THE EPISTLE OF DR. SHRAPNEL TO COMMANDER BEAUCHAMP
Before we give ear to the recital of Dr. Shrapnel’s letter to his pupil
in politics by the mouth of Captain Baskelett, it is necessary to
defend this gentleman, as he would handsomely have defended himself,
from the charge that he entertained ultimate designs in regard to the
really abominable scrawl, which was like a child’s drawing of ocean
with here and there a sail capsized, and excited his disgust almost as
much as did the contents his great indignation. He was prepared to read
it, and stood blown out for the task, but it was temporarily too much
for him. “My dear Colonel, look at it, I entreat you,” he said, handing
the letter for exhibition, after fixing his eye-glass, and dropping it
in repulsion. The common sentiment of mankind is offended by heterodoxy
in mean attire; for there we see the self-convicted villain—the
criminal caught in the act; we try it and convict it by instinct
without the ceremony of a jury; and so thoroughly aware of our
promptitude in this respect has our arch-enemy become since his
mediaeval disgraces that his particular advice to his followers is now
to scrupulously copy the world in externals; never to appear poorly
clothed, nor to impart deceptive communications in bad handwriting. We
can tell black from white, and our sagacity has taught him a lesson.
Colonel Halkett glanced at the detestable penmanship. Lord Palmet did
the same, and cried, “Why, it’s worse than mine!”
Cecilia had protested against the reading of the letter, and she
declined to look at the writing. She was entreated, adjured to look, in
Captain Baskelett’s peculiarly pursuing fashion; a “nay, but you
shall,” that she had been subjected to previously, and would have
consented to run like a schoolgirl to escape from.
To resume the defence of him: he was a man incapable of forming plots,
because his head would not hold them. He was an impulsive man, who
could impale a character of either sex by narrating fables touching
persons of whom he thought lightly, and that being done he was devoid
of malice, unless by chance his feelings or his interests were so
aggrieved that his original haphazard impulse was bent to embrace new
circumstances and be the parent of a line of successive impulses, in
the main resembling an extremely far-sighted plot, whereat he gazed
back with fondness, all the while protesting sincerely his perfect
innocence of anything of the kind. Circumstances will often interwind
with the moods of simply irritated men. In the present instance he
could just perceive what might immediately come of his reading out of
this atrocious epistle wherein Nevil Beauchamp was displayed the
dangling puppet of a mountebank wire-pulley, infidel, agitator,
leveller, and scoundrel. Cognizant of Mr. Romfrey’s overtures to
Colonel Halkett, he traced them to that scheming woman in the house at
Steynham, and he was of opinion that it was a friendly and good thing
to do to let the old colonel and Cissy Halkett know Mr. Nevil through a
bit of his correspondence. This, then, was a matter of business and
duty that furnished an excuse for his going out of his, way to call at
Mount Laurels on the old familiar footing, so as not to alarm the
heiress.
A warrior accustomed to wear the burnished breastplates between London
and Windsor has, we know, more need to withstand than to discharge the
shafts of amorous passion; he is indeed, as an object of beauty,
notoriously compelled to be of the fair sex in his tactics, and must
practise the arts and whims of nymphs to preserve himself: and no doubt
it was the case with the famous Captain Baskelett, in whose mind sweet
ladies held the place that the pensive politician gives to the masses,
dreadful in their hatred, almost as dreadful in their affection. But an
heiress is a distinct species among women; he hungered for the heiress;
his elevation to Parliament made him regard her as both the ornament
and the prop of his position; and it should be added that his pride,
all the habits of thought of a conqueror of women, had been shocked by
that stupefying rejection of him, which Cecilia had intimated to her
father with the mere lowering of her eyelids. Conceive the highest
bidder at an auction hearing the article announce that it will not have
_him!_ Captain Baskelett talked of it everywhere for a month or so:—the
girl could not know her own mind, for she suited him exactly! and he
requested the world to partake of his astonishment. Chronicles of the
season in London informed him that he was not the only fellow to whom
the gates were shut. She could hardly be thinking of Nevil? However,
let the epistle be read. “Now for the Shrapnel shot,” he nodded finally
to Colonel Halkett, expanded his bosom, or natural cuirass, as
before-mentioned, and was vocable above the common pitch:—
“‘MY BRAVE BEAUCHAMP,—On with your mission, and never a summing of
results in hand, nor thirst for _prospects_, nor counting upon
harvests; for seed sown in faith day by day is the nightly harvest of
the soul, and with the soul we work. With the soul we see.’”
Captain Baskelett intervened: “Ahem! I beg to observe that this
delectable rubbish is underlined by old Nevil’s pencil.” He promised to
do a little roaring whenever it occurred, and continued with ghastly
false accentuation, an intermittent sprightliness and depression of
tone in the wrong places.
“‘The soul,’ et cætera. Here we are! ‘Desires to realize our gains are
akin to the passion of usury; these are tricks of the usurer to grasp
his gold in act and imagination. Have none of them. Work at the
people!’ —_At_ them, remark!—‘Moveless do they seem to you? Why, so is
the earth to the sowing husbandman, and though we cannot forecast a
reaping season, we have in history durable testification that our
seasons come in the souls of men, yea, as a planet that we have set in
motion, and faster and faster are we spinning it, and firmer and firmer
shall we set it to regularity of revolution. _That means
life!_’—Shrapnel roars: you will have Nevil in a minute.—‘Recognize
that now we have bare life; at best for the bulk of men the Saurian
lizard’s broad back soaking and roasting in primeval slime; or say, in
the so-called teachers of men, as much of life as pricks the frog in
March to stir and yawn, and up on a flaccid leap that rolls him over
some three inches nearer to the ditchwater besought by his instinct.’
“I ask you, did you ever hear? The flaccid frog! But on we go.”
“‘Professors, prophets, masters, each hitherto has had his creed and
system to offer, good mayhap for the term; and each has put it forth
for the truth everlasting, to drive the dagger to the heart of time,
and put the axe to human growth!—that one circle of wisdom issuing of
the experience and needs of their day, should act the despot over all
other circles for ever!—so where at first light shone to light the
yawning frog to his wet ditch, there, with the necessitated revolution
of men’s minds in the course of ages, _darkness radiates_.’
“That’s old Nevil. Upon my honour, I haven’t a notion of what it all
means, and I don’t believe the old rascal Shrapnel has himself. And
pray be patient, my dear colonel. You will find him practical
presently. I’ll skip, if you tell me to. Darkness radiates, does it!
“‘The creed that rose in heaven sets below; and where we had an angel
we have claw-feet and fangs. Ask how that is! The creed is much what it
was when the followers diverged it from the Founder. But humanity is
not _where_ it was when that creed was food and guidance. Creeds will
not die not fighting. We cannot root them up out of us without blood.’
“He threatens blood!—‘Ours, my Beauchamp, is the belief that humanity
advances beyond the limits of creeds, is to be tied to none. We
reverence the Master in his teachings; we behold the limits of him in
his creed— and that is not his work. We truly are his disciples, who
see how far it was in him to do service; not they that made of his
creed a strait-jacket for humanity. So, in our prayers we dedicate the
world to God, not calling him great for a title, no—showing him we know
him great in a limitless world, lord of a truth we tend to, have not
grasped. I say Prayer is good. I counsel it to you again and again: in
joy, in sickness of heart. The infidel will not pray; the creed-slave
prays to the image in his box.’”
“I’ve had enough!” Colonel Halkett ejaculated.
“‘We,’” Captain Baskelett put out his hand for silence with an
ineffable look of entreaty, for here was Shrapnel’s hypocrisy in full
bloom: “‘We make prayer a part of us, praying for no gifts, no
interventions; through the faith in prayer opening the soul to the
undiscerned. And take this, my Beauchamp, for the good in prayer, that
it makes us repose on the unknown with confidence, makes us flexible to
change, makes us ready for revolution—for life, then! He who has the
fountain of prayer in him will not complain of hazards. Prayer is the
recognition of laws; the soul’s exercise and source of strength; its
thread of conjunction with them. Prayer for an object is the cajolery
of an idol; the resource of superstition. There you misread it,
Beauchamp. We that fight the living world must have the universal for
succour of the truth in it. Cast forth the soul in prayer, you meet the
effluence of the outer truth, you join with the creative elements
giving breath to you; and that crust of habit which is the soul’s tomb;
and custom, the soul’s tyrant; and pride, our volcano-peak that sinks
us in a crater; and fear, which plucks the feathers from the wings of
the soul and sits it naked and shivering in a vault, where the passing
of a common hodman’s foot above sounds like the king of terrors
coming,—you are free of them, you live in the day and for the future,
by this exercise and discipline of the soul’s faith. Me it keeps young
everlastingly, like the fountain of...’”
“I say I cannot sit and hear any more of it!” exclaimed the colonel,
chafing out of patience.
Lord Palmet said to Miss Halkett: “Isn’t it like what we used to
remember of a sermon?”
Cecilia waited for her father to break away, but Captain Baskelett had
undertaken to skip, and was murmuring in sing-song some of the phrases
that warned him off:
“‘History—Bible of Humanity;... Permanency—enthusiast’s dream—despot’s
aim—clutch of dead men’s fingers in live flesh... Man animal; man
angel; man rooted; man winged’:... Really, all this is too bad. Ah!
here we are: ‘At them with outspeaking, Beauchamp!’ Here we are,
colonel, and you will tell me whether you think it treasonable or not.
‘At them,’ et cætera: ‘We have signed no convention to respect
their’—he speaks of Englishmen, Colonel Halkett—‘their passive
idolatries; a people with whom a mute conformity is as good as worship,
but a word of dissent holds you up to execration; and only for the
freedom won in foregone days their hate would be active. _As we have
them in their present stage_,’—old Nevil’s mark—‘We are not parties to
the tacit agreement to fill our mouths and shut our eyes. We speak
because it is better they be roused to lapidate us than soused in their
sty, with none to let them hear they live like swine, craving only not
to be disturbed at the trough. The religion of this vast English
middle-class ruling the land is Comfort. It is their central thought;
their idea of necessity; their sole aim. Whatsoever ministers to
Comfort, seems to belong to it, pretends to support it, they yield
their passive worship to. Whatsoever alarms it they join to crush.
There you get at their point of unity. They will pay for the security
of Comfort, calling it national worship, or national defence, if too
much money is not subtracted from the means of individual comfort: if
too much foresight is not demanded for the comfort of their brains.
Have at them there. Speak. Moveless as you find them, they are not yet
all gross clay, and I say again, the true word spoken has its chance of
somewhere alighting and striking root. Look not to that. Seeds perish
in nature; good men fail. Look to the truth in you, and deliver it,
with no afterthought of hope, for hope is dogged by dread; we give our
courage as hostage for the fulfilment of what we hope. Meditate on that
transaction. Hope is for boys and girls, to whom nature is kind. For
men to hope is to tremble. Let prayer—the soul’s overflow, the heart’s
resignation—supplant it...’
“Pardon, colonel; I forgot to roar, but old Nevil marks all down that
page for encomium,” said Captain Baskelett. “Oh! here we are. English
loyalty is the subject. Now, pray attend to this, colonel. Shrapnel
communicates to Beauchamp that if ten Beauchamps were spouting over the
country without intermission he might condescend to hope. So on—to
British loyalty. We are, so long as our sovereigns are well-conducted
persons, and we cannot unseat them—observe; he is eminently explicit,
the old traitor!—we are to submit to the outward forms of respect, but
we are frankly to say we are Republicans; he has the impudence to swear
that England is a Republican country, and calls our thoroughgoing
loyalty—yours and mine, colonel—disloyalty. Hark: ‘Where kings lead, it
is to be supposed they are wanted. Service is the noble office on
earth, and where kings do service let them take the first honours of
the State: but’—hark at this—‘the English middle-class, which has
absorbed the upper, and despises, when it is not quaking before it, the
lower, will have nothing above it but a ricketty ornament like that you
see on a confectioner’s twelfth-cake.’”
“The man deserves hanging!” said Colonel Halkett.
“Further, my dear colonel, and Nevil marks it pretty much throughout:
‘This loyalty smacks of a terrible perfidy. Pass the lords and squires;
they are old trees, old foundations, or joined to them, whether old or
new; they naturally apprehend dislocation when a wind blows, a river
rises, or a man speaks;—that comes of age or aping age: their hearts
are in their holdings! For the loyalty of the rest of the land, it is
the shopkeeper’s loyalty, which is to be computed by the exact annual
sum of his net profits. It is now at high tide. It will last with the
prosperity of our commerce.’—The insolent old vagabond!—‘Let commercial
disasters come on us, and what of the loyalty now paying its hundreds
of thousands, and howling down questioners! In a day of bankruptcies,
how much would you bid for the loyalty of a class shivering under
deprivation of luxuries, with its God Comfort beggared? Ay, my
Beauchamp,’—the most offensive thing to me is that ‘my Beauchamp,’ but
old Nevil has evidently given himself up hand and foot to this
ruffian—‘ay, when you reflect that fear of the so-called rabble, i.e.
the people, the unmoneyed class, which knows not Comfort, tastes not of
luxuries, is the main component of their noisy frigid loyalty, and that
the people are not with them but against, and yet that the people might
be won by visible forthright kingly service to a loyalty outdoing
theirs as the sun the moon; ay, that the people verily thirst to love
and reverence; and _that their love is the only love worth having_,
because it is disinterested love, and endures, and takes heat in
adversity,—reflect on it and wonder at the inversion of things! So with
a Church. It lives if it is at home with the poor. In the arms of
enriched shopkeepers it rots, goes to decay in vestments—vestments!
flakes of mummy-wraps for it! or else they use it for one of their
political truncheons—to awe the ignorant masses: I quote them. So. Not
much ahead of ancient Egyptians in spirituality or in priestcraft! They
call it statesmanship. O for a word for it! Let Palsy and Cunning go to
form a word. _Deadmanship_, I call it.’—To quote my uncle the baron,
this is lunatic dribble!—‘Parsons and princes are happy with the homage
of this huge passive fleshpot class. It is enough for them. Why not?
The taxes are paid and the tithes. Whilst commercial prosperity
lasts!’”
Colonel Halkett threw his arms aloft.
“‘Meanwhile, note this: the people are the Power to come. Oppressed,
unprotected, abandoned; left to the ebb and flow of the tides of the
market, now taken on to work, now cast off to starve, committed to the
shifting laws of demand and supply, slaves of Capital—the whited name
for old accursed Mammon: and of all the ranked and black-uniformed host
no pastor to come out of the association of shepherds, and proclaim
before heaven and man the primary claim of their cause; they are, I
say, the power, worth the seduction of by another Power not mighty in
England now: and likely in time to set up yet another Power not
existing in England now. What if a passive comfortable clergy hand them
over to men on the models of Irish pastors, who will succour, console,
enfold, champion them? what if, when they have learnt to use their
majority, sick of deceptions and the endless pulling of interests, they
raise ONE representative to force the current of action with an
authority as little fictitious as their preponderance of numbers? The
despot and the priest! There I see _our_ danger, Beauchamp. You and I
and some dozen labour to tie and knot them to manliness. We are few;
they are many and weak. Rome offers them real comfort in return for
their mites in coin, and—poor souls! mites in conscience, many of them.
A Tyrant offers them to be directly their friend. Ask, Beauchamp, why
they should not have comfort for pay as well as the big round—’”
Captain Baskelett stopped and laid the letter out for Colonel Halkett
to read an unmentionable word, shamelessly marked by Nevil’s
pencil:—‘_belly-class!_’ Ask, too, whether the comfort they wish for is
not approaching divine compared with the stagnant fleshliness of that
fat shopkeeper’s Comfort.
“‘Warn the people of this. Ay, warn the clergy. It is not only the poor
that are caught by ranters. Endeavour to make those accommodating
shepherds understand that they stand a chance of losing rich as well as
poor! It should awaken them. The helpless poor and the uneasy rich are
alike open to the seductions of Romish priests and intoxicated ranters.
I say so it will be if that band of forty thousand go on slumbering and
nodding. They walk in a dream. The flesh is a dream. The soul only is
life.’
“Now for you, colonel.
“‘No extension of the army—no! A thousand times no. Let India go, then!
Good for India that we hold India? Ay, good: but not at such a cost as
an extra tax, or compulsory service of our working man. If India is to
be held for the good of India, throw open India to the civilized
nations, that they help us in a task that overstrains us. At present
India means utter perversion of the policy of England. Adrift India!
rather than England red-coated. We dissent, Beauchamp! For by-and-by.’
“That is,” Captain Baskelett explained, “by-and-by Shrapnel will have
old Nevil fast enough.”
“Is there more of it?” said Colonel Halkett, flapping his forehead for
coolness.
“The impudence of this dog in presuming to talk about India!—eh,
colonel? Only a paragraph or two more: I skip a lot.... Ah! here we
are.” Captain Baskelett read to himself and laughed in derision: “He
calls our Constitution a compact unsigned by the larger number involved
in it. What’s this? ‘A band of dealers in _fleshpottery_.’ Do you
detect a gleam of sense? He underscores it. Then he comes to this”:
Captain Baskelett requested Colonel Halkett to read for himself: “The
stench of the trail of Ego in our History.”
The colonel perused it with an unsavoury expression of his features,
and jumped up.
“Oddly, Mr. Romfrey thought this rather clever,” said Captain
Baskelett, and read rapidly: “‘Trace the course of Ego for them: first
the king who conquers and can govern. In his egoism he dubs him holy;
his family is of a selected blood; he makes the crown hereditary—Ego.
Son by son the shame of egoism increases; valour abates; hereditary
Crown, no hereditary qualities. The Barons rise. They in turn hold
sway, and for their order—Ego. The traders overturn them: each class
rides the classes under it while it can. It is ego—ego, the fountain
cry, origin, sole source of war! Then death to ego, I say! If those
traders had ruled for other than ego, power might have rested with them
on broad basis enough to carry us forward for centuries. The workmen
have ever been too anxious _to be ruled_. Now comes on the workman’s
era. Numbers win in the end: proof of small wisdom in the world.
Anyhow, with numbers there is rough nature’s wisdom and justice. With
numbers ego is inter-dependent and dispersed; it is universalized. Yet
these may require correctives. If so, they will have it in a series of
despots and revolutions that toss, mix, and bind the classes together:
despots, revolutions; _panting alternations of the quickened heart of
humanity:_’ marked by our friend Nevil in notes of admiration.”
“Mad as the writer,” groaned Colonel Halkett. “Never in my life have I
heard such stuff.”
“Stay, colonel; here’s Shrapnel defending Morality and Society,” said
Captain Baskelett.
Colonel Halkett vowed he was under no penal law to listen, and would
not; but Captain Baskelett persuaded him: “Yes, here it is: I give you
my word. Apparently old Nevil has been standing up for every man’s
right to run away with... Yes, really! I give you my word; and here we
have Shrapnel insisting on respect for the marriage laws. Do hear this;
here it is in black and white:—‘Society is our one tangible gain, our
one roofing and flooring in a world of most uncertain structures built
on morasses. Toward the laws that support it men hopeful of progress
give their adhesion. If it is martyrdom, what then? Let the martyrdom
be. Contumacy is animalism. And attend to me,’ says Shrapnel, ‘the
truer the love the readier for sacrifice! A thousand times yes.
Rebellion against Society, and advocacy of Humanity, run counter. Tell
me Society is the whited sepulchre, that it is blotched, hideous,
hollow: and I say, add not another disfigurement to it; add to the
purification of it. And you, if you answer, what can only one? I say
that is the animal’s answer, and applies also to politics, where the
question, _what can one?_ put in the relapsing tone, shows the country
decaying in the individual. Society is the protection of the weaker,
therefore a shield of women, who are our temple of civilization, to be
kept sacred; and he that loves a woman will assuredly esteem and pity
her sex, and not drag her down for another example of their frailty.
Fight this out within you—!’
But you are right, colonel; we have had sufficient. I shall be getting
a democratic orator’s twang, or a crazy parson’s, if I go on much
further. He covers thirty-two pages of letter-paper. The conclusion
is:—‘Jenny sends you her compliments, respects, and best wishes, and
hopes she may see you before she goes to her friend Clara Sherwin and
the General.’”
“Sherwin? Why, General Sherwin’s a perfect gentleman,” Colonel Halkett
interjected; and Lord Palmet caught the other name: “Jenny? That’s Miss
Denham, Jenny Denham; an amazingly pretty girl: beautiful thick brown
hair, real hazel eyes, and walks like a yacht before the wind.”
“Perhaps, colonel, _Jenny_ accounts for the defence of society,” said
Captain Baskelett. “I have no doubt Shrapnel has a scheme for Jenny.
The old communist and socialist!” He folded up the letter: “A curious
composition, is it not, Miss Halkett?”
Cecilia was thinking that he tempted her to be the apologist of even
such a letter.
“One likes to know the worst, and what’s possible,” said the colonel.
After Captain Baskelett had gone, Colonel Halkett persisted in talking
of the letter, and would have impressed on his daughter that the person
to whom the letter was addressed must be partly responsible for the
contents of it. Cecilia put on the argumentative air of a Court of
Equity to discuss the point with him.
“Then you defend that letter?” he cried.
Oh, no: she did not defend the letter; she thought it wicked and
senseless. “But,” said she, “the superior strength of men to women
seems to me to come from their examining all subjects, shrinking from
none. At least, I should not condemn Nevil on account of his
correspondence.”
“We shall see,” said her father, sighing rather heavily. “I must have a
talk with Mr. Romfrey about that letter.”