Spring had come again; and one beautiful May day, Leonard Fairfield sat
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." Works so eloquent 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 Saint-Simon pipes to the flock he shears; or having first laid
it down as a preliminary axiom that--
"The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,--
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,"
substituted in place thereof M. 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 Saint-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. Such organic
changes are but in the day-dreams 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 realization 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 sages 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 pickaxe, 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.