This eBook was produced by David Widger
BOOK SEVENTH.
INITIAL CHAPTER.
MR. CAXTON UPON COURAGE AND PATIENCE.
"What is courage?" said my uncle Roland, rousing himself from a revery
into which he had fallen, after the Sixth Book in this history had been
read to our family circle.
"What is courage?" he repeated more earnestly. "Is it insensibility to
fear? That may be the mere accident of constitution; and if so, there is
no more merit in being courageous than in being this table."
"I am very glad to hear you speak thus," observed Mr. Caxton, "for I
should not like to consider myself a coward; yet I am very sensible to
fear in all dangers, bodily and moral."
"La, Austin, how can you say so?" cried my mother, firing up; "was it not
only last week that you faced the great bull that was rushing after
Blanche and the children?"
Blanche at that recollection stole to my father's chair, and, hanging
over his shoulder, kissed his forehead.
MR. CAXTON (sublimely unmoved by these flatteries).--"I don't deny that I
faced the bull, but I assert that I was horribly frightened."
ROLAND.--"The sense of honour which conquers fear is the true courage of
chivalry: you could not run away when others were looking on,--no
gentleman could."
MR. CAXTON.--"Fiddledee! It was not on my gentility that I stood,
Captain. I should have run fast enough, if it had done any good. I
stood upon my understanding. As the bull could run faster than I could,
the only chance of escape was to make the brute as frightened as myself."
BLANCHE.--"Ah, you did not think of that; your only thought was to save
me and the children."
MR. CAXTON.--"Possibly, my dear, very possibly, I might have been afraid
for you too; but I was very much afraid for myself. However, luckily I
had the umbrella, and I sprang it up and spread it forth in the animal's
stupid eyes, hurling at him simultaneously the biggest lines I could
think of in the First Chorus of the 'Seven against Thebes.' I began with
ELEDEMNAS PEDIOPLOKTUPOS; and when I came to the grand howl of [A line in
Greek], the beast stood appalled as at the roar of a lion. I shall never
forget his amazed snort at the Greek. Then he kicked up his hind legs,
and went bolt through the gap in the hedge. Thus, armed with AEschylus
and the umbrella, I remained master of the field; but" (continued Mr.
Caxton ingenuously) "I should not like to go through that half-minute
again."
"No man would," said the captain, kindly. "I should be very sorry to
face a bull myself, even with a bigger umbrella than yours, and even
though I had AEschylus, and Homer to boot, at my fingers' ends."
MR. CAXTON.--"You would not have minded if it had been a Frenchman with a
sword in his hand?"
CAPTAIN.--"Of course not. Rather liked it than otherwise," he added
grimly.
MR. CAXTON.--"Yet many a Spanish matador, who does n't care a button for
a bull, would take to his heels at the first lunge /en carte/ from a
Frenchman. Therefore, in fact, if courage be a matter of constitution,
it is also a matter of custom. We face calmly the dangers we are
habituated to, and recoil from those of which we have no familiar
experience. I doubt if Marshal Turenue himself would have been quite at
his ease on the tight-rope; and a rope-dancer, who seems disposed to
scale the heavens with Titanic temerity, might possibly object to charge
on a cannon."
CAPTAIN ROLAND.--"Still, either this is not the courage I mean, or it is
another kind of it. I mean by courage that which is the especial force
and dignity of the human character, without which there is no reliance on
principle, no constancy in virtue,--a something," continued my uncle,
gallantly, and with a half bow towards my mother, "which your sex shares
with our own. When the lover, for instance, clasps the hand of his
betrothed, and says, 'Wilt thou be true to me, in spite of absence and
time, in spite of hazard and fortune, though my foes malign me, though
thy friends may dissuade thee, and our lot in life may be rough and
rude?' and when the betrothed answers, 'I will be true,' does not the
lover trust to her courage as well as her love?"
"Admirably put, Roland," said my father. "But a propos of what do you
puzzle us with these queries on courage?"
CAPTAIN ROLAND (with a slight blush).--"I was led to the inquiry (though
perhaps it may be frivolous to take so much thought of what, no doubt,
costs Pisistratus so little) by the last chapters in my nephew's story.
I see this poor boy Leonard, alone with his fallen hopes (though very
irrational they were) and his sense of shame. And I read his heart, I
dare say, better than Pisistratus does, for I could feel like that boy if
I had been in the same position; and conjecturing what he and thousands
like him must go through, I asked myself, 'What can save him and them?'
I answered, as a soldier would answer, 'Courage.' Very well. But pray;
Austin, what is courage?"
MR. CAXTON (prudently backing out of a reply).--"/Papae/!' Brother, since
you have just complimented the ladies on that quality, you had better
address your question to them."
Blanche here leaned both hands on my father's chair, and said, looking
down at first bashfully, but afterwards warming with the subject, "Do you
not think, sir, that little Helen has already suggested, if not what is
courage, what at least is the real essence of all courage that endures
and conquers, that ennobles and hallows and redeems? Is it not PATIENCE,
Father? And that is why we women have a courage of our own. Patience
does not affect to be superior to fear, but at least it never admits
despair."
PISISTRATUS.--"Kiss me, my Blanche, for you have come near to the truth
which perplexed the soldier and puzzled the sage."
MR. CAXTON (tartly).--"If you mean me by the sage, I was not puzzled at
all. Heaven knows you do right to inculcate patience,--it is a virtue
very much required--in your readers. Nevertheless," added my father,
softening with the enjoyment of his joke,--"nevertheless Blanche and
Helen are quite right. Patience is the courage of the conqueror; it is
the virtue, /par excellence/, of Man against Destiny,--of the One against
the World, and of the Soul against Matter. Therefore this is the courage
of the Gospel; and its importance in a social view--its importance to
races and institutions--cannot be too earnestly inculcated. What is it
that distinguishes the Anglo-Saxon from all other branches of the human
family,--peoples deserts with his children and consigns to them the
heritage of rising worlds? What but his faculty to brave, to suffer, to
endure,--the patience that resists firmly and innovates slowly? Compare
him with the Frenchman. The Frenchman has plenty of valour,--that there
is no denying; but as for fortitude, he has not enough to cover the point
of a pin. He is ready to rush out of the world if he is bitten by a
flea."
CAPTAIN ROLAND.--"There was a case in the papers the other day, Austin,
of a Frenchman who actually did destroy himself because he was so teased
by the little creatures you speak of. He left a paper on his table,
saying that 'life was not worth having at the price of such torments.'"
MR. CAXTON (solemnly).--"Sir, their whole political history, since the
great meeting of the /Tiers Etat/, has been the history of men who would
rather go to the devil than be bitten by a flea. It is the record of
human impatience that seeks to force time, and expects to grow forests
from the spawn of a mushroom. Wherefore, running through all extremes of
constitutional experiment, when they are nearest to democracy they are
next door to a despot; and all they have really done is to destroy
whatever constitutes the foundation of every tolerable government. A
constitutional monarchy cannot exist without aristocracy, nor a healthful
republic endure with corruption of manners. The cry of equality is
incompatible with civilization, which, of necessity, contrasts poverty
with wealth; and, in short, whether it be an emperor or a mob I that is
to rule, Force is the sole hope of order, and the government is but an
army."
[Published more than a year before the date of the French empire
under Louis Napoleon.]
"Impress, O Pisistratus! impress the value of patience as regards man
and men. You touch there on the kernel of the social system,--the secret
that fortifies the individual and disciplines the million. I care not,
for my part, if you are tedious so long as you are earnest. Be minute
and detailed. Let the real Human Life, in its war with Circumstance,
stand out. Never mind if one can read you but slowly,--better chance of
being less quickly forgotten. Patience, patience! By the soul of
Epictetus, your readers shall set you an example."
CHAPTER II.
Leonard had written twice to Mrs. Fairfield, twice to Riccabocca, and
once to Mr. Dale; and the poor proud boy could not bear to betray his
humiliation. He wrote as with cheerful spirits,--as if perfectly
satisfied with his prospects. He said that he was well employed, in the
midst of books, and that he had found kind friends. Then he turned from
himself to write about those whom he addressed, and the affairs and
interests of the quiet world wherein they lived. He did not give his own
address, nor that of Mr. Prickett. He dated his letters from a small
coffee-house near the bookseller's, to which he occasionally went for his
simple meals. He had a motive in this. He did not desire to be found
out. Mr. Dale replied for himself and for Mrs. Fairfield, to the
epistles addressed to these two. Riccabocca wrote also.
Nothing could be more kind than the replies of both. They came to
Leonard in a very dark period in his life, and they strengthened him in
the noiseless battle with despair.
If there be a good in the world that we do without knowing it, without
conjecturing the effect it may have upon a human soul; it is when we show
kindness to the young in the first barren footpath up the mountain of
life.
Leonard's face resumed its serenity in his intercourse with his employer;
but he did not recover his boyish ingenuous frankness. The under-
currents flowed again pure from the turbid soil and the splintered
fragments uptorn from the deep; but they were still too strong and too
rapid to allow transparency to the surface. And now he stood in the
sublime world of books, still and earnest as a seer who invokes the dead;
and thus, face to face with knowledge, hourly he discovered how little he
knew. Mr. Prickett lent him such works as he selected and asked to take
home with him. He spent whole nights in reading, and no longer
desultorily. He read no more poetry, no more Lives of Poets. He read
what poets must read if they desire to be great--/Sapere principium et
fons/,--strict reasonings on the human mind; the relations between motive
and conduct, thought and action; the grave and solemn truths of the past
world; antiquities, history, philosophy. He was taken out of himself; he
was carried along the ocean of the universe. In that ocean, O seeker,
study the law of the tides; and seeing Chance nowhere, Thought presiding
over all, Fate, that dread phantom, shall vanish from creation, and
Providence alone be visible in heaven and on earth!