for hours; and it is as much as my place is worth to disturb them. Sometimes, when things are going well with them, I am kept awake through the small hours of the night to hear all about the machine, which is to combine lightness with strength and with power, and is to enable us all to be aëronauts. Truth, not dulness, compels me to say that my husband has all other demerits known in the human character but that of dulness--that is, dulness for himself, because he can make other people dull by being so eminently disagreeable.

_Sir Arthur._ I think you are paid off, Ellesmere, for what you have made your friends say about Lady Ellesmere; but if we once get into recriminations of this kind, we shall never have the reading: so please, Milverton, begin.

_Ellesmere._ Stay a bit. I must say more. I want to show you how benevolent my view of dulness makes me. When I hear that any man has been speaking ill of me behind my back, I am not angry with him, but I merely say to myself, “How dull he must have been to have had nothing better to do!” I long to address to him an oration in the form of a single sentence, the outlines of which I have often imagined, and talked over to myself. The gracious Milverton was good enough, as you will perhaps remember, to tell me, patronisingly, that some sentence I uttered some time ago was not so bad.

_Lady Ellesmere._ Take breathing time, John. I wonder, by the way, whether ears can take hearing time; for, if so, we must all prepare for John’s oration, which is to be compressed into one grand, full (perhaps we may say overflowing) sentence.

_Ellesmere._ Yes, my dear, prepare; for it is always a difficult thing for a woman to listen for any time to anything that is well worth hearing.

I should take my dull maligner aside (probably it would be in Westminster Hall), tell him I had heard what he had said of me--prove to him that it was not my demerit, but his dulness, which had caused him to speak in that manner of me; and should then address him thus:--

“What, dull! when you do not know what gives its loveliness of form to the lily, its depth of colour to the violet, its fragrance to the rose; when you do not know in what consists the venom of the adder any more than you can imitate the glad movements of the dove; when, unlike the wisest of monarchs and of men, far from knowing trees as he did, ‘from the cedar tree that is in Lebanon even unto the hyssop that springeth out of the wall,’ you do not know anything even of the two extremes of Solomon’s great knowledge in this behalf; and when even these crushed syringa[32] leaves might form a subject for you to investigate, which, for the remainder of your natural life, should save you from dulness:--what, dull! when the all-pervading forces and powers of chemistry are unknown to you; when light, heat, electricity, are mere words to you, clad with no more ideas for you than they are for that boy who is whistling as he goes along, unmindful, nay unconscious, of the beauty and grandeur of this glorious building:--what, dull! when earth, air, and water are all alike mysteries to you; and when, as you stretch out your hand, you do not touch anything the properties of which you have mastered; while, all the time, Nature is inviting you to talk earnestly with her, to understand her, to subdue her, and to be blessed by her:--what, dull! when you have not travelled to the ends of the earth, and have not seen what your forefathers, the mighty men of old--some of whom were not dull men--have formed, and built, and restrained, and vanquished:--what, dull! when you have travelled over so few minds, and have not read the hundred great books of the world--for there have been at least a hundred books written by men who were not dull, and whose works fulfil the words of Samson, when he went down to Timnath to take a wife from among the Philistines, and found that which, as he said, combined leonine strength with honied sweetness:--what, dull! when you know nothing of the niceties of theology, the subtleties of metaphysics, the closeness of logic, the completeness of mathematics, the intricacies, and withal the beauties, of jurisprudence and of law:--dull, you say; and you know nothing, comparatively nothing, of the long, finely-woven chain-work of history, telling you, as best it can, of the innumerable tribes of men who have fought and bled--sinned, suffered, and rejoiced--even as we are now doing, in these which are rashly denominated the later ages:--what, dull! when Art divine, whether expressed in painting, in sculpture, or in architecture, is a thing which, even when you admire it, you ignorantly gaze at, as the heathens at Athens ignorantly worshipped their ‘Unknown God;’--what, dull! when there are thousands, nay millions of human beings, at least as worthy as yourself (ay, and poor animals too; for God only knows how much they need care, and what a burden lies upon our souls for our conduct to them), some of whom might be aided, cheered, improved, invigorated, soothed, by the smallest deed or word of sympathy on your part. Go away, man; learn something, do something, understand something; and let me hear no more of your dulness condensing itself into malignity.”

Footnote 32:

Lady Ellesmere afterwards told us that Sir John was passionately fond of the syringa, and that she had made an arrangement for a gardener who comes to Covent Garden to supply her with flowers and leaves from this shrub, which, as she said, she sometimes gave her husband when he was good.

_Sir Arthur._ I think I see the poor man dazed and amazed by Ellesmere’s torrent of grand words, and passing the remainder of his life, not in the expression of dull malignity, but in the vain endeavour to recall Ellesmere’s sentence. By the way, is it not droll to see that he brought in, unconsciously, one or two legal phrases, such as, “in this behalf”--“Solomon’s knowledge in this behalf?”

_Mauleverer._ It was a full and gorgeous sentence. Ellesmere would be a grand fellow if he were not so disagreeable sometimes.

_Lady Ellesmere._ When? How? Where? Never to anybody, Mr. Mauleverer, but to me; and he has a right to be so to me, if he please.

_Milverton._ Don’t be angry, Mildred. Mauleverer only said that to tease you; and, as the vulgar say, to get “a rise” out of you.

_Lady Ellesmere._ I am much obliged to him, I am sure.

_Ellesmere._ Now then, Milverton, you may proceed. After a great effort of mind, one can never stoop to answer small criticisms.

_Milverton._ I will proceed: but after one of these grand flights of Ellesmere’s, which occur about two or three times a year, I really am ashamed to read to you my poor, slow, dull, creeping, crawling sentences.

[The reading was then continued.]

The Story of Realmah.