SALA'S LIFE AND AD VENTURES.*

MR. Seta begins his preface by telling his readers that he has purposely chosen the style of "Life and Adventures "for his book, to give it something of an air of novelty in these autobiographic days. And it must be admitted that he does well ; while on the other hand it must be admitted as readily, that few men are more entitled to place on record their veritable accounts of what they have seen and heard. Starting in life in a hard-working capacity "behind the scenes," and gradually developing into one of the most distinctive figures in modern journalism, travelling and corresponding, and recording everywhere, abroad and at home, meeting every- body, and seeing everything, accepted in the useful capacity of one of the most accomplished of after-dinner speakers, and consequently always in demand at banquets to "respond" for somebody or something, and generally constructing a sort of theory of philosophy of his own out of the whole show, he is as characteristic an inhabitant of to-day's "Vanity Fair" as we are likely to meet with. It seems to have been but a painful • The Ws and Adventures of George Augustus Sala. Written by HitnEelf. 2 yols. London: Oassell and Co. 1M5. and disappointing life upon the whole, to accept Mr. Sala at his own valuation, and there is a kind of undertone of bitter- ness even when he wants to be most genial, which may be but part of the man, who was, as he tells no, "a wretchedly sickly child—who has led, in every sense of the term, the hardest of lives in all kinds of climates, in most parts of the civilised world." He never seems to have liked his wander- ings heartily, and his readers cannot help finding him more at home and at ease in his dramatic and tavern anecdotes than in any other part of his work. There never was a more loyal cockney to be found than this universal wanderer, who confesses to disliking mountains so much, after endless ex- periences of high-level travel, from Switzerland to Mexico, that his main object daring mountain transits of all kinds is to sleep as much of the time as possible till he gets among streets again. London and its highways and byways are his natural and chosen element, with a genuine love for Brighton as its proper suburb and appendage, which finds a constant expression in his varied pages. There is something quaint and characteristic about such a result of unlimited travel, which disposes one rather favourably towards this charac- teristic writer. It is, moreover, right to record that, in spite of the fact that the initials "G-. A. S." have been connected with this kind of personal journalism for many years in many papers, the volumes before us are not a republication. They constitute, he tells us, the first book he has ever written "right off," and it must be a proof of very great resource if he has steered clear of the many weekly records of interviews and experiences with which he has so long provided the wants of a certain class of man, for it is distinctly to a certain class that he appeals, as there is another that will never rank him high amongst their Press instructors. A certain feeling of this seems to be always in Mr. Sala's mind while he is writing, and recurs again and again in his protests against being supposed to possess any " literary " claims as opposed to those of journalism. As neither genius nor great talent, according to his own estimate, but only a strong will, made him as successful as he is, so he disclaims all title to fame, but resents any imputation of obscurity, indulging in a sharp discussion on the point with some wilful Saturday. Reviewer. He is as well known, he says, as Pears' Soap or Colman's Mustard, and it would be affectation to deny it. But the sense of melancholy which the book leaves upon the mind is undeniable.

On one point we are entirely in accord with Mr. Sala. Though no man living is more closely connected with personal journalism in the sense of the use of the word "I," he is a most strenuous upholder of the virtues and value of the anonymous in the writing of articles, in all cases where the opinion of the paper rather than of the individual is given. No man has written more leaders in his time than he, and we suspect that his most effective work has been forged under the shield. The journalist acts with a freer hand under these conditions, where he is dealing with public or political questions, and feeling himself to be in general accord with the views of his paper, is able to express them with but slight variation, and the power that the paper lends. It is as " we" that he speaks, not as " I ; " and the very sense of power and freedom which the fiction lends is of inestimable value to the effect. Even in criticism the singular personal pronoun is often apt to lead its employer into an excess of egoism which injures the whole.

But we are keeping Mr. Sala's book waiting. In truth it is one from which it is difficult to make satisfactory ex- tracts, owing to the very variety of the tastes which it is meant to gratify. The story of his boyhood is full of all the tremors and sufferings of a nervous child, whose mother, though, as he describes her, "the kindest, the best, and the most devoted of parents," was still the daughter of a slave- owner, and had inherited not a little of the slave-owner's approval of the lash. She was a native of Demerara, while Mr. Sala's father was a Roman citizen, three Sala clans surviving still in Italy,—a fit origin for such a cosmopolitan hero. From an English school Mr. Sala went to a Parisian one, but an affection of the eyes in early boyhood left him with but half his sight available for practical use, and it is only just to say that in describing his difficulties from that source he speaks of a "long, laborious, and happy life," in a way which contradicts the feeling we have ourselves attached' to the memoir. As a very little boy he learned to keep lato

hours in a splendid but, as he describes it, a very studious Bohemian way, in a musical and dramatic world in which his mother, who was a professional singer and teacher of music, played a prominent and useful part of her own. Eliza Vestris and Harriet Mellon, Baroness Burdett- Coutts and Lady Combermere, all figure in the early memories, and a brother of our author's, who played with Maoready and Charles Kean, was another close per- sonal link for Mr. Sala with the dramatic profession. Of this brother, some very amusing anecdotes are told in connection with the terrible Macready, whose language and temper on the stage were very much out of keeping with his reputation and position in private life, if the testimony of Mr. Sala and many others is to be trusted. A well-drawn contrast between the English and French schools of that date (1841) introduces us to his French school-fellows in the pit of the Theatre des Jeunes Eleves, and amongst them two sons of Casimir Delavigne and Another shapely young fellow, about sixteen, with very light blue-grey eyes and an abundance of soft, light, auburn hair, which curled in rather a frizzled mass," whose name was Alexandre Dumas, the son of the famous author of

Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers. Amongst those

who showed kindness in Paris to Mr. Sala and his mother, who was there for professional purposes, was the beautiful Lady Harriet d'Orsay, daughter of the Earl of Blessington :—

"She was presiding at a stall at a vente de charite, a bazaar, held in aid of the funds of some asylum or another, when there came up the young Duke of Orleans, son and heir of King Louis Philippe. The Duke, after some polite small-talk, began to extol the beauty of her hair ; and, indeed, her Henrietta Maria coiffure had never looked glossier and softer than it did that day. ' Oh !' said his Royal Highness, if I could only possess one of those entrancing ringlets !'—‘ How much would Monseigneur give for

one F Five thousand francs ? A mere bagatelle ! Six

thousand francs ? Anything so charming a lady chose to ask! '—'I will not be extortionate. We will say five thousand.' And then she very composedly produced a dainty little pair of scissors ; snipped off the adorable ringlet ; wrapped it in silver paper, and handed it, with a smile and a curtsey full of graceful

to the Duke. His Royal Highness looked very straight down his nose, and returning Lady Harriet's salute, stalked somewhat gloomily away. But his Privy Purse duly forwarded the money next day."

The agonies of the frugal Louis Philippe may well be imagined ; and as a contrasting story of a different kind, we may select one a few pages later, about Weiss, the opera- singer, a very handsome man, but so thin that he wore what

on the stage is called a " shape,"—a complete suit of padding from neck to ankles, worn next the skin. One night he was playing in an opera in which he wore flowing robes, and was able to dispense with it. In the course of the performance an appalling shriek astounded the players, and a coryphee rushed into the green-room with the information that the basso had hanged himself. She had peeped into his dressing-room and seen the " shape " behind the door.

As we read of Mr. Sala's early struggles with the pen, we are more struck with the change that has come over

"Bohemia" than anything else. The Mayhews and the Broughs, et hoc genus, were innocent of the white-tie and swallow-tail, except on very especial occasions; and who nowadays hears of the "Let-us-Alone Club," which proposed to acquire the lease of a mansion in Pall Mall, where, on Sunday mornings and afternoons, the members could sit at the

windows in their shirt-sleeves, smoking clay pipes, and hand- bag each other pewter tankards P They were to do as they liked, and tell justices and inspectors to let them alone, as men might do before the fear of licenses and licensing laws, when Pickwick and his friends made jollity the chief business of life. Mr. Sala has a lingering preference for those days of freedom, which the fact that the "Let-us-Alone," finding Pall Mall too expensive, drew in their horns and set themselves up in the first-floor over a hairdresser's shop in a narrow part of the Strand, does not serve to lessen. Sala's close connection

with Charles Dickens and Household Words is the subject of interesting matter, and the "Journey Due North," which, under Dickens's auspices, he made to Russia, under protest,

as he tells us, about the inappropriateness of the name "due north," which was a decided misrepresentation of the direction for a Russward voyage, gives us many interesting details of

the great Empire, while in later days various moving accidents by square and street are the result of his figuring as special correspondent in Paris during the famous war. For it was on the staff of the Telegraph that Mr. Sala performed most of his

feats as a special correspondent,—the renowned class which he was perhaps the first to make famous. The post led to many bright hours and pleasant acquaintances, and one of the beat of the memories relates to a trip to Homburg with Augustus Mayhew, who was typical of so many travellers in his dread of German, which he described as "Welsh with an occasional sneeze;" and Vizetelly, who averred that he could travel all through Germany on the strength of the one phrase, "Kann mann P " with the word for wine, water, theatre, or bed, added according to need. The infallible system of the three at Homburg was amusing in its results.

The International Exhibition of 1867 was one of the many occasions which found the busy journalist at work in Paris, meeting About and Wolff and Dore among Lord Houghton's guests, and moralising, after his fashion as he went, on the ups-and-downs of the world he has had to witness,—crowns won and lost, picked up or pilfered, beggars set on horseback to be rolled in the mud; speculators hailed as benefactors one day, and denounced as swindlers the next ; Republics dis- membered and reunited; Presidents and Kings deified and murdered ; political upheavals and social eruptions, while he was "tranquilly earning his bread by scribbling 'copy' for a newspaper." Yes ! the life must have been a strange and full one, and Mr. Sala is very well justified in recording it. Rome and Berlin and all the capitals take their turn before us ; and there are appropriate stories for all sorts and con- ditions of men. It is amusing and characteristic to read of Lord Beaconsfield, whom he did not know, introducing him- self to Mr. Sala after receiving a deputation of journalists in Downing Street, in order to express his own desire to be introduced to Miss Braddon. About the Royalties of the world Mr. Sala has his civil say, feeling proud as "a working journalist of no celebrity but of some notoriety," of having been received and entertained amongst them as their guest. Indeed, Mr. Sala is rather amusing in his repeated deprecia- tions of himself, as contrasted with his sensitiveness about his craft. On the whole, his greatest disappointment seems to have been that, "bred in the seraglio "as he was, he was never able to write a play, which in so practical a Pressman, does seem a little strange. He tried his hand at a burlesque on Wat Tyler, but seemingly to no great purpose. Finally, the book is a very readable book by a very characteristic man ; and by no means his least amusing experience is reserved for his last, in the shape of a very peculiar interview with the well-known Member for Northampton, who is the hero of more than one exceptionally good story.