This eBook was produced by David Widger
"MY NOVEL."
BOOK FIRST.
INITIAL CHAPTER.
SHOWING HOW MY NOVEL CAME TO BE WRITTEN.
Scene, the hall in UNCLE ROLAND'S tower; time, niyht; season, winter.
MR. CAXTON is seated before a great geographical globe, which he is
turning round leisurely, and "for his own recreation," as, according to
Sir Thomas Browne, a philosopher should turn round the orb of which that
globe professes to be the representation and effigies. My mother having
just adorned a very small frock with a very smart braid, is holding it
out at arm's length, the more to admire the effect. Blanche, though
leaning both hands on my mother's shoulder, is not regarding the frock,
but glances towards PISISTRATUS, who, seated near the fire, leaning back
in the chair, and his head bent over his breast, seems in a very bad
humour. Uncle Roland, who has become a great novel-reader, is deep in
the mysteries of some fascinating Third Volume. Mr. Squills has brought
the "Times" in his pocket for his own special profit and delectation, and
is now bending his brows over "the state of the money market," in great
doubt whether railway shares can possibly fall lower,--for Mr. Squills,
happy man! has large savings, and does not know what to do with his
money, or, to use his own phrase, "how to buy in at the cheapest in order
to sell out at the dearest."
MR. CAXTON (musingly).--"It must have been a monstrous long journey. It
would be somewhere hereabouts, I take it, that they would split off."
MY MOTHER (mechanically, and in order to show Austin that she paid him
the compliment of attending to his remarks).--"Who split off, my dear?"
"Bless me, Kitty," said my father, in great admiration, "you ask just the
question which it is most difficult to answer. An ingenious speculator
on races contends that the Danes, whose descendants make the chief part
of our northern population (and indeed, if his hypothesis could be
correct, we must suppose all the ancient worshippers of Odin), are of the
same origin as the Etrurians. And why, Kitty,--I just ask you, why?"
My mother shook her head thoughtfully, and turned the frock to the other
side of the light.
"Because, forsooth," cried my father, exploding,--"because the Etrurians
called their gods the 'AEsar,' and the Scandinavians called theirs the
'AEsir,' or 'Aser'! And where do you think this adventurous scholar puts
their cradle?"
"Cradle!" said my mother, dreamily, "it must be in the nursery."
MR. CAXTON.--"Exactly,--in the nursery of the human race, just here," and
my father pointed to the globe; "bounded, you see, by the river Halys,
and in that region which, taking its name from Ees, or As (a word
designating light or fire), has been immemorially called Asia. Now,
Kitty, from Ees, or As, our ethnological speculator would derive not only
Asia, the land, but AEsar, or Aser, its primitive inhabitants. Hence he
supposes the origin of the Etrurians and the Scandinavians. But if we
give him so much, we must give him more, and deduce from the same origin
the Es of the Celt and the Ized of the Persian, and--what will be of more
use to him, I dare say, poor man, than all the rest put together--the AEs
of the Romans,--that is, the God of Copper-money--a very powerful
household god he is to this day!"
My mother looked musingly at her frock, as if she were taking my father's
proposition into serious consideration.
"So perhaps," resumed my father, "and not unconformably with sacred
records, from one great parent horde came all those various tribes,
carrying with them the name of their beloved Asia; and whether they
wandered north, south, or west, exalting their own emphatic designation
of 'Children of the Land of Light' into the title of gods. And to think"
(added Mr. Caxton pathetically, gazing upon that speck on the globe on
which his forefinger rested),--"to think how little they changed for the
better when they got to the Don, or entangled their rafts amidst the
icebergs of the Baltic,--so comfortably off as they were here, if they
could but have stayed quiet."
"And why the deuce could not they?" asked Mr. Squills. "Pressure of
population, and not enough to live upon, I suppose," said my father.
PISISTRATUS (sulkily).--"More probably they did away with the Corn Laws,
sir."
"/Papae!/" quoth my father, "that throws a new light on the subject."
PISISTRATUS (full of his grievances, and not caring three straws about
the origin of the Scandinavians).--"I know that if we are to lose L500
every year on a farm which we hold rent-free, and which the best judges
allow to be a perfect model for the whole country, we had better make
haste and turn AEsir, or Aser, or whatever you call them, and fix a
settlement on the property of other nations, otherwise, I suspect, our
probable settlement will be on the parish."
MR. SQUILLS (who, it must be remembered, is an enthusiastic Free-trader).
"You have only got to put more capital on the land."
PISISTRATUS.--"Well, Mr. Squills, as you think so well of that
investment, put your capital on it. I promise that you shall have every
shilling of profit."
MR. SQUILLS (hastily retreating behind the "Times")- "I don't think the
Great Western can fall any lower, though it is hazardous; I can but
venture a few hundreds--"
PISISTRATUS.--"On our land, Squills?---Thank you."
MR. SQUILLS.--"No, no,--anything but that; on the Great Western."
Pisistratus relaxes into gloom. Blanche steals up coaxingly, and gets
snubbed for her pains.
A pause.
MR. CAXTON.--"There are two golden rules of life; one relates to the
mind, and the other to the pockets. The first is, If our thoughts get
into a low, nervous, aguish condition, we should make them change the
air; the second is comprised in the proverb, 'It is good to have two
strings to one's bow.' Therefore, Pisistratus, I tell you what you must
do,--Write a book!"
PISISTRATUS.--"Write a book! Against the abolition of the Corn Laws?
Faith, sir, the mischief's done! It takes a much better pen than mine to
write down an act of parliament."
MR. CAXTON.--"I only said, 'Write a book.' All the rest is the addition
of your own headlong imagination."
PISISTRATUS (with the recollection of The Great Book rising before him).
--"Indeed, sir, I should think that that would just finish us!"
MR. CAXTON (not seeming to heed the interruption).---"A book that will
sell; a book that will prop up the fall of prices; a book that will
distract your mind from its dismal apprehensions, and restore your
affection to your species and your hopes in the ultimate triumph of sound
principles--by the sight of a favourable balance at the end of the yearly
accounts. It is astonishing what a difference that little circumstance
makes in our views of things in general. I remember when the bank in
which Squills had incautiously left L1000 broke, one remarkably healthy
year, that he became a great alarmist, and said that the country was on
the verge of ruin; whereas you see now, when, thanks to a long succession
of sickly seasons, he has a surplus capital to risk in the Great Western,
he is firmly persuaded that England was never in so prosperous a
condition."
MR. SQUILLS (rather sullenly).--"Pooh, pooh."
MR. CAXTON.--"Write a book, my son,--write a book. Need I tell you that
Money or Moneta, according to Hyginus, was the mother of the Muses?
Write a book."
BLANCHE and my MOTHER (in full chorus).--"O yes, Sisty, a book! a book!
you must write a book."
"I am sure," quoth my Uncle Roland, slamming down the volume he had just
concluded, "he could write a devilish deal better book than this; and how
I come to read such trash night after night is more than I could possibly
explain to the satisfaction of any intelligent jury, if I were put into a
witness-box, and examined in the mildest manner by my own counsel."
MR. CAXTON.--"You see that Roland tells us exactly what sort of a book it
shall be."
PISISTRATUS.---"Trash, sir?"
MR. CAXTON.--"No,--that is, not necessarily trash; but a book of that
class which, whether trash or not, people can't help reading. Novels
have become a necessity of the age. You must write a novel."
PISISTRATUS (flattered, but dubious).-"A novel! But every subject on
which novels can be written is preoccupied. There are novels of low
life, novels of high life, military novels, naval novels, novels
philosophical, novels religious, novels historical, novels descriptive of
India, the Colonies, Ancient Rome, and the Egyptian Pyramids. From what
bird, wild eagle, or barn-door fowl, can I
"'Pluck one unwearied plume from Fancy's wing?'"
MR. CAXTON (after a little thought).--"You remember the story which
Trevanion (I beg his pardon, Lord Ulswater) told us the other night?
That gives you something of the romance of real life for your plot, puts
you chiefly among scenes with which you are familiar, and furnishes you
with characters which have been very sparingly dealt with since the time
of Fielding. You can give us the country Squire, as you remember him in
your youth; it is a specimen of a race worth preserving, the old
idiosyncrasies of which are rapidly dying off, as the railways bring
Norfolk and Yorkshire within easy reach of the manners of London. You
can give us the old-fashioned Parson, as in all essentials he may yet be
found--but before you had to drag him out of the great Tractarian bog;
and, for the rest, I really think that while, as I am told, many popular
writers are doing their best, especially in France, and perhaps a little
in England, to set class against class, and pick up every stone in the
kennel to shy at a gentleman with a good coat on his back, something
useful might be done by a few good-humoured sketches of those innocent
criminals a little better off than their neighbours, whom, however we
dislike them, I take it for granted we shall have to endure, in one shape
or another, as long as civilization exists; and they seem, on the whole,
as good in their present shape as we are likely to get, shake the dice-
box of society how we will."
PISISTRATUS.--"Very well said, sir; but this rural country gentleman life
is not so new as you think. There's Washington Irving--"
MR. CAXTON.--"Charming; but rather the manners of the last century than
this. You may as well cite Addison and Sir Roger de Coverley."
PISISTRATUS.--"'Tremaine' and 'De Vere.'"
MR. CAXTON.--"Nothing can be more graceful, nor more unlike what I mean.
The Pales and Terminus I wish you to put up in the fields are familiar
images, that you may cut out of an oak tree,--not beautiful marble
statues, on porphyry pedestals, twenty feet high."
PISISTRATUS.--"Miss Austen; Mrs. Gore, in her masterpiece of 'Mrs.
Armytage;' Mrs. Marsh, too; and then (for Scottish manners) Miss
Ferrier!"
MR. CAXTON (growing cross).--"Oh, if you cannot treat on bucolics but
what you must hear some Virgil or other cry 'Stop thief,' you deserve to
be tossed by one of your own 'short-horns.'" (Still more
contemptuously)--"I am sure I don't know why we spend so much money on
sending our sons to school to learn Latin, when that Anachronism of
yours, Mrs. Caxton, can't even construe a line and a half of Phaedrus,--
Phaedrus, Mrs. Caxton, a book which is in Latin what Goody Two-Shoes is
in the vernacular!"
MRS. CAXTON (alarmed and indignant).--"Fie! Austin I I am sure you can
construe Phaedrus, dear!"
Pisistratus prudently preserves silence.
MR. CAXTON.--"I'll try him--
"'Sua cuique quum sit animi cogitatio
Colurque proprius.'
"What does that mean?"
PISISTRATITS (smiling)--"That every man has some colouring matter within
him, to give his own tinge to--"
"His own novel," interrupted my father. "/Contentus peragis!/"
During the latter part of this dialogue, Blanche had sewn together three
quires of the best Bath paper, and she now placed them on a little table
before me, with her own inkstand and steel pen.
My mother put her finger to her lip, and said, "Hush!" my father returned
to the cradle of the AEsas; Captain Roland leaned his cheek on his hand,
and gazed abstractedly on the fire; Mr. Squills fell into a placid doze;
and, after three sighs that would have melted a heart of stone, I rushed
into--MY NOVEL.
CHAPTER II.
"There has never been occasion to use them since I've been in the
parish," said Parson Dale.
"What does that prove?" quoth the squire, sharply, and looking the parson
full in the face.
"Prove!" repeated Mr. Dale, with a smile of benign, yet too conscious
superiority, "what does experience prove?"
"That your forefathers were great blockheads, and that their descendant
is not a whit the wiser."
"Squire," replied the parson, "although that is a melancholy conclusion,
yet if you mean it to apply universally, and not to the family of the
Dales in particular; it is not one which my candour as a reasoner, and my
humility as a mortal, will permit me to challenge."
"I defy you," said Mr. Hazeldean, triumphantly. "But to stick to the
subject (which it is monstrous hard to do when one talks with a parson),
I only just ask you to look yonder, and tell me on your conscience--I
don't even say as a parson, but as a parishioner--whether you ever saw a
more disreputable spectacle?"
While he spoke, the squire, leaning heavily on the parson's left
shoulder, extended his cane in a line parallel with the right eye of that
disputatious ecclesiastic, so that he might guide the organ of sight to
the object he had thus unflatteringly described.
"I confess," said the parson, "that, regarded by the eye of the senses,
it is a thing that in its best day had small pretensions to beauty, and
is not elevated into the picturesque even by neglect and decay. But, my
friend, regarded by the eye of the inner man,--of the rural philosopher
and parochial legislator,--I say it is by neglect and decay that it is
rendered a very pleasing feature in what I may call 'the moral topography
of a parish.'"
The squire looked at the parson as if he could have beaten him; and,
indeed, regarding the object in dispute not only with the eye of the
outer man, but the eye of law and order, the eye of a country gentleman
and a justice of the peace, the spectacle was scandalously disreputable.
It was moss-grown; it was worm-eaten; it was broken right in the middle;
through its four socketless eyes, neighboured by the nettle, peered the
thistle,--the thistle! a forest of thistles!--and, to complete the
degradation of the whole, those thistles had attracted the donkey of an
itinerant tinker; and the irreverent animal was in the very act of taking
his luncheon out of the eyes and jaws of--THE PARISH STOCKS.
The squire looked as if he could have beaten the parson; but as he was
not without some slight command of temper, and a substitute was luckily
at hand, he gulped down his resentment, and made a rush--at the donkey!
Now the donkey was hampered by a rope to its fore-feet, to the which was
attached a billet of wood, called technically "a clog," so that it had no
fair chance of escape from the assault its sacrilegious luncheon had
justly provoked. But the ass turning round with unusual nimbleness at
the first stroke of the cane, the squire caught his foot in the rope, and
went head over heels among the thistles. The donkey gravely bent down,
and thrice smelt or sniffed its prostrate foe; then, having convinced
itself that it had nothing further to apprehend for the present, and very
willing to make the best of the reprieve, according to the poetical
admonition, "Gather your rosebuds while you may," it cropped a thistle in
full bloom, close to the ear of the squire,--so close, indeed, that the
parson thought the ear was gone; and with the more probability, inasmuch
as the squire, feeling the warm breath of the creature, bellowed out with
all the force of lungs accustomed to give a View-hallo!
"Bless me, is it gone?" said the parson, thrusting his person between the
ass and the squire.
"Zounds and the devil!" cried the squire, rubbing himself, as he rose to
his feet.
"Hush!" said the parson, gently. "What a horrible oath!"
"Horrible oath! If you had my nankeens on," said the squire, still
rubbing himself, "and had fallen into a thicket of thistles, with a
donkey's teeth within an inch of your ear--"
"It is not gone, then?" interrupted the parson.
"No,--that is, I think not," said the squire, dubiously; and he clapped
his hand to the organ in question. "No! it is not gone!"
"Thank Heaven!" said the good clergyman, kindly. "Hum," growled the
squire, who was now once more engaged in rubbing himself. "Thank Heaven
indeed, when I am as full of thorns as a porcupine! I should just like
to know what use thistles are in the world."
"For donkeys to eat, if you will let them, Squire," answered the parson.
"Ugh, you beast!" cried Mr. Hazeldean, all his wrath reawakened, whether
by the reference to the donkey species, or his inability to reply to the
parson, or perhaps by some sudden prick too sharp for humanity--
especially humanity in nankeens--to endure without kicking. "Ugh, you
beast!" he exclaimed, shaking his cane at the donkey, which, at the
interposition of the parson, had respectfully recoiled a few paces, and
now stood switching its thin tail, and trying vainly to lift one of its
fore-legs--for the flies teased it.
"Poor thing!" said the parson, pityingly. "See, it has a raw place on
the shoulder, and the flies have found out the sore."
"I am devilish glad to hear it," said the squire, vindictively.
"Fie, fie!"
"It is very well to say 'Fie, fie.' It was not you who fell among the
thistles. What 's the man about now, I wonder?"
The parson had walked towards a chestnut-tree that stood on the village
green; he broke off a bough, returned to the donkey, whisked away the
flies, and then tenderly placed the broad leaves over the sore, as a
protection from the swarms. The donkey turned round its head, and looked
at him with mild wonder.
"I would bet a shilling," said the parson, softly, "that this is the
first act of kindness thou hast met with this many a day. And slight
enough it is, Heaven knows."
With that the parson put his hand into his pocket, and drew out an apple.
It was a fine large rose-cheeked apple, one of the last winter's store
from the celebrated tree in the parsonage garden, and he was taking it as
a present to a little boy in the village who had notably distinguished
himself in the Sunday-school. "Nay, in common justice, Lenny Fairfield
should have the preference," muttered the parson. The ass pricked up one
of its ears, and advanced its head timidly. "But Lenny Fairfield would
be as much pleased with twopence; and what could twopence do to thee?"
The ass's nose now touched the apple. "Take it, in the name of Charity,"
quoth the parson; "Justice is accustomed to be served last;" and the ass
took the apple. "How had you the heart!" said the parson, pointing to
the squire's cane.
The ass stopped munching, and looked askant at the squire. "Pooh! eat
on; he'll not beat thee now."
"No," said the squire, apologetically. "But after all, he is not an ass
of the parish; he is a vagrant, and he ought to be pounded. But the
pound is in as bad a state as the stocks, thanks to your new-fashioned
doctrines."
"New-fashioned!" cried the parson, almost indignantly, for he had a great
disdain of new fashions. "They are as old as Christianity; nay, as old
as Paradise, which you will observe is derived from a Greek, or rather a
Persian word, and means something more than 'garden,' corresponding"
(pursued the parson, rather pedantically) "with the Latin--vivarium,--
namely, grove or park full of innocent dumb creatures. Depend on it,
donkeys were allowed to eat thistles there."
"Very possibly," said the squire, dryly. "But Hazeldeau, though a very
pretty village, is not Paradise. The stocks shall be mended
to-morrow,--ay, and the pound too, and the next donkey found trespassing
shall go into it, as sure as my name's Hazeldean."
"Then," said the parson, gravely, "I can only hope that the next parish
may not follow your example; or that you and I may never be caught
straying."