Transcriber's Notes:
1. Page scan source: Google Books
https://books.google.com/books?id=IgMiAAAAMAAJ
(the New York Public Library)
2. The diphthong oe is represented by [oe].
THE FATE:
A TALE OF STIRRING TIMES.
BY G. P. R. JAMES, ESQ.,
AUTHOR OF
"THE COMMISSIONER," "HENRY SMEATON," "THE OLD OAK CHEST," "THE
WOODMAN," "GOWRIE," "RUSSELL," "THE FORGERY," "BEAUCHAMP,"
"RICHELIEU," "DARK SCENES OF HISTORY," &c., &c.
NEW YORK:
HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS,
PEARL STREET, FRANKLIN SQUARE.
1864.
Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year one thousand eight
hundred and fifty-one, by
GEORGE P. R. JAMES,
in the Office of the Clerk of the District Court of the Southern
District of New York.
PREFACE.
Change of scene I believe to be as invigorating to the mind as change
of air is to the body, refreshing the weary and exhausted powers, and
affording a stimulus which prompts to activity of thought. To a writer
of fiction, especially, the change may be necessary, not only on
account of the benefits to be derived by his own mind from the
invigorating effects of a new atmosphere, but also on account of the
fresh thoughts suggested by the different circumstances in which he is
placed.
We are curiously-constructed creatures, not unlike the mere brute
creation in many of our propensities; and the old adage, that "custom
is a second nature," is quite as applicable to the mind as to the
body. If we ride a horse along a road to which he is accustomed, he
will generally make a little struggle to stop at a house where his
master has been in the habit of calling, or to turn up a by-lane
through which he has frequently gone. The mind, too, especially of an
author, has its houses of call and by-lanes in plenty; and, so long as
it is in familiar scenes, it will have a strong hankering for its
accustomed roads and pleasant halting-places. Every object around us
is a sort of bough from which we gather our ideas; and it is very
well, now and then, to pluck the apples of another garden, of a flavor
different from our own.
Whether I have in any degree benefited by the change from one side of
the Atlantic to the other--a change much greater when morally than
when physically considered--it is not for me to say; but I trust that,
at all events, the work which is to follow these pages will not show
that I have in any degree or in any way suffered from my visit to and
residence in America. I have written it with interest in the
characters portrayed and the events detailed; and I humbly
desire--without even venturing to hope--that I may succeed in
communicating some portion of the same interest to my readers.
A good deal of laudatory matter has been written upon the
landscape-painting propensities of the author; and one reviewer,
writing in Blackwood's Magazine, has comprehended and pointed out what
has always been one of that author's especial objects in describing
mere scenes of inanimate nature. In the following pages I have
indulged very little in descriptions of this kind; but here, as every
where else, I have ever endeavored to treat the picture of any
particular place or scene with a reference to man's heart, or mind, or
fate--his thoughts, his feelings, his destiny--and to bring forth, as
it were, the latent sympathies between human and mere material nature.
There is, to my mind, a likeness (a shadowing forth--a symbolism) in
all the infinite variations which we see around us in the external
world, to the changeful ideas, sensations, sentiments--as infinite and
as varied--of the world of human life; and I can not think that the
scenes I have visited, or the sights that I have seen, in this
portion of the earth--the richness, the beauty, the grandeur, the
sublimity--can have been without influence upon myself; can have left
the pages of nature here a sealed book to one who has studied their
bright, mysterious characters so diligently in other lands.
Nay, more, I have met with much, in social life, well calculated to
expand the heart, as well as to elevate the mind, which I should be
ungrateful not to mention--kindness, hospitality, friendship, where I
had no claim, and enlightened intercourse with powerful minds, in
which I expected much, and found much more.
Sweet and ineffaceable impressions, ye can not have served to deaden
the feelings or to obscure the intellect!
I will rest, then, in hope that this work, the first which I have
commenced and completed in America, may not be worse than its many
literary brethren, and merely pray that it may be better. Let the
critics say, Amen!
G. P. R. JAMES.
_Stockbridge, Massachusetts_, 30_th July_, 1851.
THE FATE.
CHAPTER I.
There is no mistake more common among historians, no mistake more
mischievous, than to take for granted, without deduction, all the
statements of the satirists and splenetics of past-by ages as to the
manners and customs of their own times, and of the people with whom
they mingled. There are half a dozen, at least, of the pleasant little
passions of human nature which lead men, especially men of letters, to
decry their companions, their friends, and their neighbors--nay, even
their countrymen and their country. To say nothing of "envy, hatred,
malice, and all uncharitableness"--sins common enough to be wisely
prayed against--pride, vanity, and levity point the pen, direct the
words, or furnish forth a little drop of gall to every man who is
giving an account of the times in which he lives and the country in
which he dwells, for those who are living or to live at a distance of
space or time from himself. It is pleasant to place our own brightness
on a dark back-ground; and the all but universal propensity of mankind
to caricature derives an extraordinary zest in its exercise, when, by
rendering others around us contemptible or odious, we can bring out
our own characters in bolder relief. But there are other, perhaps even
meaner motives still, which induce men frequently to portray their own
times in broad and distorted sketches. The faculty of admiration is a
very rare one; the faculty of just appreciation a rarer one still; but
every one loves to laugh; every one feels himself elevated by the
contemplation of absurdities in others. There is a vain fondness for
the grotesque lurking in the bosoms of most men; and a consciousness
that sly or even gross satire, and delicate or coarse caricature, are
the best means of giving pleasure to the great mass of mankind, is
probably one reason why we find such depreciatory exaggeration in the
writings of all those who have given pictures of their own times. The
letters of Petrarch, the statements of Hollingshed, the pictures of
Hogarth, the romances of Smollett and Fielding, all furnish, it is
true, certain sketches of their own times from which we can derive
some valuable information, but so distorted by passion, by prejudice,
by a satirical spirit, or a love of the ridiculous, that the portrait
can be no more relied upon, in its details, than Bunbury's caricature
of a Cantab for the general appearance of Cambridge scholars.
To give such pictures is mischievous in itself; but I can not help
thinking that for an historian to follow them without allowance is
more mischievous still. If there be a deviation on either side--though
any deviation should be avoided, if possible--surely it would be
better for every moral object to paint the past more bright rather
than more foul, as the past alone contains the just objects of
imitation, though we may emulate contemporary virtue or aspire to
ideal perfection in the future.
Truth--plain, simple truth, with such reflections upon the verities of
the past as may tend to benefit mankind in the present and the future,
forms all that the historian can desire; but he might as well hope to
draw truth from the pages of the satirists of any age, as a future
portrait painter might represent Lord John Russell or Lord Brougham
from the caricatures in Punch, where a certain likeness is kept up,
but every peculiarity is exaggerated with the grossest extravagance.
I enter my caveat against the picture given of the state of England in
the year 1685 by Mr. Macaulay, in his great and fanciful historical
work, and especially against that part of it which refers to the
English country gentlemen of those times, and to the English country
clergy. That such men did exist as those from which he has drawn his
statement, there can be no doubt; that they did exist in a greater
proportion than at present, there can be no doubt either; but that the
great mass were such as he has represented, may be very safely denied.
Pickwicks, and Tupmans, and Winkles are full of truth; but society is
not made up of these; and the reign of Victoria would appear very ill
in history if, by misfortune, it should have for its future historian
one inclined to paint the state of England in 1850 from similar
sources to those which have been pressed into the service of Mr.
Macaulay.
Nor does his reasoning afford any support to his statements; for, when
important elements are left out of calculation, the result can never
be admitted. Thus, when he says, "A country gentleman who witnessed
the revolution was probably in receipt of about a fourth part of the
rent which his acres now yield to his posterity. He was, therefore, as
compared with his posterity, a poor man, and was generally under the
necessity of residing with little interruption on his estate." The
historian forgets to state what was the comparative value of money at
the period he speaks of, and therefore can not draw as a fair
inference from the amount of rent, that the country gentleman of those
days was condemned by poverty to perpetual seclusion in the country,
which is, in fact, what he attempts to show. The tastes, the habits of
a country gentleman of that period kept him probably more in the
country; but it was not poverty. Even in the eighteenth century, we
find gentlemen of an estate producing two thousand pounds a year
keeping a pack of hounds without burdening their property, and every
true picture of country life which has descended to us shows that the
country gentlemen in general lived more at their ease than the same
class in the present day, and were as numerous in proportion to the
population. If their enjoyments were not so refined, it was because
the age was not so refined; and though the picture of Squire Alworthy
may be a pleasing exaggeration on the one hand, that of Squire Western
is an unpleasant caricature on the other, while the truth lay between,
and a multitude of country gentlemen existed of a very fair degree of
polish, without all the refined virtues of the one or the brutal
coarseness of the other.