MY PROXIMITY TO THE CLERGY IMPELS ME TO PREACH--I ADVOCATE THE VULGAR,
AND PROVE THAT NEITHER THE HUMBLE NOR THE LOW ARE NECESSARILY THE
DEBASED--CONSEQUENTLY THIS CHAPTER NEED NOT BE READ.
What with dipping, port wine, bark, and Dr Buck, at the age of four
years my limbs began to expand properly, and my countenance to assume
the hue of health. I have recorded the death of my foster-sister Mary;
but, about this time, the top-sawyer, wishing to perpetuate the dynasty
of the Brandons, began to enact _pater familias_ in a most reckless
manner. He was wrong; but this must be said in extenuation of his
impiously acting upon the divine command, "to increase and multiply,"
that at that time, Mr Malthus had not corrected the mistake of the
Omniscient, nor had Miss Harriet Martineau begun her pilgrimage after
the "preventive check." There was no longer any pretence for my
remaining at Bath, or for my worthy foster-father abstaining from work;
so we again removed, with a small family, in our search after saw-pits
and happiness, to one of the best houses in Felix Street, somewhere near
Lambeth Marsh. This place, after the experience of some time, proving
not to be sufficiently blissful, we removed to Paradise Row; some
furlongs nearer to the Father in God, his Grace the Archbishop of
Canterbury. I have a laudable pride in showing that I had a
_respectable_--I beg pardon, the word is inapplicable--I mean a grand
neighbour. "I am not the rose," said the flower in the Persian poem,
"but I have lived near the rose." I did not bloom in the archbishop's
garden, but I flourished under the wall, though on the outside. The
wall is now down, and rows of houses up in its place.
In our location in Paradise Row, the house being larger than we required
for our accommodation, we again received old Ford, the only paradise, I
am rather afraid, that will ever own him as an inmate. An awful man was
old Ford, my godfather. His mingled prayers and blasphemies, hymns and
horrid songs, defiance and remorse, groans and laughter, made everyone
hate and avoid him. Hell-fire, as he continually asserted, was ever
roaring before his eyes; and, as there is a text in the New Testament
that says, there is no salvation for him who curses the Holy Ghost, he
would, in the frenzy of his despair, swear at that mysterious portion of
the Trinity by the hour, and then employ the next in beating his breast
in the agony of repentance. Many may think all this sheer madness; but
he was not more mad than most of the hot-headed methodists, whose
preachers, at that time, held uncontrolled sway over the great mass of
people that toiled in the humbler walks of life. Two nights in the week
we used to have prayer-meetings at our house; and, though I could not
have been five years old at the time, vividly do I remember that our
front room used, on those occasions, to be filled to overflow, with
kneeling fanatics, old Ford in the centre of the room, and a couple of
lank-haired hypocrites, one on each side of the reprobate, praying till
the perspiration streamed down their foreheads, to pray the devil out of
him. The ohs! and the groanings of the audience were terrible; and the
whole scene, though very edifying to the elect, was disgraceful to any
sect who lived within the pale of civilisation.
I must now draw upon my own memory. I must describe my own sensations.
If I reckon by the toil and turmoil of the mind, I am already an old
man. I have lived for ages. I am far, very far, on my voyage. Let me
cast my eyes back on the vast sea that I have traversed; there is a mist
settled over it, almost as impenetrable as that which glooms before me.
Let me pause. Methinks that I see it gradually break, and partial
sunbeams struggle through it. Now the distant waves rise, and wanton
and play, pure and lucid. 'Tis the day-spring of innocency. How near
to the sanctified heavens do those remote waves appear! They meet, and
are as one with the far horizon. Those sparkling waves were the hours
of my childhood--the blissful feelings of my infancy. As the sea of
life rolls on, the waves swell and are turbid; and, as I recede from the
horizon of my early recollections, so heaven recedes from me. The
thunder-cloud is high above my head, the treacherous waters roar beneath
me, before me is the darkness and the night of an unknown futurity.
Where can I now turn my eyes for solace, but over the vast space that I
have passed? Whilst my bark glides heedlessly forward, I will not
anticipate dangers that I cannot see, or tremble at rocks that are
benevolently hidden from my view. It is sufficient for me to know that
I must be wrecked at last; that my mortal frame must be like a shattered
bark upon the beach ere the purer elements that it contains can be
wafted through the immensity of immortality. I will commune with my
boyish days--I will live in the past only. Memory shall perform the
Medean process, shall renovate me to youth. I will again return to
marbles and an untroubled breast--to hoop and high spirits--at least, in
imagination.
I shall henceforward trust to my own recollections. Should this part of
my story seem more like a chronicle of sensations than a series of
events, the reader must bear in mind that these sensations are, in early
youth, real events, the parents of actions, and the directors of
destiny. The circle in which, in boyhood, one may be compelled to move,
may be esteemed low; the accidents all round him may be homely, the
persons with whom he may be obliged to come in contact may be mean in
apparel, and sordid in nature; but his mind, if it remain to him pure as
he received it from his Maker, is an unsullied gem of inestimable price,
too seldom found, and too little appreciated when found, among the
great, or the fortuitously rich. Nothing that is abstractedly mental,
is low. The mind that well describes low scenery is not low, nor is the
description itself necessarily so. Pride, and contempt for our
fellow-creatures, evince a low tone of moral feeling, and is the innate
vulgarity of the soul; it is this which but too often makes those who
rustle in silks and roll in carriages, lower than the lowest.
I have said this much, because the early, very early part of my life was
passed among what are reproachfully termed "low people." If I describe
them faithfully, they must still appear low to those who arrogate to
themselves the epithet of "high." For myself; I hold that there is
nothing low under the sun, except meanness. Where there is utility
there ought to be honour. The utility of the humble artisan has never
been denied, though too often despised, and too rarely honoured; but I
have found among the "vulgar" a horror of meanness, a self-devotion, an
unshrinking patience under privation, and the moral courage, that
constitute the hero of high life. I can also tell the admirers of the
great, that the evil passions of the vulgar are as gigantic, their
wickedness upon as grand a scale, and their notions of vice as refined,
and as extensive, as those of any fashionable _roue_ that is courted
among the first circles, or even as those of the crowned despot. Then,
as to the strength of vulgar intellect: True, that intellect is rarely
cultivated by the learning which consists of words. The view it takes
of science is but a partial glance--that intellect is contracted, but it
is strong. It is a dwarf; with the muscle and sinews of a giant; and
its grasp, whenever it can lay hold of anything within its circumscribed
reach, is tremendous. The general who has conquered armies and
subjugated countries--the minister who has ruined them, and the jurist
who has justified both, never at the crisis of their labours have
displayed a tithe of the ingenuity and the resources of mind that many
an artisan is forced to exert to provide daily bread for himself and
family; or many a shopkeeper to keep his connection together, and
himself out of the workhouse. Why should the exertions of intellect be
termed low, in the case of the mechanic, and vast, profound, and
glorious, in that of the minister? It is the same precious gift of a
beneficent power to all his creatures. As well may the sun be voted as
excessively vulgar, because it, like intellect, assists all equally to
perform their functions. I repeat, that nothing that has mind is, of
necessity, low; and nothing is vulgar but meanness.