Spring had come again; and one beautiful May-day, Leonard Fairfield
sate beside the little fountain which he had now actually constructed
in the garden. The butterflies were hovering over the belt of flowers
which he had placed around his fountain, and the birds were singing
overhead. Leonard Fairfield was resting from his day's work, to enjoy
his abstemious dinner, beside the cool play of the sparkling waters,
and, with the yet keener appetite of knowledge, he devoured his book as
he munched his crusts.
A penny tract is the shoeing-horn of literature: it draws on a great
many books, and some too tight to be very useful in walking. The penny
tract quotes a celebrated writer, you long to read him; it props a
startling assertion by a grave authority, you long to refer to it.
During the nights of the past winter, Leonard's intelligence had
made vast progress: he had taught himself more than the elements of
mechanics, and put to practice the principles he had acquired, not
only in the hydraulical achievement of the fountain, nor in the still
more notable application of science, commenced on the stream in which
Jackeymo had fished for minnows, and which Lenny had diverted to the
purpose of irrigating two fields, but in various ingenious contrivances
for the facilitation or abridgment of labour, which had excited great
wonder and praise in the neighbourhood. On the other hand, those
rabid little tracts, which dealt so summarily with the destinies of
the human race, even when his growing reason, and the perusal of
works more classical or more logical, had led him to perceive that
they were illiterate, and to suspect that they jumped from premises
to conclusions with a celerity very different from the careful
ratiocination of mechanical science, had still, in the citations and
references wherewith they abounded, lured him on to philosophers more
specious and more perilous. Out of the Tinker's bag he had drawn a
translation of Condorcet's _Progress of Man_, and another of Rousseau's
_Social Contract_. These had induced him to select from the tracts in
the Tinker's miscellany those which abounded most in professions of
philanthropy, and predictions of some coming Golden Age, to which old
Saturn's was a joke--tracts so mild and mother-like in their language,
that it required a much more practical experience than Lenny's to
perceive that you would have to pass a river of blood before you had
the slightest chance of setting foot on the flowery banks on which
they invited you to repose--tracts which rouged poor Christianity on
the cheeks, clapped a crown of innocent daffodillies on her head,
and set her to dancing a _pas de zephyr_ in the pastoral ballet in
which St Simon pipes to the flock he shears; or having first laid
it down as a preliminary axiom, that
"The cloud-capt towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself--
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,"
substituted in place thereof Monsieur Fourier's symmetrical
phalanstere, or Mr Owen's architectural parallelogram. It was with some
such tract that Lenny was seasoning his crusts and his radishes, when
Riccabocca, bending his long dark face over the student's shoulder,
said abruptly--
"_Diavolo_, my friend! What on earth have you got there? Just let me
look at it, will you?"
Leonard rose respectfully, and coloured deeply as he surrendered the
tract to Riccabocca.
The wise man read the first page attentively, the second more
cursorily, and only ran his eye over the rest. He had gone through
too vast a range of problems political, not to have passed over that
venerable _Pons Asinorum_ of Socialism, on which Fouriers and St
Simons sit straddling and cry aloud that they have arrived at the last
boundary of knowledge!
"All this is as old as the hills," quoth Riccabocca irreverently;
"but the hills stand still, and this--there it goes!" and the sage
pointed to a cloud emitted from his pipe. "Did you ever read Sir
David Brewster on Optical Delusions? No! Well, I'll lend it to you.
You will find therein a story, of a lady who always saw a black cat
on her hearth-rug. The black cat existed only in her fancy, but the
hallucination was natural and reasonable--eh--what do you think?"
"Why, sir," said Leonard, not catching the Italian's meaning, "I don't
exactly see that it was natural and reasonable."
"Foolish boy, yes! because black cats are things possible and known.
But who ever saw upon earth a community of men such as sit on the
hearth-rugs of Messrs Owen and Fourier? If the lady's hallucination was
not reasonable, what is his, who believes in such visions as these?"
Leonard bit his lip.
"My dear boy," cried Riccabocca kindly, "the only thing sure and
tangible to which these writers would lead you, lies at the first step,
and that is what is commonly called a Revolution. Now, I know what that
is. I have gone, not indeed through a revolution, but an attempt at
one."
Leonard raised his eyes towards his master with a look of profound
respect, and great curiosity.
"Yes," added Riccabocca, and the face on which the boy gazed exchanged
its usual grotesque and sardonic expression for one animated, noble,
and heroic. "Yes, not a revolution for chimeras, but for that cause
which the coldest allow to be good, and which, when successful, all
time approves as divine--the redemption of our native soil from
the rule of the foreigner! I have shared in such an attempt. And,"
continued the Italian mournfully, "recalling now all the evil passions
it arouses, all the ties it dissolves, all the blood that it commands
to flow, all the healthful industry it arrests, all the madmen that it
arms, all the victims that it dupes, I question whether one man really
honest, pure, and humane, who has once gone through such an ordeal,
would ever hazard it again, unless he was assured that the victory
was certain--ay, and the object for which he fights not to be wrested
from his hands amidst the uproar of the elements that the battle has
released."
The Italian paused, shaded his brow with his hand, and remained long
silent. Then, gradually resuming his ordinary tone, he continued--
"Revolutions that have no definite objects made clear by the positive
experience of history; revolutions, in a word, that aim less at
substituting one law or one dynasty for another, than at changing the
whole scheme of society, have been little attempted by real statesmen.
Even Lycurgus is proved to be a myth who never existed. They are the
suggestions of philosophers who lived apart from the actual world,
and whose opinions (though generally they were very benevolent, good
sort of men, and wrote in an elegant poetical style) one would no more
take on a plain matter of life, than one would look upon Virgil's
_Eclogues_ as a faithful picture of the ordinary pains and pleasures
of the peasants who tend our sheep. Read them as you would read poets,
and they are delightful. But attempt to shape the world according to
the poetry--and fit yourself for a madhouse. The farther off the age is
from the realisation of such projects, the more these poor philosophers
have indulged them. Thus, it was amidst the saddest corruption of court
manners that it became the fashion in Paris to sit for one's picture,
with a crook in one's hand, as Alexis or Daphne. Just as liberty was
fast dying out of Greece, and the successors of Alexander were founding
their monarchies, and Rome was growing up to crush in its iron grasp
all states save its own, Plato withdraws his eyes from the world,
to open them in his dreamy Atlantis. Just in the grimmest period of
English history, with the axe hanging over his head, Sir Thomas More
gives you his _Utopia_. Just when the world is to be the theatre of
a new Sesostris, the dreamers of France tell you that the age is too
enlightened for war, that man is henceforth to be governed by pure
reason, and live in a paradise. Very pretty reading all this to a man
like me, Lenny, who can admire and smile at it. But to you, to the man
who has to work for his living, to the man who thinks it would be so
much more pleasant to live at his ease in a phalanstere than to work
eight or ten hours a day; to the man of talent and action and industry,
whose future is invested in that tranquillity and order of a state,
in which talent and action and industry are a certain capital;--why,
Messrs Coutts the great bankers had better encourage a theory to upset
the system of banking! Whatever disturbs society, yea, even by a
causeless panic, much more by an actual struggle, falls first upon the
market of labour, and thence affects prejudicially every department
of intelligence. In such times the arts are arrested; literature is
neglected; people are too busy to read anything save appeals to their
passions. And capital, shaken in its sense of security, no longer
ventures boldly through the land, calling forth all the energies of
toil and enterprise, and extending to every workman his reward. Now,
Lenny, take this piece of advice. You are young, clever, and aspiring:
men rarely succeed in changing the world; but a man seldom fails of
success if he lets the world alone, and resolves to make the best of
it. You are in the midst of the great crisis of your life; it is the
struggle between the new desires knowledge excites, and that sense of
poverty, which those desires convert either into hope and emulation,
or into envy and despair. I grant that it is an up-hill work that lies
before you; but don't you think it is always easier to climb a mountain
than it is to level it? These books call on you to level the mountain;
and that mountain is the property of other people, subdivided amongst
a great many proprietors, and protected by law. At the first stroke
of the pick-axe, it is ten to one but what you are taken up for a
trespass. But the path up the mountain is a right of way uncontested.
You may be safe at the summit, before (even if the owners are fools
enough to let you) you could have levelled a yard. _Cospetto!_" quoth
the Doctor, "it is more than two thousand years ago since poor Plato
began to level it, and the mountain is as high as ever!"
Thus saying, Riccabocca came to the end of his pipe, and, stalking
thoughtfully away, he left Leonard Fairfield trying to extract light
from the smoke.