Every Saturday,
May 5, 1866.]

THE TOILERS OF THE SEA.

ing nothing to prove, is conspicuous all through. | verse intelligence, is a sphinx, propounding the terIt leaves the author free to work out each of his rible riddle, the riddle of evil." What is their law? characters completely, free to paint what is the main "All created beings return one into another. PourSuch is the terrifying law. subject of his work with an undivided energy and riture c'est nourriture. Frightful purifying of the enthusiasm. Perhaps, though, in one way this tells globe. Man, too, carnivorous man, is a satyr. Our against him. The stupendous force of the descrip-life is made of death. "Mais tâchons que la mort nous soit progrès. AsSuivons la tions of Nature and her works and laws-the theme We are sepulchres." But we are not quite left here. of the book is so overpowering that the incidents of the story and the interests of the people in it pirons aux mondes moins ténébreux. seem petty by comparison. There is probably a conscience qui nous y mène. Car, ne l'oublions ja It will be seen from this, that Victor Hugo is not design in this disproportion. The vastness of the mais, le mieux n'est trouvé que par le meilleur." unmeasured forces which labor and rage in the universe outside the minds of mortals is what the self- affected by the sea as other poets have been. Of importance of mortals pleasingly blinds them to. course, nobody expected to find him talking silly It is the eye of the poet which discerns this, and nonsense about its moaning over the harbor-bar, through nearly every page of Victor Hugo's story while men must work and women must weep, or we hear, as a ceaseless refrain to the loves and aspi- reducing the sea and the winds to the common rations and toils of his good men and his knaves drawing-room measure of polished sentimental pretture is that which has most attraction for him. Only alike, the swirling of the sea-winds and "the far- tiness. Here, as elsewhere, the terrible side of Nareaching murmur of the deep." The grandeur of the long episode of Gilliatt, re- here he seems to have been unusually insensible to covering the machinery of the steamboat from the the existence of her other aspect. Take the wellThe hideous creature is squatting in the terrific rock, may make us forget the singular power known picture of "The Toad" in the Légende des of the earlier scene at the same spot, where Sieur Siècles. Clubin found himself, "in the midst of the fog and road in a summer evening, enjoying himself after the waters, far from every human sound, left for his humble fashion. Some boys pass by, and amuse dead, alone with the sea which was rising, and the themselves by digging out its eyes, striking off its night which was approaching, and filled with a pro- limbs, making holes in it. The wretched toad tries found joy." The analysis of this joy of the scoun-feebly to crawl away into the ditch. Its tormentors drel and hypocrite, at finding himself free to enjoy the fruits of his scoundrelism, and to throw aside the burdensome mask of his hypocrisy, is powerful to a degree which makes one smile at the lavishness with which credit for power is so constantly given to novelists and poets. The dramatic force of the situation, the appalling mistake which the scoundrel has made, the sanguineness and shiftiness with which, like all hypocrites, he seeks to repair it, the swift and amazing vengeance which overtakes him, has perhaps never been surpassed. And the horror is not theatrical or artificial. The spot is brought vividly before us by no tricks, but by genuine imaginative power. The rock on which Clubin has, against his intention, driven the steamboat, is a block of granite, brutal and hideous to behold, offering only the stern, inhospitable shelter of an abyss. At its foot, far below the water, are caverns and "Here monstrous species Crabs mazes of dim passages. propagate, here they destroy one another. eat the fish and are themselves eaten. Fearful shapes, made to be seen by no human eye, roam in this dim light, living their lives. Vague outlines of open jaws, antennæ, scales, fins, claws, are there floating about, trembling, growing, decomposing, vanishing, in the sinister clearness of the wave.

To look into the depth of the sea is to behold the
imagination of the Unknown on its terrible side.
The gulf is like night. There, too, is a slumber, a
seeming slumber of the conscience of creation.
There, in full security, are accomplished the crimes
of the irresponsible. There, in a baleful peace, the
embryos of life, almost phantoms, altogether de-
mons, are busy at the fell occupations of the gloom."
The minute yet profoundly poetic description of
the most terrible of these monsters, in a succeeding
part of the book, is one which nobody who has once
read it can forget, any more than the horrors of
the Inferno of Dante can be forgotten. The pieuvre
at one extremity of the chain of existence "almost
"Optimism, which is
proves a Satan at the other."
true for all that, almost loses countenance before it.
Every malignant creature, like every per-

see an ass coming on drawing a cart, so, with a
scream of delight, they bethink themselves to put
the toad in the rut where it will be crushed by the
wheel of the cart. The ass is weary with his day's
work and his burden, and sore with the blows of his
master, who even then is cursing and bethwacking
him. But the ass turns his gentle eye upon the rut,
sees the torn and bleeding toad, and with a painful
effort drags his cart off the track. The whole pic-
ture gives one a heart-ache, but the gentleness of the
ass is the single touch which makes the thought of
so much horror endurable.

In the Toilers of the Sea we almost miss this single
touch. Watching the sea year after year in the land
of his exile, Victor Hugo has seen in it nothing but
sternness and cruelty. He finds it only the repre-
sentative of the relentless Fatality of Nature which
man is constantly occupied in combating and wrest-
ling with. It is so real, so tragically effective, that
such a reflection as that "Time writes no wrinkle
on its azure brow" must seem the merest mimicry
of poetic sentiment. The attitude which he has be-
fore assumed towards Society he also takes towards
external Nature. To Keats Nature presented her-
followed, a goddess with white and smooth limbs,
self as a being whom even the monsters loved and
and deep breasts, teeming with fruit and oil and
corn and flowers. Compared with the sensuous pas-
sion of Keats, the feeling of Wordsworth for Nature
Victor Hugo is impressed by
was an austere and distant reverence. He found in
her little more than a storehouse of emblems for the
better side of men.
Nature, not as a goddess to be sensuously enclapsed,
not as some remote and pure spirit, shining cold yet
benign upon men, but as men's cruel and implacable
foe. Other poets have loved to make her anthropo-
He holds with no such personification
morphic, and to invest her with the moral attributes
of mortals.
of Nature as a whole. Nature to him is little more
than a chaos of furious and warring Forces.

The prolonged and sublime description of the storm at the beginning of the third volume is what nobody but Victor Hugo could have conceived, be

ever feels a greater pleasure than that which re-
warded our first paying of the waiter. Calling for
the bill, and settling it off-hand was pleasant, but
the vail to the waiter was delicious. There he
stood, clothed in the canonicals of his order, and in-
vested with that dress coat to the dignity of which
you yourself had not yet aspired.
You could give
him just as much, or as little, as you liked. You
always liked giving him much if you had it; you
were, in fact, more than half afraid of him, if the
truth was told. A time comes when this respect
vanishes; you point roughly to the items of your
account, and inquire if attendance is included, send-

cause nobody else is so penetrated with a sense of the fierce eternal conflict which to him is all that Nature means. Take the tramp of the legion of the winds, for instance: "In the solitudes of space they drive the great ships; without a truce, by day and by night, in every season, at the tropic and at the pole, with the deadly blast of their trumpet, sweeping through the thickets of the clouds and billows, they pursue their black chase of the ships. They have fierce hounds for their slaves. They make sport for themselves. Among the waters and the rocks they set their hounds to bark. They mould the clouds together, and they rive them in sunder. As with a million hands, they knead the boundless sup-ing off the waiter to get himself stuck down for a ple waters." The gigantic wave, again, at a later period of the storm," which was a sum of forces, and had as it were the mien of a living being. You could almost fancy in that swelling transparent mass the growth of fins and gills. It spread itself forth, and then in fury dashed itself in pieces against the breakwater. Its monstrous shape was all ragged and torn in the rebound. There was left on the block of granite and timber the huge destruction of some portentous hydra. The surge spread ruin in its own expiring moment. The wave seemed to clutch and devour. A shudder quivered through the rock. There was a sound as of some growling monster, the froth was like the foaming mouth of a leviathan."

paltry shilling below the last brandy-and-soda you had before breakfast. Such is life. A waiter never again impresses you. His calling falls in your estimate to the level of the social area, but one remove from the cook.

Indeed, we believe there is no member of the community who is reckoned so small as a waiter. Who ever heard of one voting, or going to law, or beating his wife, or exercising any other privilege of an Englishman? He is even neglected in literature. You seldom find a waiter in a novel. He cannot claim descent from the drawers or tapsters of old; he figures not in Shakespeare or Ben; he does not belong to the serving men of Suckling, who "presented and away" at the feast commemorated by that famous knight. Mr. Tennyson, to be sure,

It has been said that the sublime picture of the storm-and the variety and movement in the pic-marked down the plump head-waiter at the "Cock"

ture are among its most splendid characteristics as poctic game, but it was only to surround him with makes us indifferent to the conclusion of the story. local color, to paint him, Teniers-like, pipe and pot, The truth is, that but for this the conclusion would with his mind enveloped in the fog of dinners, and be absurdly weak and unintelligible. It is the long his notions limited to steak and the willow pattern. exile of Gilliatt on the fierce rock in the isolation of Nor is the modern drama propitious to the napkin. the sea, his appalling struggles with all the forces of Occasionally, farce-writers engage a waiter for the nature in temporary alliance against him, which purpose of bringing in the crockery they intend to make the very gist and force of the final tragedy, have smashed in the course of the piece, but they the supreme Fatality. It is because we have seen give him nothing to say beyond "Yes, sir." The him in the presence of the raging troop of the winds, meek and deferential affirmativeness of "Yes, sir," is and battling with the storm of waters, that we feel supposed to express, as it were, the dropping-downthe weight of the blow which at last crushes him. deadness of waiterism. The phrase belongs to the But for this the whole story would be a piece of non-profession, as does also a certain gait. A waiter sensical sentimentality. It is this grand eipoveía which raises what might otherwise have been a mere idyl into a lofty tragedy. "Solitude had wrapped itself round him. A thousand menaces at once had been upon him with clenched hand. The wind was there, ready to blow; the sea was there, ready to roar. Impossible to gag the mouth of the wind; impossible to tear out the fangs from the jaws of the We are not at all as polite in hotels as at home. sea. Still he had striven; man as he was, he had We order a meal peremptorily. We smile with a fought hand to hand with the ocean and wrestled grim incredulousness when told we shall have it in with the tempest." Meanwhile, the object to attain a "quarter of an hour." When the time has exwhich he was waging his fearful war had been slow-pired, and our patience nearly with it, the waiter ly removing itself from his reach, and when he returned he returned to find it irrecoverably vanished.

WAITERS.

OUR readers will recollect in "David Copperfield" the account of David's first hotel experience, and especially the description of the waiter who drank the boy's beer, in order to save him from the fate of an apocryphal personage named Top-Sawyer. That waiter was out of the usual run of waiters. As a rule, those functionaries are kind to children. There are still a few snug hotels where old gentlemen bring lads to bait on the way to or from school, and the waiters in those establishments are attentive to the youngsters. We doubt whether, in after life, one

neither walks nor runs. He does something between a skim and a slide. There is caution in it (a view to breakages ahead) and still a jaunty affectation of the reckless. He must be a judge of human nature, at least of human nature expectant of dinner, when the animal is predominant, and in temper like that proverbial bear whose head is tender.

lays on the salt, emphatically proposing the cel
lar, as it would seem, as a sort of ground to rest
our appetite on for a while. If still delayed, he
gives us bread, and then pickles, with an intent
doubtless to distribute our vexation among many
things, that it may not collectively fall upon
himself
and the malingering mutton. This is one of the
mysteries of the craft. It is dying out before
modern improvements, however, and is not notice-
able in the monster hotels. Indeed, the latter pos-
sess a type of waiter peculiar to them,
we had
almost said, a monster waiter. As our cupola or
turret vessels will probably demand a different chip
from that of the old sailor block, so the huge cara-
vanserais claim for their service another description
of attendant from that which we are accustomed to.

May 5, 1866.]

"effusion."

The class is as yet scarce defined enough to set it | ments is sometimes necessary. Dregs are considered out in detail. by him as perquisites, and, in fact, he regards all the Waitering admits of variation, and can be accom-flotsam and jetsam of supper in the same light. He modated to circumstances. There is, for instance, will undertake the decanting of the sherry at very the music-hall waiter. Twenty years ago nobody short notice, and almost with what the French call could have predicted him. He brings to his occupation a disposition utterly opposed to the habits of his Next comes the club-waiter, who studies the memancestors. He condescends to ask your orders. He bers, and is careful to hang on the beck of the comdoes not permit you to have unmixed the music his mittee. He can oppress a visitor grandly. His employer provides. If he perceives you entertaining movements are dignified, especially when he is yourself in the company of kindred spirits with the freighted with an expensive wine, which he opens in charming "Slap Bang," he sidles up, and wishes such a manner that, suppose you are taking your to know if you "ave said gin 'ot." It is his busi-modest beer in the neighborhood, the cork sounds ness also to ascertain the moment of the evening most conducive to the prosperity of the proprietor. Generally, when the irrepressible nigger or the great' "Tolderol comes on, the music-hall frequenters liquor up. The stages of festivity are marked or checked off by tumblers. Then the waiter improves the shining hour, and, calm midst the storm of "hankore,” the reek of punch, and the clash of four-and-twenty fiddlers, he flits from the tables to the bar, dexterous and imperturbable. He is remarkable for his ingenuity in making pence play a prominent part in the matter of change. Whatever he gets, copper comes of it; there is always a twopence or so slinking obsequiously from the silver in his direction, and which, on the slightest intimation from you, vanishes with an astound-cloud of witnesses; and we should like to see those ing alacrity.

66

like a fillip in the face of your poverty. He occasionally serves the billiard-room, but with an implied protest. He prefers the haunt of hungry sinners, and takes not kindly to cues; he is often on bad terms with the marker.

Waiters towards each other are an unsocial class. In this age of universal institutes and societies, we wonder they do not resolve into an academy, as the hairdressers have done, and inaugurate it with an exhibition of skill. We once heard a waiter boast, in a tone as if he felt sure of fame, that he was the only member of his craft who could cut sandwiches from hot bread. A soirée of waiters, at which the nice conduct of the bread-basket and the napkin would be emulously displayed, ought to attract a

who daily contemplate the famous roast joint of this country go in for a larger slice of the social advantages within their reach.

FOREIGN NOTES.

THE first volume of a native translation of Shakespeare has just been issued at Bombay.

THE anniversary of the birth of Hahnemann was celebrated by the Homœopathic Society of Paris by banquet on the 10th of April.

IN Paris, the average sale per week of artificial eyes amounts to four hundred. One of the leading oculists "receives" in a magnificent saloon, resplendent with gilding and mirrors. He evidently has an eye for business!

The Cremorne waiter is of another kidney. He is a swell in his line, but inexorable as to the dole; even should you help yourself to a cigar from a box, he appears with a light, and thereby prescriptively assesses a further duty on the already overtaxed luxury. He is exceedingly wide awake, this Cremorne waiter, and no alarum yet invented will call you early enough to get round him. The whitebait waiter is more or less continental; his poll and head are placed at a Parisian angle. He is a stickler for the wine list. He is very discreet and polished. He a is used to little parties. During tête-à-tête dinners he always looks out of the window at the right time, and on the same occasions he is most particular in knocking at the door to announce the Hansom or the Brougham. His costume is perfect, and fit for any ball-room. Waiters, like giants, usually go in the legs. Neat enough to the waistcoat, you not unfrequently find them baggy at the knees, and running to slippered slovenliness in the extremities. A whitebait waiter is admirably chokered. His linen is really a credit to his laundress. This gives him not only a gentlemanly, but a clergyman-like air. Very different from him is the waiter of an à-lamode beef shop. This latter is spotted with cold gravy from head to foot. If he has seen better days his nose is usually red, and his complexion pasty. There is an indescribable broken look about him. He jingles forks and knives in a corner drearily when the customers are helped, as though he felt that all was vanity and vexation of waiters. appears to be forever figuratively contemplating his visage in a perpendicular spoon. Nothing rouses him, and you are inclined uncharitably to believe that his apathy and ill-humor arise to a considerable extent from his being kept so long from getting drunk. Where does this waiter live, and what will he do when he pawns the gravy-spotted suit?

He

THE Emperor of Austria, on Good Friday, went through the annual ceremony of washing the feet of twelve poor old men and as many old women, their aggregate ages amounting, for the former to 1,069 years, and for the latter 1,063 years. The eldest of the group was 96 years of age; the youngest, 85.

THE last literary production of the late Master of Trinity was his article on Mr. Grote's "Plato," in the April number of Fraser's Magazine. It is reported that Mr. John Stuart Mill has written an elaborate review of the same work, which will appear in the forthcoming number of the Edinburgh Review.

A DANGEROUS hoax, says the London Spectator, was played off on the 1st April. About 300 tickets were sold for a penny each, signed "Wildboar," purporting to admit people to the Zoological Gardens on Sunday, and promising that all the beasts should walk in procession. The buyers of course thronged the gates, and when refused admittance became so violent that the authorities of the GarBesides the regular waiter, there is a sort of casual, dens sent for a strong force of police. An effort who, on the annual dinner of a genteel family, is was subsequently made to punish one of the sellers sent with the other confectionery from the cook-shop. of the tickets for obtaining money under false preHe is generally cheap, and a watch on his move-tences, but it failed. The author of the tickets

VOL. I.]

A Journal of Choice Reading,

SELECTED FROM FOREIGN CURRENT LITERATURE.

SATURDAY, MAY 12, 1866.

[No. 19.

some relation between the symptoms of choleraic
collapse and the loss of fluid by vomiting and purg-
Yet the authority of all who have written
ing.
upon cholera from much experience, in India and in
Europe, affirms that there is no such direct relation;
that they often bear even an inverse ratio to one
another. Cholera cases have been most malignant
where there was least passage of fluid from the intes-
tines. If there were any correspondence between
loss of fluid and degree of collapse, it would still
have to be shown that they stood to each other in
the relation of cause and effect, that they were not
effects of a common cause. But in fact, so far as
there is any relation at all between the discharge of
fluid from the system and the peril of collapse, it
points to the existence, not of a direct, but of an in-

verse ratio between them.

THE FIRST BLOW AGAINST CHOLERA. THERE is every reason to expect that we shall hear more of Cholera next summer, and that it may come nearer home to us than it did last year. While politicians have been sitting in conference for the arrest of the outlawry of the disease as a political offender, one of the most eminent of our English physicians has been ripening the fruits of his own study and experience, and he has within the last few weeks given them to the public in a little book of "Notes on Cholera," which concerns the public very much. For in that small book of about a hundred lightly printed pages there is given to the world what the foremost members of the medical profession are now readily accepting as the first true and complete explanation of the disAgain, if the collapse in cholera be caused by the ease, which is moreover such a demonstration as immediately excludes the method of treatment found-watery constituents of the blood, it should have such ed upon a mistaken theory hitherto dominant, the symptoms as an excessive drain of fluid from the blood method which has actually aggravated danger, is known usually to produce. The collapse caused by a profuse drain from the blood is marked by a small killed, instead of cured. and frequent pulse, pale skin, dim sight, and singing in the ears; symptoms so much increased by the erect posture, that in extreme cases the raising of the head, even for a moment, from the pillow causes fainting. The collapse of cholera is quite different from this. There is the peculiar blueness and coldness, with other symptoms indicating interference with aeration of the blood; and the patient, whose skin is blue and icy cold, with a pulse hardly perceptible, is often able to stand up, and even walk. Several authors have expressed their surprise at the amount of muscular exertion of which even a cold and pulseless patient is capable. Again, the patient, exhausted by drain from the blood, whether of water alone or of the blood constituents, slowly recovers strength.

The first real blow struck against Cholera is the discovery of what it is. For the physicians are its true antagonists, and knowledge of their enemy is the condition of successful battle. Some of our readers may remember that at the time of the cholera epidemic in 1854, Dr. George Johnson, who was then, as now, physician to King's College Hospital, and whose credit stood high in his profession for important original additions that had been made by him to the known pathology of disease of the kidney, strongly supported, by results of his own hospital experience, the treatment of cholera with castor oil. He spoke with knowledge and with reason, though he is now convinced that he often gave excessive quantities of castor oil. Upon what path of inquiry he was travelling when he made that recommendation we are now quite able to understand. The true doctrine of the nature of cholera is explained in his little book with a masterly clearness" a man stand at his door on Wednesday, who on and cogency, is really unassailable by any rebutting Monday was in perfect collapse"; and a professionfacts, and will henceforth pass bodily into every al observer of the disease in India speaks of recovgood text-book upon the character and treatment of eries from cholera as "almost as sudden and complete as in cases of patients who are resuscitated disease. after suspension of animation from submersion in water."

The theory hitherto dominant has been that the worst symptoms of the disease are caused by the drain of fluid from the blood. The treatment, thereto check purging by opiates and fore, has been astringents, and even to restore to the blood its lost constituents by saline injections into the veins. were so, it is argued, there would be But if this By GEORGE

• Notes 63

Cholera. its Nature and Treatment.
JOHNSON, M. D., Professor of Medicine in King's College, London.

A cholera patient who recovers, is himself again "I have seen," says Mr. Grainger, in a few days.

Again, compare results of treatment in collapse through drain of liquid from the blood and in collapse through cholera. In one case wine or brandy will soon cause improvement of the pulse and visibly Give them in the collapse of cholassist recovery. era, as they have been given freely and boldly, and the patient will even grow colder, his pulse dimin