Spring had come again; and one beautiful May-day, Leonard Fairfield sate
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 labor, which had excited great
wonder and praise in the neighborhood. 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_. These 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 St.
Simon pipes to the flock he shears; or having first laid it down as a
preliminary axiom, that
"The cloud-capt towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself--
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,"
substituted in place thereof Monsieur 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 colored 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 St. 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. They are the
suggestions 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 dreamers 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 labor, and thence affects prejudicially every
department of intelligence. In such times the arts are arrested;
literature is neglected; people are too busy to read any thing 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 uphill 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 a 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
pick-axe 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.