wars in two separate worlds: one against the factory boys, in a real
world of flesh and blood, of stones and brickbats, of flight and
pursuit, that were any thing but figurative; the other in a world
purely aerial, where all the combats and the sufferings were absolute
moonshine. And yet the simple truth is, that, for anxiety and distress
of mind, the reality (which almost every morning's light brought round)
was as nothing in comparison of that dream kingdom which rose like a
vapor from my own brain, and which apparently by _fiat_ of my will
could be forever dissolved. Ah! but no; I had contracted obligations
to Gombroon; I had submitted my conscience to a yoke; and in secret
truth my will had no such autocratic power. Long contemplation of a
shadow, earnest study for the welfare of that shadow, sympathy with
the wounded sensibilities of that shadow under accumulated wrongs,
these bitter experiences, nursed by brooding thought, had gradually
frozen that shadow into a rigor of reality far denser than the material
realities of brass or granite. Who builds the most durable dwellings?
asks the laborer in "Hamlet;" and the answer is, The gravedigger. He
builds for corruption; and yet _his_ tenements are incorruptible: "the
houses which _he_ makes last to doomsday." [13] Who is it that seeks for
concealment? Let him hide himself [14] in the unsearchable chambers of
light,--of light which at noonday, more effectually than any gloom,
conceals the very brightest stars,--rather than in labyrinths of darkness
the thickest. What criminal is that who wishes to abscond from public
justice? Let him hurry into the frantic publicities of London, and by no
means into the quiet privacies of the country. So, and upon the analogy
of these cases, we may understand that, to make a strife overwhelming by
a thousand fold to the feelings, it must not deal with gross material
interests, but with such as rise into the world of dreams, and act
upon the nerves through spiritual, and not through fleshly torments.
Mine, in the present case, rose suddenly, like a rocket, into their
meridian altitude, by means of a hint furnished to my brother from a
Scotch advocate's reveries.
This advocate, who by his writings became the remote cause of so much
affliction to my childhood, and struck a blow at the dignity of
Gombroon, that neither my brother nor all the forces of Tigrosylvania
(my brother's kingdom) ever could have devised, was the celebrated
James Burnett, better known to the English public by his judicial title
of Lord Monboddo. The Burnetts of Monboddo, I have often heard, were
a race distinguished for their intellectual accomplishments through
several successive generations; and the judge in question was eminently
so. It did him no injury that many people regarded him as crazy. In
England, at the beginning of the last century, we had a saying,
[15] in reference to the Harveys of Lord Bristol's family, equally
distinguished for wit, beauty, and eccentricity, that at the creation
there had been three kinds of people made, viz., men, women, and Harveys;
and by all accounts, something of the same kind might plausibly have been
said in Scotland about the Burnetts. Lord Monboddo's nieces, of whom one
perished by falling from a precipice, (and, as I have heard, through mere
absence of mind, whilst musing upon a book which she carried in her
hand,) still survive in the affection of many friends, through the
interest attached to their intellectual gifts; and Miss Burnett, the
daughter of the judge, is remembered in all the memorials of Burns the
poet, as the most beautiful, and otherwise the most interesting, of his
female aristocratic friends in Edinburgh. Lord Monboddo himself trod an
eccentric path in literature and philosophy; and our tutor, who spent
his whole life in reading, withdrawing himself in that way from the
anxieties incident to a narrow income and a large family, found, no
doubt, a vast fund of interesting suggestions in Lord M.'s "Dissertations
on the Origin of Language;" but to us he communicated only one section of
the work. It was a long passage, containing some very useful
illustrations of a Greek idiom; useful I call them, because four years
afterwards, when I had made great advances in my knowledge of Greek, they
so appeared to me. [16] But then, being scarcely seven years
old, as soon as our tutor had finished his long extract from the
Scottish judge's prelection, I could express my thankfulness for what
I had received only by composing my features to a deeper solemnity and
sadness than usual--no very easy task, I have been told; otherwise,
I really had not the remotest conception of what his lordship meant.
I knew very well the thing called a _tense_; I knew even then by name
the _Aoristus Primus_, as a respectable tense in the Greek language.
It (or shall we say _he_?) was known to the whole Christian world by
this distinction of _Primus_; clearly, therefore, there must be some
low, vulgar tense in the background, pretending also to the name of
Aorist, but universally scouted as the _Aoristus Secundus_, or
Birmingham counterfeit. So that, unable as I was, from ignorance, to
go along with Lord M.'s appreciation of his pretensions, still, had
it been possible to meet an Aoristus Primus in the flesh, I should
have bowed to him submissively, as to one apparently endowed with the
mysterious rights of primogeniture. Not so my brother.
Aorist, indeed! Primus or Secundus, what mattered it? Paving stones
were something, brickbats were something; but an old superannuated
tense! That any grown man should trouble himself about _that!_ Indeed
there _was_ something extraordinary there. For it is not amongst the
ordinary functions of lawyers to take charge of Greek; far less, one
might suppose, of lawyers of Scotland, where the _general_ system of
education has moved for two centuries upon a principle of slight regard
to classical literature. Latin literature was very much neglected, and
Greek nearly altogether. The more was the astonishment at finding a
rare delicacy of critical instinct, as well as of critical sagacity,
applied to the Greek idiomatic niceties by a Scottish lawyer, viz.,
that the same eccentric judge, first made known to us by our tutor.
To the majority of readers, meantime, at this day, Lord M. is memorable
chiefly for his craze about the degeneracy of us poor moderns, when
compared with the men of pagan antiquity; which craze itself might
possibly not have been generally known, except in connection with the
little skirmish between him and Dr. Johnson, noticed in Boswell's
account of the doctor's Scottish tour. "Ah, doctor," said Lord M.,
upon some casual suggestion of that topic, "poor creatures are we of
this eighteenth century; our fathers were better men than we!" "O, no,
my lord," was Johnson's reply; "we are quite as strong as our
forefathers, and a great deal wiser! "Such a craze, however, is too
widely diffused, and falls in with too obstinate a preconception
[17] in the human race, which has in every age hypochondriacally regarded
itself as under some fatal necessity of dwindling, much to have
challenged public attention. As real paradoxes (spite of the idle meaning
attached usually to the word _paradox_) have often no falsehood in them,
so here, on the contrary, was a falsehood which had in it nothing
paradoxical. It contradicted all the indications of history and
experience, which uniformly had pointed in the very opposite direction;
and so far it ought to have been paradoxical, (that is, revolting to
popular opinion,) but was _not_ so; for it fell in with prevailing
opinions, with the oldest, blindest, and most inveterate of human
superstitions. If extravagant, yet to the multitude it did not _seem_
extravagant. So natural a craze, therefore, however baseless, would never
have carried Lord Monboddo's name into that meteoric notoriety and
atmosphere of astonishment which soon invested it in England. And, in
that case, my childhood would have escaped the deadliest blight of
mortification and despondency that could have been incident to a most
morbid temperament concurring with a situation of visionary (yes! if you
please, of fantastic) but still of most real distress.
How much it would have astonished Lord Monboddo to find himself made
answerable, virtually made answerable, by the evidence of secret tears,
for the misery of an unknown child in Lancashire. Yet night and day
these silent memorials of suffering were accusing him as the founder
of a wound that could not be healed. It happened that the several
volumes of his work lay for weeks in the study of our tutor. Chance
directed the eye of my brother, one day, upon that part of the work
in which Lord M. unfolds his hypothesis that originally the human race
had been a variety of the ape. On which hypothesis, by the way, Dr.
Adam Clarke's substitution of _ape_ for _serpent_, in translating the
word _nachash_, (the brute tempter of Eve,) would have fallen to the
ground, since this would simply have been the case of one human being
tempting another. It followed inevitably, according to Lord M., however
painful it might be to human dignity, that in this, their early stage
of brutality, men must have had tails. My brother mused upon this
revery, and, in a few days, published an extract from some scoundrel's
travels in Gombroon, according to which the Gombroonians had not yet
emerged from this early condition of apedom. They, it seems, were still
_homines caudati_. Overwhelming to me and stunning was the ignominy
of this horrible discovery. Lord M. had not overlooked the natural
question--In what way did men get rid of their tails? To speak the
truth, they never _would_ have got rid of them had they continued to
run wild; but growing civilization introduced arts, and the arts
introduced sedentary habits. By these it was, by the mere necessity
of continually sitting down, that men gradually wore off their tails.
Well, and what should hinder the Gombroonians from sitting down?
_Their_ tailors and shoemakers would and could, I hope, sit down, as
well as those of Tigrosylvania. Why not? Ay, but my brother had insisted
already that they _had_ no tailors, that they _had_ no shoemakers;
which, _then_, I did not care much about, as it merely put back the
clock of our history--throwing us into an earlier, and therefore,
perhaps, into a more warlike stage of society. But, as the case stood
now, this want of tailors, &c., showed clearly that the process of
sitting down, so essential to the ennobling of the race, had not
commenced. My brother, with an air of consolation, suggested that I
might even now, without an hour's delay, compel the whole nation to
sit down for six hours a day, which would always "make a beginning."
But the truth would remain as before, viz., that I was the king of a
people that had tails; and the slow, slow process by which, in a course
of many centuries, their posterity might rub them off,--a hope of
vintages never to be enjoyed by any generations that are yet heaving
in sight,--_that_ was to me the worst form of despair.
Still there was one resource: if I "didn't like it," meaning the state
of things in Gombroon, I might "abdicate." Yes, I knew _that_. I might
abdicate; and, once having cut the connection between myself and the
poor abject islanders, I might seem to have no further interest in the
degradation that affected them. After such a disruption between us,
what was it to me if they had even three tails apiece? Ah, _that_ was
fine talking; but this connection with my poor subjects had grown up
so slowly and so genially, in the midst of struggles so constant against
the encroachments of my brother and his rascally people; we had suffered
so much together; and the filaments connecting them with my heart were
so aerially fine and fantastic, but for that reason so inseverable,
that I abated nothing of my anxiety on their account; making this
difference only in my legislation and administrative cares, that I
pursued them more in a spirit of despondency, and retreated more shyly
from communicating them. It was in vain that my brother counselled me
to dress my people in the Roman toga, as the best means of concealing
their ignominious appendages: if he meant this as comfort, it was none
to me; the disgrace lay in the fact, not in its publication; and in
my heart, though I continued to honor Lord Monboddo (whom I heard my
guardian also daily delighting to honor) as a good Grecian, yet secretly
I cursed the Aoristus Primus, as the indirect occasion of a misery
which was not and could not be comprehended.
From this deep degradation of myself and my people, I was drawn off
at intervals to contemplate a different mode of degradation affecting
two persons, twin sisters, whom I saw intermittingly; sometimes once
a week, sometimes frequently on each separate day. You have heard,
reader, of pariahs. The pathos of that great idea possibly never reached
you. Did it ever strike you how far that idea had extended? Do not
fancy it peculiar to Hindostan. Before Delhi was, before Agra, or
Lahore, might the pariah say, I was. The most interesting, if only as
the most mysterious, race of ancient days, the Pelasgi, that overspread,
in early times of Greece, the total Mediterranean,--a race distinguished
for beauty and for intellect, and sorrowful beyond all power of man
to read the cause that could lie deep enough for so imperishable an
impression,--_they_ were pariahs. The Jews that, in the twenty-eighth
chapter of Deuteronomy, were cursed in a certain contingency with a
sublimer curse than ever rang through the passionate wrath of prophecy,
and that afterwards, in Jerusalem, cursed themselves, voluntarily
taking on their own heads, and on the heads of their children's children
forever and ever, the guilt of innocent blood,--_they_ are pariahs
to this hour. Yet for _them_ there has ever shone a sullen light of
hope. The gypsies, for whom no conscious or acknowledged hope burns
through the mighty darkness that surrounds them,--they are pariahs of
pariahs. Lepers were a race of mediaeval pariahs, rejected of men, that
now have gone to rest. But travel into the forests of the Pyrenees,
and there you will find their modern representatives in the Cagots.
Are these Pyrenean Cagots pagans? Not at all, They are good Christians.
Wherefore, then, that low door in the Pyrenean churches, through which
the Cagots are forced to enter, and which, obliging them to stoop
almost to the ground, is a perpetual memento of their degradation?
Wherefore is it that men of pure Spanish blood will hold no intercourse
with the Cagot? Wherefore is it that even the shadow of a Cagot, if
it falls across a fountain, is held to have polluted that fountain?
All this points to some dreadful taint of guilt, real or imputed, in
ages far remote. [18]
But in ages far nearer to ourselves, nay, in our own generation and
our own land, are many pariahs, sitting amongst us all, nay, oftentimes
sitting (yet not recognized for what they really are) at good men's
tables. How general is that sensuous dulness, that deafness of the
heart, which the Scriptures attribute to human beings! "Having ears,
they hear not; and, seeing, they do not understand." In the very act
of facing or touching a dreadful object, they will utterly deny its
existence. Men say to me daily, when I ask them, in passing, "Any thing
in this morning's paper?" "O, no; nothing at all." And, as I never had
any other answer, I am bound to suppose that there never _was_ any
thing in a daily newspaper; and, therefore, that the horrible burden
of misery and of change, which a century accumulates as its _facit_
or total result, has not been distributed at all amongst its thirty-six
thousand five hundred and twenty-five days: every day, it seems, was
separately a blank day, yielding absolutely nothing--what children
call a deaf nut, offering no kernel; and yet the total product has
caused angels to weep and tremble. Meantime, when I come to look at
the newspaper with my own eyes, I am astonished at the misreport of
my informants. Were there no other section in it than simply that
allotted to the police reports, oftentimes I stand aghast at the
revelations there made of human life and the human heart; at its
colossal guilt, and its colossal misery; at the suffering which
oftentimes throws its shadow over palaces, and the grandeur of mute
endurance which sometimes glorifies a cottage. Here transpires the
dreadful truth of what is going on forever under the thick curtains
of domestic life, close behind us, and before us, and all around us.
Newspapers are evanescent, and are too rapidly recurrent, and people
see nothing great in what is familiar, nor can ever be trained to read
the silent and the shadowy in what, for the moment, is covered with
the babbling garrulity of daylight. I suppose now, that, in the next
generation after that which is here concerned, had any neighbor of our
tutor been questioned on the subject of a domestic tragedy, which
travelled through its natural stages in a leisurely way, and under the
eyes of good Dr. S----, he would have replied, "Tragedy! O, sir, nothing
of the kind! You have been misled; the gentleman must lie under a
mistake: perhaps it was in the next street." No, it was _not_ in the
next street; and the gentleman does not lie under a mistake, or, in
fact, lie at all. The simple truth is, blind old neighbor, that you,
being rarely in the house, and, _when_ there, only in one particular
room, saw no more of what was hourly going on than if you had been
residing with the Sultan of Bokhara. But I, a child between seven and
eight years old, had access every where. I was privileged, and had the
_entree_ even of the female apartments; one consequence of which was,
that I put _this_ and _that_ together. A number of syllables, that
each for itself separately might have meant nothing at all, did yet,
when put together, through weeks and months, read for _my_ eyes into
sentences, as deadly and significant as _Tekel, upharsin._ And another
consequence was, that, being, on account of my age, nobody at all, or
very near it, I sometimes witnessed things that perhaps it had not
been meant for any body to witness, or perhaps some half-conscious
negligence overlooked my presence. "Saw things! What was it now? Was
it a man at midnight, with a dark lantern and a six-barrel revolver?"
No, _that_ was not in the least like what I saw: it was a great deal
more like what I will endeavor to describe. Imagine two young girls,
of what exact age I really do not know, but apparently from twelve to
fourteen, twins, remarkably plain in person and features, unhealthy,
and obscurely reputed to be idiots. Whether they really were such was
more than I knew, or could devise any plan for learning. Without
dreaming of any thing unkind or uncourteous, my original impulse had
been to say, "If you please, are you idiots?" But I felt that such a
question had an air of coarseness about it, though, for my own part,
I had long reconciled myself to being called an idiot by my brother.
There was, however, a further difficulty: breathed as a gentle murmuring
whisper, the question might possibly be reconciled to an indulgent ear
as confidential and tender. Even to take a liberty with those you love
is to show your trust in their affection; but, alas! these poor girls
were deaf; and to have shouted out, "Are you idiots, if you please?"
in a voice that would have rung down three flights of stairs, promised
(as I felt, without exactly seeing why) a dreadful exaggeration to
whatever incivility might, at any rate, attach to the question; and
some _did_ attach, that was clear, even if warbled through an air of
Cherubini's and accompanied on the flute. Perhaps they were _not_
idiots, and only seemed to be such from the slowness of apprehension
naturally connected with deafness. That I saw them but seldom, arose
from their peculiar position in the family. Their father had no private
fortune; his income from the church was very slender; and, though
considerably increased by the allowance made for us, his two pupils,
still, in a great town, and with so large a family, it left him little
room for luxuries. Consequently, he never had more than two servants,
and at times only one. Upon this plea rose the scheme of the mother
for employing these two young girls in menial offices of the household
economy. One reason for that was, that she thus indulged her dislike
for them, which she took no pains to conceal; and thus, also, she
withdrew them from the notice of strangers. In this way, it happened
that I saw them myself but at uncertain intervals. Gradually, however,
I came to be aware of their forlorn condition, to pity them, and to
love them. The poor twins were undoubtedly plain to the degree which
is called, by unfeeling people, ugliness. They were also deaf, as I
have said, and they were scrofulous; one of them was disfigured by the
small pox; they had glimmering eyes, red, like the eyes of ferrets,
and scarcely half open; and they did not walk so much as stumble along.
There, you have the worst of them. Now, hear something on the other
side. What first won my pity was, their affection for each other,
united to their constant sadness; secondly, a notion which had crept
into my head, probably derived from something said in my presence by
elder people, that they were destined to an early death; and, lastly,
the incessant persecutions of their mother. This lady belonged, by
birth, to a more elevated rank than that of her husband, and she was
remarkably well bred as regarded her manners. But she had probably a
weak understanding; she was shrewish in her temper; was a severe
economist; a merciless exactor of what she viewed as duty; and, in
persecuting her two unhappy daughters, though she yielded blindly to
her unconscious dislike of them, as creatures that disgraced her, she
was not aware, perhaps, of ever having put forth more expressions of
anger and severity than were absolutely required to rouse the
constitutional torpor of her daughters' nature; and where disgust has
once rooted itself, and been habitually expressed in tones of harshness,
the mere sight of the hateful object mechanically calls forth the
eternal tones of anger, without distinct consciousness or separate
intention in the speaker. Loud speaking, besides, or even shouting,
was required by the deafness of the two girls. From anger so constantly
discharging its thunders, naturally they did not show open signs of
recoiling; but that they felt it deeply, may be presumed from their
sensibility to kindness. My own experience showed _that_; for, as
often as I met them, we exchanged kisses; and my wish had always been
to beg them, if they really _were_ idiots, not to mind it, since I
should not like them the less on that account. This wish of mine never
came to utterance; but not the less they were aware, by my manner of
salutation, that one person at least, amongst those who might be
considered strangers, did not find any thing repulsive about them; and
the pleasure they felt was expressed broadly upon their kindling faces.
Such was the outline of their position; and, that being explained,
what I saw was simply this: it composed a silent and symbolic scene,
a momentary interlude in dumb show, which interpreted itself, and
settled forever in my recollection, as if it had prophesied and
interpreted the event which soon followed. They were resting from toil,
and both sitting down. This had lasted for perhaps ten or fifteen
minutes. Suddenly from below stairs the voice of angry summons rang
up to their ears. Both rose, in an instant, as if the echoing scourge
of some avenging Tisiphone were uplifted above their heads; both opened
their arms; flung them round each other's necks; and then, unclasping
them, parted to their separate labors. This was my last rememberable
interview with the two sisters; in a week both were corpses. They had
died, I believe, of scarlatina, and very nearly at the same moment.
* * * * *
But surely it was no matter for grief, that the two scrofulous idiots
were dead and buried. O, no! Call them idiots at your pleasure, serfs
or slaves, strulbrugs [19] or pariahs; _their_ case was certainly not
worsened by being booked for places in the grave. Idiocy, for any thing I
know, may, in that vast kingdom, enjoy a natural precedency; scrofula and
leprosy may have some mystic privilege in a coffin; and the pariahs
of the upper earth may form the aristocracy of the dead. That the
idiots, real or reputed, were at rest,--that their warfare was
accomplished,--might, if a man happened to know enough, be interpreted
as a glorious festival. The sisters were seen no more upon staircases
or in bed rooms, and deadly silence had succeeded to the sound of
continual uproars. Memorials of _them_ were none surviving on earth.
Not _they_ it was that furnished mementoes of themselves. The mother
it was, the father it was--that mother who by persecution had avenged
the wounds offered to her pride; that father, who had tolerated this
persecution; she it was, he it was, that by the altered glances of her
haunted eye, that by the altered character of his else stationary
habits, had revived for me a spectacle, once real, of visionary twin
sisters, moving forever up and down the stairs--sisters, patient,
humble, silent, that snatched convulsively at a loving smile, or loving
gesture, from a child, as at some message of remembrance from God,
whispering to them, "You are not forgotten"--sisters born apparently
for the single purpose of suffering, whose trials, it is true, were
over, and could not be repeated, but (alas for her who had been their
cause!) could not be recalled. Her face grew thin, her eye sunken and
hollow, after the death of her daughters; and, meeting her on the
staircase, I sometimes fancied that she did not see me so much as
something beyond me. Did any misfortune befall her after this double
funeral? Did the Nemesis that waits upon the sighs of children pursue
her steps? Not apparently: externally, things went well; her sons were
reasonably prosperous; her handsome daughter--for she had a more
youthful daughter, who really _was_ handsome--continued to improve in
personal attractions; and some years after, I have heard, she married
happily. But from herself, so long as I continued to know her, the
altered character of countenance did not depart, nor the gloomy eye,
that seemed to converse with secret and visionary objects.
This result from the irrevocable past was not altogether confined to
herself. It is one evil attached to chronic and domestic oppression,
that it draws into its vortex, as unwilling, or even as loathing,
coöperators, others who either see but partially the wrong they are
abetting, or, in cases where they do see it, are unable to make head
against it, through the inertia of their own nature, or through the
coercion of circumstances. Too clearly, by the restless irritation
of his manner for some time after the children's death, their father
testified, in a language not fully, perhaps, perceived by himself, or
meant to be understood by others, that to his inner conscience he also
was not clear of blame. Had he, then, in any degree sanctioned the
injustice which sometimes he must have witnessed? Far from it; he had
been roused from his habitual indolence into energetic expressions of
anger; he had put an end to the wrong, when it came openly before him.
I had myself heard him say on many occasions, with patriarchal fervor,
"Woman, they are your children, and God made them. Show mercy to _them_,
as you expect it for yourself." But he must have been aware, that, for
any three instances of tyrannical usage that fell under his notice,
at least five hundred would escape it. That was the sting of the
case--that was its poisonous aggravation. But with a nature that sought
for peace before all things, in this very worst of its aggravations
was found a morbid cure--the effectual temptation to wilful blindness
and forgetfulness. The sting became the palliation of the wrong, and
the poison became its anodyne. For together with the five hundred
hidden wrongs, arose the necessity that they must be hidden. Could he
be pinned on, morning, noon, and night, to his wife's apron? And if
not, what else should he do by angry interferences at chance times
than add special vindictive impulses to those of general irritation
and dislike? Some truth there was in this, it cannot be denied:
innumerable cases arise, in which a man the most just is obliged, in
some imperfect sense, to connive at injustice; his chance experience
must convince him that injustice is continually going on; and yet, in
any attempt to intercept it or to check it, he is met and baffled by
the insuperable obstacles of household necessities. Dr. S. therefore
surrendered himself, as under a coercion that was none of _his_
creating, to a passive acquiescence and a blindness that soothed his
constitutional indolence; and he reconciled his feelings to a tyranny
which he tolerated, under some self-flattering idea of submitting with
resignation to a calamity that he suffered.
Some years after this, I read "Agamemnon" of Aeschylus; and then, in
the prophetic horror with which Cassandra surveys the regal abode in
Mycenae, destined to be the scene of murders so memorable through the
long traditions of the Grecian stage, murders that, many centuries
after all the parties to them--perpetrators, sufferers, avengers--had
become dust and ashes, kindled again into mighty life through a thousand
years upon the vast theaters of Athens and Rome, I retraced the horrors,
not prophetic but memorial, with which I myself had invested that
humble dwelling of Dr. S.; and read again, repeated in visionary
proportions, the sufferings which there had darkened the days of people
known to myself through two distinct successions--not, as was natural
to expect, of parents first and then children, but inversely of children
and parents. Manchester was not Mycenae. No, but by many degrees nobler.
In some of the features most favorable to tragic effects, it was so;
and wanted only these idealizing advantages for withdrawing mean details
which are in the gift of distance and hazy antiquity. Even at that day
Manchester was far larger, teeming with more and with stronger hearts;
and it contained a population the most energetic even in the _modern_
world--how much more so, therefore, by comparison with any race in
_ancient_ Greece, inevitably rendered effeminate by dependence too
generally upon slaves. Add to this superior energy in Lanceshire, the
immeasurably profounder feelings generated by the mysteries which stand
behind Christianity, as compared with the shallow mysteries that stood
behind paganism, and it would be easy to draw the inference, that,
in the capacity for the infinite and impassioned, for horror and for
pathos, Mycenae could have had no pretentions to measure herself against
Manchester. Not that I had drawn such an inference myself. Why should
I? there being nothing to suggest the points in which the two cities
differed, but only the single one in which they agreed, viz., the dusky
veil that overshadowed in both the noonday tragedies haunting their
household recesses; which veil was raised only to the gifted eyes of
a Cassandra, or to the eyes that, like my own, had experimentally
become acquainted with them as facts. Pitiably mean is he that measures
the relations of such cases by the scenical apparatus of purple and
gold. That which never _has_ been apparelled in royal robes, and hung
with theatrical jewels, is but suffering from an accidental fraud,
having the same right to them that any similar misery can have, or
calamity upon an equal scale. These proportions are best measured from
the fathoming ground of a real uncounterfeit sympathy.
I have mentioned already that we had four male guardians, (a fifth
being my mother.) These four were B., E., G., and H. The two consonants,
B. and G., gave us little trouble. G., the wisest of the whole band,
lived at a distance of more than one hundred miles: him, therefore,
we rarely saw; but B., living within four miles of Greenbay, washed
his hands of us by inviting us, every now and then, to spend a few
days at his house.
At this house, which stood in the country, there was a family of amiable
children, who were more skilfully trained in their musical studies
than at that day was usual. They sang the old English glees and
madrigals, and correctly enough for me, who, having, even at that
childish age, a preternatural sensibility to music, had also, as may
be supposed, the most entire want of musical knowledge. No blunders
could do much to mar _my_ pleasure. There first I heard the concertos
of Corelli; but also, which far more profoundly affected me, a few
selections from Jomelli and Cimarosa. With Handel I had long been
familiar, for the famous chorus singers of Lancashire sang continually
at churches the most effective parts from his chief oratorios. Mozart
was yet to come; for, except perhaps at the opera in London, even at
this time, his music was most imperfectly diffused through England.
But, above all, a thing which to my dying day I could never forget,
at the house of this guardian I heard sung a long canon of Cherubini's.
Forty years later I heard it again, and better sung; but at that time
I needed nothing better. It was sung by four male voices, and rose
into a region of thrilling passion, such as my heart had always dimly
craved and hungered after, but which now first interpreted itself, as
a physical possibility, to my ear.
My brother did not share my inexpressible delight; his taste ran in
a different channel; and the arrangements of the house did not meet
his approbation; particularly this, that either Mrs. B. herself, or
else the governess, was always present when the young ladies joined
our society, which my brother considered particularly vulgar, since
natural propriety and decorum should have whispered to an old lady
that a young gentleman might have "things" to say to her daughters
which he could not possibly intend for the general ear of
eavesdroppers--things tending to the confidential or the sentimental,
which none but a shameless old lady would seek to participate; by that
means compelling a young man to talk as loud as if he were addressing
a mob at Charing Cross, or reading the Riot Act. There were other
out-of-door amusements, amongst which a swing--which I mention for the
sake of illustrating the passive obedience which my brother levied
upon me, either through my conscience, as mastered by his doctrine of
primogeniture, or, as in this case, through my sensibility to shame
under his taunts of cowardice. It was a most ambitious swing, ascending
to a height beyond any that I have since seen in fairs or public
gardens. Horror was at my heart regularly as the swing reached its
most aerial altitude; for the oily, swallow-like fluency of the swoop
downwards threatened always to make me sick, in which it is probable
that I must have relaxed my hold of the ropes, and have been projected,
with fatal violence, to the ground. But, in defiance of all this
miserable panic, I continued to swing whenever he tauntingly invited
me. It was well that my brother's path in life soon ceased to coincide
with my own, else I should infallibly have broken my neck in confronting
perils which brought me neither honor nor profit, and in accepting
defiances which, issue how they might, won self-reproach from myself,
and sometimes a gayety of derision from _him_. One only of these
defiances I declined. There was a horse of this same guardian B.'s,
who always, after listening to Cherubini's music, grew irritable to
excess; and, if any body mounted him, would seek relief to his wounded
feelings in kicking, more or less violently, for an hour. This habit
endeared him to my brother, who acknowledged to a propensity of the
same amiable kind; protesting that an abstract desire of kicking seized
him always after hearing good performers on particular instruments,
especially the bagpipes. Of kicking? But of kicking what or _whom_?
I fear of kicking the venerable public collectively, creditors without
exception, but also as many of the debtors as might be found at large;
doctors of medicine more especially, but with no absolute immunity for
the majority of their patients; Jacobins, but not the less
anti-Jacobins; every Calvinist, which seems reasonable; but then also,
which is intolerable, every Arminian. Is philosophy able to account
for this morbid affection, and particularly when it takes the restricted
form (as sometimes it does, in the bagpipe case) of seeking furiously
to kick the piper, instead of paying him? In this case, my brother was
urgent with me to mount _en croupe_ behind himself. But weak as I
usually was, this proposal I resisted as an immediate suggestion of
the fiend; for I had heard, and have since known proofs of it, that
a horse, when he is ingeniously vicious, sometimes has the power, in
lashing out, of curving round his hoofs, so as to lodge them, by way
of indorsement, in the small of his rider's back; and, of course, he
would have an advantage for such a purpose, in the case of a rider
sitting on the crupper. That sole invitation I persisted in declining.
A young gentleman had joined us as a fellow-student under the care of
our tutor. He was an only son; indeed, the only child of an amiable
widow, whose love and hopes all centred in _him_. He was destined to
inherit several separate estates, and a great deal had been done to
spoil him by indulgent aunts; but his good natural disposition defeated
all these efforts; and, upon joining us, he proved to be a very amiable
boy, clever, quick at learning, and abundantly courageous. In the
summer months, his mother usually took a house out in the country,
sometimes on one side of Manchester, sometimes on another. At these
rusticating seasons, he had often much farther to come than ourselves,
and on that account he rode on horseback. Generally it was a fierce
mountain pony that he rode; and it was worth while to cultivate the
pony's acquaintance, for the sake of understanding the extent to which
the fiend can sometimes incarnate himself in a horse. I do not trouble
the reader with any account of his tricks, and drolleries, and
scoundrelisms; but this I may mention, that he had the propensity
ascribed many centuries ago to the Scandinavian horses for sharing and
practically asserting his share in the angry passions of a battle. He
would fight, or attempt to fight, on his rider's side, by biting,
rearing, and suddenly wheeling round, for the purpose of lashing out
when he found himself within kicking range. [20] This little monster was
coal black; and, in virtue of his carcass, would not have seemed very
formidable; but his head made amends--it was the head of a buffalo, or of
a bison, and his vast jungle of mane was the mane of a lion. His eyes, by
reason of this intolerable and unshorn mane, one did not often see,
except as lights that sparkled in the rear of a thicket; but, once seen
they were not easily forgotten, for their malignity was diabolic. A few
miles more of less being a matter of indifference to one who was so well
mounted, O. would sometimes ride out with us to the field of battle; and,
by manoeuvring so as to menace the enemy of the flanks, in skirmishes he
did good service. But at length came a day of pitched battle. The enemy
had mustered in unusual strength, and would certainly have accomplished
the usual result of putting us to flight with more than usual ease,
but, under the turn which things took, their very numbers aided their
overthrow, by deepening their confusion. O. had, on this occasion,
accompanied us; and, as he had hitherto taken no very decisive part
in the war, confining himself to distant "demonstrations," the enemy
did not much regard his presence in the field. This carelessness threw
them into a dense mass, upon which my brother's rapid eye saw instantly
the opportunity offered for operating most effectually by a charge.
O. saw it too; and, happening to have his spurs on, he complied
cheerfully with my brother's suggestion. He had the advantage of a
slight descent: the wicked pony went down "with a will;" his echoing
hoofs drew the general gaze upon him; his head, his leonine mane, his
diabolic eyes, did the rest; and in a moment the whole hostile array had
broken, and was in rapid flight across the brick fields. I leave the
reader to judge whether "Te Deum" would be sung on that night. A Gazette
Extraordinary was issued; and my brother had really some reason for his
assertion, "that in conscience he could not think of comparing Cannae to
this smashing defeat;" since at Cannae many brave men had refused to
fly--the consul himself, Terentius Varro, amongst them; but, in the
present rout, there was no Terentius Varro--_every body_ fled.
The victory, indeed, considered in itself, was complete. But it had
consequences which we had not looked for. In the ardor of our conflict,
neither my brother nor myself had remarked a stout, square-built man,
mounted on an uneasy horse, who sat quietly in his saddle as spectator
of the battle, and, in fact, as the sole non-combatant present. This
man, however, had been observed by O., both before and after his own
brilliant charge; and, by the description, there could be no doubt
that it had been our guardian B., as also, by the description of the
horse, we could as little doubt that he had been mounted on Cherubini.
My brother's commentary was in a tone of bitter complaint, that so
noble an opportunity should have been lost for strengthening O.'s
charge. But the consequences of this incident were graver than we
anticipated. A general board of our guardians, vowels and consonants,
was summoned to investigate the matter. The origin of the feud, or
"war," as my brother called it, was inquired into. As well might the
war of Troy or the purser's accounts from the Argonautic expedition
have been overhauled. Ancient night and chaos had closed over the
"incunabula belli;" and that point was given up in despair. But what
hindered a general pacification, no matter in how many wrongs the
original dispute had arisen? Who stopped the way which led to peace?
Not we, was our firm declaration; we were most pacifically inclined,
and ever had been; we were, in fact, little saints. But the enemy could
not be brought to any terms of accommodation. "That we will try," said
the vowel amongst our guardians, Mr. E. He, being a magistrate, had
naturally some weight with the proprietors of the cotton factory. The
foremen of the several floors were summoned, and gave it as their
humble opinion that we, the aristocratic party in the war, were as bad
as the _sans culottes_--"not a pin to choose between us." Well, but
no matter for the past: could any plan be devised for a pacific future?
Not easily. The workspeople were so thoroughly independent of their
employers, and so careless of their displeasure, that finally this
only settlement was available as wearing any promise of permanence,
viz., that we should alter our hours, so as not to come into collision
with the exits or returns of the boys.
Under this arrangement, a sort of hollow armistice prevailed for some
time; but it was beginning to give way, when suddenly an internal
change in our own home put an end to the war forever. My brother,
amongst his many accomplishments, was distinguished for his skill in
drawing. Some of his sketches had been shown to Mr. De Loutherbourg,
an academician well known in those days, esteemed even in these days,
after he has been dead for forty or fifty years, and personally a
distinguished favorite with the king, (George III.) He pronounced a
very flattering opinion upon my brother's promise of excellence. This
being known, a fee of a thousand guineas was offered to Mr. L. by the
guardians; and finally that gentleman took charge of my brother as a
pupil. Now, therefore, my brother, King of Tigrosylvania, scourge of
Gombroon, separated from me; and, as it turned out, forever. I never
saw him again; and, at Mr. De L.'s house in Hammersmith, before he had
completed his sixteenth year, he died of typhus fever. And thus it
happened that a little gold dust skilfully applied put an end to wars
that else threatened to extend into a Carthaginian length. In one
week's time
"Hi motus animorum atque haec certamina tanta
Pulveris exigui jactu compressa quiêrunt."
* * * * *
Here I had terminated this chapter, as at a natural pause, which, whilst
shutting out forever my eldest brother from the reader's sight and
from my own, necessarily at the same moment worked a permanent
revolution in the character of my daily life. Two such changes, and
both so abrupt, indicated imperiously the close of one era and the
opening of another. The advantages, indeed, which my brother had over
me in years, in physical activities of every kind, in decision of
purpose, and in energy of will,--all which advantages, besides,
borrowed a ratification from an obscure sense, on my part, of duty as
incident to what seemed an appointment of Providence,--inevitably _had_
controlled, and for years to come _would have_ controlled, the free
spontaneous movements of a contemplative dreamer like myself.
Consequently, this separation, which proved an eternal one, and
contributed to deepen my constitutional propensity to gloomy meditation,
had for me (partly on that account, but much more through the sudden
birth of perfect independence which so unexpectedly it opened) the
value of a revolutionary experience. A new date, a new starting point,
a redemption (as it might be called) into the golden sleep of halcyon
quiet, after everlasting storms, suddenly dawned upon me; and not as
any casual intercalation of holidays that would come to an end, but,
for any thing that appeared to the contrary, as the perpetual tenor
of my future career. No longer was the factory a Carthage for me: if
any obdurate old Cato there were who found his amusement in denouncing
it with a daily _"Delenda est,"_ take notice, (I said silently to
myself,) that I acknowledge no such tiger for a friend of mine.
Nevermore was the bridge across the Irwell a bridge of sighs for me.
And the meanest of the factory population--thanks be to their
discrimination--despised my pretensions too entirely to waste a thought
or a menace upon a cipher so abject.
This change, therefore, being so sudden and so total, ought to signalize
itself externally by a commensurate break in the narrative. A new
chapter, at the least, with a huge interspace of blank white paper,
or even a new book, ought rightfully to solemnize so profound a
revolution. And virtually it shall. But, according to the general
agreement of antiquity, it is not felt as at all disturbing to the
unity of that event which winds up the "Iliad," viz., the death of
Hector, that Homer expands it circumstantially into the whole ceremonial
of his funeral obsequies; and upon that same principle I--when looking
back to this abrupt close of all connection with, my brother, whether
in my character of major general or of potentate trembling daily for
my people--am reminded that the very last morning of this connection
had its own separate distinction from all other mornings, in a way
that entitles it to its own separate share in the general commemoration.
A shadow fell upon this particular morning as from a cloud of danger,
that lingered for a moment over our heads, might seem even to muse and
hesitate, and then sullenly passed away into distant quarters. It is
noticeable that a danger which approaches, but wheels away,--which
threatens, but finally forbears to strike,--is more interesting by
much on a distant retrospect than the danger which accomplishes its
mission. The Alpine precipice, down which many pilgrims have fallen,
is passed without much attention; but that precipice, within one inch
of which a traveller has passed unconsciously in the dark, first tracing
his peril along the snowy margin on the next morning, becomes invested
with an attraction of horror for all who hear the story. The dignity
of mortal danger ever after consecrates the spot; and, in this
particular case which I am now recalling, the remembrance of such a
danger consecrates the day.
That day was amongst the most splendid in a splendid June: it was--to
borrow the line of Wordsworth--
"One of those heavenly days which cannot die;"
and, early as it was at that moment, we children, all six of us that then
survived, were already abroad upon the lawn. There were two lawns at
Greenhay in the shrubbery that invested three sides of the house: one of
these, which ran along one side of the house, extended to a little bridge
traversed by the gates of entrance. The central gate admitted carriages:
on each side of this was a smaller gate for foot passengers; and, in a
family containing so many as six children, it may be supposed that often
enough one or other of the gates was open; which, most fortunately, on
this day was not the case. Along the margin of this side lawn ran a
little brook, which had been raised to a uniform level, and kept up by
means of a wear at the point where it quitted the premises; after which
it resumed its natural character of wildness, as it trotted on to the
little hamlet of Greenhill. This brook my brother was at one time
disposed to treat as Remus treated the infant walls of Rome; but, on
maturer thoughts, having built a fleet of rafts, he treated it more
respectfully; and this morning, as will be seen, the breadth of the
little brook did us "yeoman's service." Me at one time he had meant to
put on board this fleet, as his man Friday; and I had a fair prospect of
first entering life in the respectable character of supercargo. But it
happened that the current carried his rafts and himself over the wear;
which, he assured us, was no accident, but a lesson by way of practice in
the art of contending with the rapids of the St. Lawrence and other
Canadian streams. However, as the danger had been considerable, he was
prohibited from trying such experiments with me. On the centre of the
lawn stood my eldest surviving sister, Mary, and my brother William.
Round _him_, attracted (as ever) by his inexhaustible opulence of thought
and fun, stood, laughing and dancing, my youngest sister, a second Jane,
and my youngest brother Henry, a posthumous child, feeble, and in his
nurse's arms, but on this morning showing signs of unusual animation and
of sympathy with the glorious promise of the young June day. Whirling
round on his heel, at a little distance, and utterly abstracted from all
around him, my next brother, Richard, he that had caused so much
affliction by his incorrigible morals to the Sultan Amurath, pursued his
own solitary thoughts--whatever those might be. And, finally, as regards
myself, it happened that I was standing close to the edge of the brook,
looking back at intervals to the group of five children and two nurse
maids who occupied the centre of the lawn; time, about an hour before
_our_ breakfast, or about two hours before the world's breakfast,--
_i.e._, a little after seven,--when as yet in shady parts of the grounds
the dazzling jewelry of the early dews had not entirely exhaled. So
standing, and so occupied, suddenly we were alarmed by shouts as of some
great mob manifestly in rapid motion, and probably, at this instant
taking the right-angled turn into the lane connecting Greenhay with the
Oxford Road. The shouts indicated hostile and headlong pursuit: within
one minute another right-angled turn in the lane itself brought the
uproar fully upon the ear; and it became evident that some imminent
danger--of what nature it was impossible to guess--must be hastily
nearing us. We were all rooted to the spot; and all turned anxiously to
the gates, which happily seemed to be closed. Had this been otherwise, we
should have had no time to apply any remedy whatever, and the
consequences must probably have involved us all. In a few seconds, a
powerful dog, not much above a furlong ahead of his pursuers, wheeled
into sight. We all saw him pause at the gates; but, finding no ready
access through the iron lattice work that protected the side battlements
of the little bridge, and the pursuit being so hot, he resumed his course
along the outer margin of the brook. Coming opposite to myself, he made a
dead stop. I had thus an opportunity of looking him steadily in the face;
which I did, without more fear than belonged naturally to a case of so
much hurry, and to me, in particular, of mystery. I had never heard of
hydrophobia. But necessarily connecting the furious pursuit with the dog
that now gazed at me from the opposite side of the water, and feeling
obliged to presume that he had made an assault upon somebody or other, I
looked searchingly into his eyes, and observed that they seemed glazed,
and as if in a dreamy state, but at the same time suffused with some
watery discharge, while his mouth was covered with masses of white foam.
He looked most earnestly at myself and the group beyond me; but he made
no effort whatever to cross the brook, and apparently had not the energy
to attempt it by a flying leap. My brother William, who did not in the
least suspect the real danger, invited the dog to try his chance in a
leap--assuring him that, if he succeeded, he would knight him on the
spot. The temptation of a knighthood, however, did not prove sufficient.
A very few seconds brought his pursuers within sight; and steadily,
without sound or gesture of any kind, he resumed his flight in the only
direction open to him, viz., by a field path across stiles to Greenhill.
Half an hour later he would have met a bevy of children going to a dame's
school, or carrying milk to rustic neighbors. As it was, the early
morning kept the road clear in front. But behind immense was the body of
agitated pursuers. Leading the chase came, probably, half a troop of
light cavalry, all on foot, nearly all in their stable dresses, and armed
generally with pitchforks, though some eight or ten carried carabines.
Half mingled with these, and very little in the rear, succeeded a vast
miscellaneous mob, that had gathered on the chase as it hurried through
the purlieus of Deansgate, and all that populous suburb of Manchester.
From some of these, who halted to recover breath, we obtained an
explanation of the affair. About a mile and a half from Greenhay stood
some horse barracks, occupied usually by an entire regiment of cavalry. A
large dog--one of a multitude that haunted the barracks--had for some
days manifested an increasing sullenness, snapping occasionally at dogs
and horses, but finally at men. Upon this, he had been tied up; but in
some way he had this morning liberated himself: two troop horses he had
immediately bitten; and had made attacks upon several of the men, who
fortunately parried these attacks by means of the pitchforks standing
ready to their hands. On this evidence, coupled with the knowledge of his
previous illness, he was summarily condemned as mad; and the general
pursuit commenced, which brought all parties (hunters and game) sweeping
so wildly past the quiet grounds of Greenhay. The sequel of the affair
was this: none of the carabineers succeeded in getting a shot at the dog;
in consequence of which, the chase lasted for 17 miles nominally; but,
allowing for all the doublings and headings back of the dog, by
computation for about 24; and finally, in a state of utter exhaustion, he
was run into and killed, somewhere in Cheshire. Of the two horses whom he
had bitten, both treated alike, one died in a state of furious
hydrophobia some two months later, but the other (though the more
seriously wounded of the two) manifested no symptoms whatever of
constitutional derangement. And thus it happened that for me this general
event of separation from my eldest brother, and the particular morning on
which it occurred, were each for itself separately and equally memorable.
Freedom won, and death escaped, almost in the same hour,--freedom from a
yoke of such secret and fretful annoyance as none could measure but
myself, and death probably through the fiercest of torments,--these
double cases of deliverance, so sudden and so _unlooked for_, signalized
by what heraldically might have been described as a two-headed memorial,
the establishment of an _epoch_ in my life. Not only was the chapter of
INFANCY thus solemnly finished forever, and the record closed, but--which
cannot often happen--the chapter was closed pompously and conspicuously
by what the early printers through the 15th and 16th centuries would have
called a bright and illuminated colophon.
FOOTNOTES
[1] "_Peculiar_."--Viz., as _endowed_ foundations to which those resort
who are rich and pay, and those also who, being poor, cannot pay, or
cannot pay so much. This most honorable distinction amongst the services
of England from ancient times to the interests of education--a service
absolutely unapproached by any one nation of Christendom--is amongst the
foremost cases of that remarkable class which make England, whilst often
the most aristocratic, yet also, for many noble purposes, the most
democratic of lands.
[2] Five years ago, during the carnival of universal anarchy equally
amongst doers and thinkers, a closely-printed pamphlet was published with
this title, "A New Revelation, or the Communion of the Incarnate Dead
with the Unconscious Living. Important Fact, without trifling Fiction, by
HIM." I have not the pleasure of knowing HIM; but certainly I must
concede to HIM, that he writes like a man of extreme sobriety upon his
extravagant theme. He is angry with Swedenborg, as might be expected, for
his chimeras; some of which, however, of late years have signally altered
their aspect; but. as to HIM, there is no chance that he should be
occupied with chimeras, because (p. 6) "he has met with some who have
acknowledged the fact of their having come from the dead"--_habes
confitentem reum_. Few, however, are endowed with so much candor; and in
particular, for the honor of literature, it grieves me to find, by p. 10,
that the largest number of these shams, and perhaps the most uncandid,
are to be looked for amongst "publishers and printers," of whom, it
seems, "the great majority" are mere forgeries: a very few speak frankly
about the matter, and say they don't care who knows it, which, to my
thinking, is impudence, but by far the larger section doggedly deny it,
and call a policeman, if you persist in charging them with being shams.
Some differences there are between my brother and HIM, but in the great
outline of their views they coincide.
[3] Charles II., notoriously wrote a book on the possibility of a voyage
to the moon, which, in a bishop, would be called a translation to the
moon, and perhaps it was _his_ name in combination with _his_ book that
suggested the "Adventures of Peter Wilkins." It is unfair, however, to
mention him in connection with that single one of his works which
announces an extravagant purpose. He was really a scientific man, and
already in the time of Cromwell (about 1656) had projected that Royal
Society of London which was afterwards realized and presided over by
Isaac Barrow and Isaac Newton. He was also a learned man, but still with
a veil of romance about him, as may be seen in his most elaborate work--
"The Essay towards a Philosophic or Universal Language."
[4] "_Middy_."--I call him so simply to avoid confusion, and by way of
anticipation; else he was too young at this time to serve in the navy.
Afterwards he did so for many years, and saw every variety of service in
every class of ships belonging to our navy. At one time, when yet a boy,
he was captured by pirates, and compelled to sail with them; and the end
of his adventurous career was, that for many a year he has been lying at
the bottom of the Atlantic.
[5] "Green_heys_," with slight variation in the spelling, is the name
given to that district of which Greenhay formed the original nucleus.
Probably it was the solitary situation of the house which (failing any
other grounds of denomination) raised it to this privilege.
[6] "_Factory_."--Such was the designation technically at that time. At
present, I believe that a building of that class would be called a
"mill."
[7] This word, however, exists in _Jack-a-dandy_--a very old English
word. But what does _that_ mean?
[8] Precisely, however, the same gesture, plebian as it was, by which the
English commandant at Heligoland replied to the Danes when civilly
inviting him to surrender. Southey it was, on the authority of Lieutenant
Southey, his brother, who communicated to me this anecdote.
[9] "_Bridge of sighs_."--Two men of memorable genius, Hood last, and
Lord Byron by many years previously, have so appropriated this phrase,
and reissued it as English currency, that many readers suppose it to be
theirs. But the genealogies of fine expressions should be more carefully
preserved. The expression belongs originally to Venice. This _jus
postliminii_ becomes of real importance in many cases, but especially in
the case of Shakspeare. Could one have believed it possible beforehand?
And yet it is a fact that he is made to seem a robber of the lowest
order, by mere dint of suffering robbery. Purely through their own
jewelly splendor have many hundreds of his phrases forced themselves into
usage so general, under the vulgar infirmity of seeking to strengthen
weak prose by shreds of poetic quotation, that at length the majority of
careless readers come to look upon these phrases as belonging to the
language, and traceable to no distinct proprietor any more than proverbs:
and thus, on afterwards observing them in Shakspeare, they regard him in
the light of one accepting alms (like so many meaner persons) from the
common treasury of the universal mind, on which treasury, meantime, he
had himself conferred these phrases as original donations of his own.
Many expressions in the "Paradise Lost," in "Il Penseroso," and in
"L'Allegro," are in the same predicament. And thus the almost incredible
case is realized which I have described, viz., that simply by having
suffered a robbery through two centuries, (for the first attempt at
plundering Milton was made upon his juvenile poems,) have Shakspeare and
Milton come to be taxed as robbers. N. B.--In speaking of Hood as having
appropriated the phrase _Bridge of Sighs_, I would not be understood to
represent him as by possibility aiming at any concealment. He was as far
above such a meanness by his nobility of heart, as he was raised above
all need for it by the overflowing opulence of his genius.
[10] Geometry (it has been said) would not evade disputation, if a man
could find his interest in disputing it: such is the spirit of cavil. But
I, upon a very opposite ground, assert that there is not one page of
prose that could be selected from the best writer in the English language
(far less in the German) which, upon a sufficient interest arising, would
not furnish matter, simply through its defects in precision, for a suit
in Chancery. Chancery suits do not arise, it is true, because the
doubtful expressions do not touch any interest of property; but what
_does_ arise is this--that something more valuable than a pecuniary
interest is continually suffering, viz., the interests of truth.
[11] "_Of a Stuart sovereign_," and by no means of a Stuart only. Queen
Anne, the last Stuart who sat on the British throne, was the last of _our
princes_ who touched for the _king's evil_, (as scrofula was generally
called until lately;) but the Bourbon houses, on the thrones of France,
Spain, and Naples, as well as the house of Savoy, claimed and exercised
the same supernatural privilege down to a much later period than the year
1714--the last of Queen Anne: according to their own and the popular
faith, they could have cleansed Naaman the Syrian, and Gehazi too.
[12] One reason, I believe, why it was held a point of wisdom in ancient
days that the metropolis of a warlike state should have a secret name
hidden from the world, lay in the pagan practice of _evocation_, applied
to the tutelary deities of such a state. These deities might be lured by
certain rites and briberies into a transfer of their favors to the
besieging army. But, in order to make such an evocation effectual, it was
necessary to know the original and secret name of the beleaguered city;
and this, therefore, was religiously concealed.
[13] Hamlet, Act v., scene 1.
[14] "_Hide himself in--light_."--The greatest scholar, by far, that this
island ever produced, viz., Richard Bentley, published (as is well known)
a 4to volume that in some respects is the very worst 4to now extant in
the world--viz., a critical edition of the. "Paradise Lost." I observe,
in the "Edinburgh Review," (July, 1851, No. 191, p. 15,) that a learned
critic supposes Bentley to have meant this edition as a "practical jest."
Not at all. Neither could the critic have fancied such a possibility, if
he had taken the trouble (which _I_ did many a year back) to examine it.
A jest book it certainly is, and the most prosperous of jest books, but
undoubtedly never meant for such by the author. A man whose lips are
livid with anger does not jest, and does not understand jesting. Still,
the Edinburgh Reviewer is right about the proper functions of the book,
though wrong about the intentions of the author. The fact is, the man was
maniacally in error, and always in error, as regarded the ultimate or
poetic truth of Milton; but, as regarded truth reputed and truth
_apparent_, he often had the air of being furiously in the right; an
example of which I will cite. Milton, in the First Book of the "Paradise
Lost," had said,--
"That from the _secret_ top
Of Oreb or of Sinai didst inspire;"
upon which Bentley comments in effect thus: "How!--the exposed summit of
a mountain _secret_? Why, it's like Charing Cross--always the least
secret place in the whole county." So one might fancy; since the summit
of a mountain, like Plinlimmon or Cader Idris in Wales, like Skiddaw or
Helvellyn in England, constitutes a central object of attention and gaze
for the whole circumjacent district, measured by a radius sometimes of 15
to 20 miles. Upon this consideration, Bentley instructs us to substitute
as the true reading--"That on the _sacred_ top," &c. Meantime, an actual
experiment will demonstrate that there is no place so absolutely secret
and hidden as the exposed summit of a mountain, 3500 feet high, in
respect to an eye stationed in the valley immediately below. A whole
party of men, women, horses, and even tents, looked at under those
circumstances, is absolutely invisible unless by the aid of glasses: and
it becomes evident that a murder might be committed on the bare open
summit of such a mountain with more assurance of absolute secrecy than
any where else in the whole surrounding district.
[15] Which "_saying_" is sometimes ascribed, I know not how truly, to
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.
[16] It strikes me, upon second thoughts, that the particular idiom,
which Lord Monboddo illustrated as regarded the Greek language, merits a
momentary notice; and for this reason--that it plays a part not at all
less conspicuous or less delicate in the Latin. Here is an instance of
its use in Greek, taken from the well-known night scene in the "Iliad:"--
------_gaethaese de poimenos aetor_,
And the heart of the shepherd _rejoices_; where the verb _gaethaese_ is
in the indefinite or aorist tense, and is meant to indicate a condition
of feeling not limited to any time whatever--past, present, or future.
In Latin, the force and elegance of this usage are equally impressive,
if not more so. At this moment, I remember two cases of this in Horace:-
-
1. "Rarò antecedentem scelestum
_Deseruit_ pede poena claudo;"
2. "saepe Diespiter
Neglectus incesto _addidit_ integrum."
That is--"oftentimes the supreme ruler, when treated with neglect,
confounds or unites (not _has united_, as the tyro might fancy) the
impure man with the upright in one common fate."
Exceedingly common is this usage in Latin poetry, when the object is to
generalize a remark--as not connected with one mode of time more than
another. In reality, all three modes of time--past, present, future--are
used (though not equally used) in all languages for this purpose of
generalization. Thus,--
1. The _future_; as, Sapiens dominabitur astris;
2. The _present_; as, Fortes fortuna juvat;
3. The _past_; as in the two cases cited from Horace.
But this practice holds equally in English: as to the future and the
present, nobody will doubt it; and here is a case from the past: "The
fool _hath said_ in his heart, There is no God;" not meaning, that in
some past time he has said so, but that generally in all times he _does_
say so, and _will_ say so.
[17] "_Too obstinate a preconception_."--Until the birth of geology, and
fossil paleontology, concurring with vast strides ahead in the science of
comparative anatomy, it is a well-established fact, that oftentimes the
most scientific museum admitted as genuine fragments of the human
osteology what in fact belonged to the gigantic brutes of our earth in
her earliest stages of development. This mistake would go some way in
accounting for the absurd disposition in all generations to view
themselves as abridged editions of their forefathers. Added to which, as
a separate cause of error, there can be little doubt, that intermingled
with the human race there has at most periods of the world been a
separate and Titanic race, such as the Anakim amongst the peoples of
Palestine, the Cyclopean race diffused over the Mediterranean in the
elder ages of Greece, and certain tribes amongst the Alps, known to
Evelyn in his youth (about Cromwell's time) by an unpleasant travelling
experience. These gigantic races, however, were no arguments for a
degeneration amongst the rest of mankind. They were evidently a variety
of man, coexistent with the ordinary races, but liable to be absorbed and
gradually lost by intermarriage amongst other tribes of the ordinary
standard. Occasional exhumations of such Titan skeletons would strengthen
the common prejudice. They would be taken, not for a local variety, but
for an antediluvian or prehistoric type, from which the present races of
man had arisen by gradual degeneration.
These cases of actual but misinterpreted experience, at the same time
that they naturally must tend to fortify the popular prejudice, would
also, by accounting for it, and ingrafting it upon a reasonable origin,
so far tend to take from it the reproach of a prejudice. Though
erroneous, it would yet seem to us, in looking back upon it, a rational
and even an inevitable opinion, having such plausible grounds to stand
upon; plausible, I mean, until science and accurate examination of the
several cases had begun to read them into a different construction. Yet,
on the other hand, in spite of any colorable excuses that may be pleaded
for this prejudice, it is pretty plain that, after all, there is in human
nature a deep-laid predisposition to an obstinate craze of this nature.
Else why is it that, in every age alike, men have asserted or even
assumed the downward tendency of the human race in all that regards
_moral_ qualities. For the _physical_ degeneration of man there really
were some apparent (though erroneous) arguments; but, for the moral
degeneration, no argument at all, small or great. Yet a bigotry of belief
in this idle notion has always prevailed amongst moralists, pagan alike
and Christian. Horace, for example, informs us that
"Aetas parentum, pejor avis, tulit
Nos nequiores--mox daturos
Progeniem vitiosiorem."
The last generation was worse, it seems, than the penultimate, as the
present is worst than the last. We, however, of the present, bad as we
may be, shall be kept in countenance by the coming generation, which will
prove much worse than ourselves. On the same precedent, all the sermons
through the last three centuries, if traced back through decennial
periods, so as to form thirty successive strata, will be found regularly
claiming the precedency in wickedness for the immediate period of the
writer. Upon which theories, as men ought physically to have dwindled
long ago into pygmies, so, on the other hand, morally they must by this
time have left Sodom and Gomorrah far behind. What a strange animal must
man upon this scheme offer to our contemplation; shrinking in size, by
graduated process, through every century, until at last he would not rise
an inch from the ground; and, on the other hand, as regards villany,
towering evermore and more up to the heavens. What a dwarf! what a giant!
Why, the very crows would combine to destroy such a little monster.
[18] The names and history of the Pyrenean Cagots are equally obscure.
Some have supposed that, during the period of the Gothic warfare with the
Moors, the Cagots were a Christian tribe that betrayed the Christian
cause and interests at a critical moment. But all is conjecture. As to
the name, Southey has somewhere offered a possible interpretation of it;
but it struck me as far from felicitous, and not what might have been
expected from Southey, whose vast historical research and commanding
talent should naturally have unlocked this most mysterious of modern
secrets, if any unlocking does yet lie within the resources of human
skill and combining power, now that so many ages divide us from the
original steps of the case. I may here mention, as a fact accidentally
made known to myself, and apparently not known to Southey, that the
Cagots, under a name very slightly altered, are found in France also, as
well as Spain, and in provinces of France that have no connection at all
with Spain.
[19] "_Strulbrugs_."--Hardly _strulbrugs_, will be the thought of the
learned reader, who knows that _young_ women could not be strulbrugs;
since the true strulbrug was one who, from base fear of dying, had
lingered on into an old age, omnivorous of every genial or vital impulse.
The strulbrug of Swift (and Swift, being his horrid creator, ought to
understand his own horrid creation) was a wreck, a shell, that had been
burned hollow, and cancered by the fierce furnace of life. His clockwork
was gone, or carious; only some miserable fragment of a pendulum
continued to oscillate paralytically from mere incapacity of any thing so
abrupt, and therefore so vigorous, as a decided HALT! However, the use of
this dreadful word may be reasonably extended to the young who happen to
have become essentially old in misery. Intensity of a suffering existence
may compensate the want of extension; and a boundless depth of misery may
be a transformed expression for a boundless duration of misery. The most
aged person, to all appearance, that ever came under my eyes, was an
infant--hardly eight months old. He was the illegitimate son of a poor
idiot girl, who had herself been shamefully ill treated; and the poor
infant, falling under the care of an enraged grandmother, who felt
herself at once burdened and disgraced, was certainly not better treated.
He was dying, when I saw him, of a lingering malady, with features
expressive of frantic misery; and it seemed to me that he looked at the
least three centuries old. One might have fancied him one of Swift's
strulbrugs, that, through long attenuation and decay, had dwindled back
into infancy, with one organ only left perfect--the organ of fear and
misery.
[20] This was a manoeuvre regularly taught to the Austrian cavalry in the
middle of the last century; as a ready way of opening the doors of
cottages.